TOMBSTONES Chapter One

I know William Williams was anxious as he approached the cabin after midnight on Thursday,  26 July, 1860. He could see the adobe and the outbuildings in the dim quarter moon light, but the silence worried him. No smoke issued from the chimney where 15 men had cooked their meals and smelted their ore for the last year. There was not a sound from the corral where the burros and horses should have been responding to the pack animals he was leading. Motioning the boys, Billy and Charley Ake, to hold back their laden burros, Williams approached the cabin alone, calling out his cousin's name. "James? James?" Something unseen in the pitch blackness made him stop short. William struck a match. And in a ragged breath he saw that the cabin's front door was ajar, and then, stretched on the ground he saw James, face down, with his head split wide open and small clumps of gray-white brain trailing away into the dark.

This story begins after North America had been sailing westward at 2 inches a year for about a hundred million years. Then about 25 million years ago the continent's northwestern edge slammed head on into the Juan de Fuca plate. And like 2 cars colliding head on left headlamp to right headlamp, the collision sent 250 sextillion tons of continental rock buckling and twisting. The wrenching spun Baja California loose from Mexico and, about 17 million years ago, switched on the San Andreas fault.

Telling the boys to stay back, William edged past his cousin's corpse, and pushed the door wider. The small room was was deep black. Holding the match high, William took two steps inside and stumbled over the heavy body of John Moss. That was enough. William stumbled out of the cabin, yelling at the Ake boys to gather the mules, and get the hell out of here.

As the west coast twisted, the crust behind was pulled out, stretching a hundred miles and more, until it was so thin it cracked into 400 blocks roughly 25 miles across, each dropping down at a 60 degree angle on the west end with eastern escarpments tilting up to 10,000 feet into the sky. 

They formed a rhythmic series of north-south mountain islands, appearing on maps like "an army of caterpillars marching toward Mexico".  With every 1,000 feet in elevation of each range, the temperature dropped 4 degrees, and rainfall increased by 4 inches. Thus each mountain range became a sky island, biologically isolated by the 120 degree desert seas between them .And in this 500 by 1,500 mile Basin and Range Province lay most of North America's accessible rare metal wealth.

The 3 traumatized males hurried 35 miles south along the San Pedro River to Sonoita Creek, then west up it's canyon to Fort Buchanan. The outpost's commander, Captain Richard S. Ewell, recognized William as the panicked man rode up,  not long after dawn. 

The two had crossed paths just the day before, and, as Ewell wrote his sister back in Virginia, he immediately realized, "..something bad had happened." The story spilled from William like a desert gully-washer. "He said he had arrived at the mine about midnight, and no one answering, struck a light and saw his cousin lifeless with his head split open. They did not wait to see more...." Ewell dispatched as many of his malaria ridden dragoons as he could spare to accompany William back to the cabin. The Captain's assumption was that the Apache must be responsible. But Ewell kept the Ake boys at the fort to question them, as to what they had seen and heard.

As the crustal blocks tilted they lifted ancient hydrothermal vents,  where super heated brine had split the bedrock. As the vents cooled they left behind precipitate, veins of quartz,  tinted occasionally with gold, but more often with lead - galena - or sulfur - agentite -  or even chlorine - horn silver (above). 

And by the middle of the 19th century, some humans had learned to read such rocks, the way a hunter reads a trail. A bit of fur caught on a bramble, a leaf nervously nibbled but left on the branch, tells of a furtive buck hiding nearby. Quartz stained with chalcopyrite tells of veins of copper sulphide hiding below. Gelena hints at lead sulphide (above). Should you find both, if you were educated, diligent and lucky, you might find silver as well.

The soldiers found the mechanic James Williams, "ravaged by animals", on the ground between the 3 room adobe cabin (above) and the empty supply shed. All the horses and mules kept in the corral and their tack were gone. Inside the adobe was the body of chemist John C. Moss. He lay on the front room floor, stabbed multiple times. The contents of the cabin had been ransacked, and some of the assaying equipment was missing. But there was no sign of the cook, David Brontrager, nor of the 11 miners recruited from Sonora Mexico, nor the tents they had occupied, nor their boss, the head of the St. Louis Mining Company, Frederick Brunckow.

Silver is an odd metal. You never pan for silver in a stream, or dig it out with your bare hands. Silver is found only in veins running through hard rock, where it forms thin flakes or plates and occasionally crystal clusters (above). But it takes an educated eye to recognize silver ore. In 1858 an educated mining engineer tracked a quartz trail across the hot deserts of the Sonoran, until he found a 6 foot wide vein of silver chloride, a mile east of the north flowing San Pedro River. He filed a claim and named his mine "The Bronco". His name was Frederick Brunckow.

