In passing through Richmond we left behind us two very efficient officers on a very pleasant mission, Dr. James Evans, Surgeon of the Third, who was to be married to one of Virginia’s fair daughters, and Captain T.W.  Gary, of same regiment, who was to act as best man.  Dr. Evans was a native South Carolinian and a brother of Brigadier General N.G.  Evans, of Manassas fame.  While still a young man, he was considered one of the finest surgeons and practitioners in the army.  He was kind and considerate to his patients, punctual and faithful in his duties, and withal a dignified, refined gentleman.  Such confidence had the soldiers in his skill and competency, that none felt uneasy when their lives or limbs, were left to his careful handling.  Both officers rejoined us in a few days.

We reached Ringold on the evening of the 19th of September, and marched during the night in the direction of the day’s battlefield.  About midnight we crossed over the sluggish stream of Chickamauga, at Alexander’s Bridge, and bivouaced near Hood’s Division, already encamped.  Chickamauga! how little known of before, but what memories its name is to awaken for centuries afterwards!  What a death struggle was to take place along its borders between the blue and the gray, where brother was to meet brother—­where the soldiers of the South were to meet their kinsmen of the Northwest!  In the long, long ago, before the days of fiction and romance of the white man in the New World, in the golden days of legend of the forest dwellers, when the red man chanted the glorious deeds of his ancestors during his death song to the ears of his children, this touching story has come down from generation to generation, until it reached the ears of their destroyers, the pale faces of to-day: 

Away in the dim distant past a tribe of Indians, driven from their ancestral hunting grounds in the far North, came South and pitched their wigwams along the banks of the “river of the great bend,” the Tennessee.  They prospered, multiplied, and expanded, until their tents covered the mountain sides and plains below.  The braves of the hill men hunted and sported with their brethren of the valley.  Their children fished, hunted, played, fought, and gamboled in mimic warfare as brothers along the sparkling streamlets that rise in the mountain ridges, their sparkling waters leaping and jumping through the gorges and glens and flowing away to the “great river.”  All was peace and happiness; the tomahawk of war had long since been buried, and the pipe of peace smoked around their camp fires after every successful hunting expedition.  But dissentions arose—­distrust and embittered feelings took the place of brotherly love.  The men of the mountains became arrayed against their brethren of the plains, and they in turn became the sworn enemies of the dwellers of the cliffs.  The war hatchet was dug up and the pipe of peace no longer passed in brotherly love at the council meeting.  Their bodies were decked in the paint of war, and the once peaceful and happy people forsook their hunting grounds and entered upon, the war path.