General Longstreet speaks thus of his army after he had established his camps and the subsistence trains began to forage in the rich valleys of the French Broad and Chucky Rivers and along the banks of Mossy Creek: 

“With all the plentitude of provisions, and many things, which, at the time, seemed luxuries, we were not quite happy.  Tattered blankets, garments, shoes (the later going—­some gone) opened ways on all sides for piercing winter blasts.  There were some hand looms in the country from which we occasionally picked up a piece of cloth, and here and there we received other comforts—­some from kind, some from unwilling hands, which could nevertheless spare them.  For shoes, we were obliged to resort to raw-hides, from beef cattle, as temporary protection from the frozen ground.  Then we found soldiers who could tan the hides of our beeves, some who could make shoes, some who could make shoe pegs, some who could make shoe lasts, so that it came about that the hides passed rapidly from the beeves to the feet of the soldiers in the form of comfortable shoes.”

We took up very comfortable quarters, in the way that comfort goes with a soldier—­cut off from the outside world.  Only a few officers had the old army fly tents; the soldiers were each supplied, or rather had supplied themselves upon the battlefield of the enemy with small tent flies, about five by six feet, so arranged with buttons and button holes that two being buttoned together and stretched over a pole would make the sides or roof and the third would close the end, making a tent about six feet long, five feet wide, and four feet high, in which three or four men could sleep very comfortably.  In the bitter weather great roaring fires were built in front during the night, and to which the soldier, by long habit, or a kind of intuition, would stretch his feet, when the cold would become unbearable under his threadbare blanket.

But notwithstanding all these disadvantages, the men of Kershaw’s Brigade were bent on having a good time in East Tennessee.  They foraged during the day for apples, chickens, butter, or whatever they could find to eat.  Some of sporting proclivities would purchase a lot of chicken roosters and then fight, regiment against regiment, and seemed to enjoy as much seeing a fight between a shanghai and a dunghill, as a match between gaved Spanish games.

Many formed the acquaintance of ladies in the surrounding country, and they, too, Union as well as Southern, being cut off like ourselves—­their husbands and brothers being either in the Northern or Southern Army—­seemed determined on having a good time also.  Dancing parties were frequent, and the ladies of Southern sympathies gave the officers and soldiers royal dinners.

In this connection, I will relate an anecdote told on our gallant Lieutenant Colonel Rutherford, of the Third, by a friend of his.