Frederick had been born in Saxony in 1830, of a Russian father and a German mother. He was trained as a mining engineer at the University of Westphalia. He was fluent in German, English, French and Spanish. At 20 years of age he emigrated to the United States, where he worked his way down the Mississippi as a steamboat deckhand, all the way to  Texas. There, in 1854, his mining degree earned him an $1,800 a year salary with the Sonora Exploration and Mining Company. And after 2 seasons tracking minerals in the New Mexico basin and range providence, Frederick decided to strike out on his own.

They found Frederick Brunckow not far inside the mine shaft (above). Like the others he had been dead for several days. But his death had been more violent, in part probably because he was Jewish. 

His corpse had a 10 inch long hardened steel hand-held drill bit driven into this abdomen. Because of the violence of all the attacks, and because the bodies had lain in the Arizona heat for 3 days, the dead were buried in hastily dug and poorly marked graves. The next morning the nervous soldiers returned to Fort Buchanan.

Frederick had found financial backing in the immigrant community of St. Louis, Missouri. He found his first four employees there, as well. Pharmacist John Moss invested in the Bronco and would serve as chemist. Machinist James Williams agreed to keep the mine's equipment running and his cousin William offered to serve as the Bronco's supervisor. Another German American, David Brontrager, signed on as the mine's cook. The plan was to gather equipment in St. Louis, sail down the Mississippi to New Orleans, then across the Gulf of Mexico to Texas, and make their way overland to Arizona and Sonora, where Frederick would hire peons to do the heavy work because they were cheaper than Americans.

The soldiers returned to Fort Buchanan on Sunday, 29 July, 1860. Their opinion, as Captain Ewell told his sister, was "the Mexican employees had risen, murdered the Americans and robbed the place and run off for Sonora" Having negotiated with the Apache, Ewell agreed. "This is much worse than would have been done by the Indians," he wrote, "who don't betray confidence in this manner." A few days later, this version was seemingly confirmed when the cook, David Brontrager, reappeared 15 miles closer to the Mexican border, at Camp Jecker, on the San Pedro River.

The first task in hard rock mining is simple back-breaking labor under very dangerous conditions. In "single-jacking" an individual miner used a 5 pound hammer to drive a 4 foot long drill 3 feet into the rock, rotating the drill a quarter turn after every strike. 

When there was enough space 2 or 3 men would "Double Jack", one holding the drill and the others wielding 10 pound hammers, The completed holes were then filled with black powder, which was set off to crack the rock into pieces. The debris was then "mucked out" and carried to the surface in buckets or carts.

If Broterager's story was to be believed, just hours after William and the Ake brothers had left the adobe on Monday, 23 July, to buy flour at Fort Buchanan, the Sonoran peons had rebelled. They murdered Brunckow because he was the boss and because he was Jewish, James Williams and John Moss because they were witnesses, and the peons kidnapped and released Broterager at the Mexican border because, as they told him, he was "a good Catholic".  

The peons primary motive was theft. What they stole speaks to their poverty in feudal Sonora. They took firearms, boots, shoes, underwear, and several dozen pairs of pants, and a small amount of silver ore which had been refined through the use of an arrastra.

The method had been brought to the new world by the Spanish 300 years earlier. An axle was vertically driven into the center of a pit, lined with stones (above). Large flat bottom rocks were then tied to the axle so that as the axle turned, the stones would be dragged (arrastra) across the ore, slowly grinding it into pebbles. This "Chilli Mill" meant more back breaking labor, this time under the killing Arizona sun.  But without abundant water, it was the only way to "refine" the ore.

In the America of 1860, Catholics were still suspect, and Ewell could not prove Broterager's innocence. So the German American remained in the fort's brig while the Arizona mining community panicked.  Meetings were held, committees formed, outraged expressed, and a list of the "murdering greasers" was compiled. Captain Ewell forwarded these expressions of outrage to Governor Ignacio Pesqueira of Sonora, Mexico (above). The murderers were never arrested, but some of the mining equipment was returned, along with enough validation of Broterager's story, that he was released. 

And then the outbreak of the Civil War gave the Americans something else to worry about. Captain Ewell would rise to Lieutenant General of the Confederate States of America, and command 1/3rd of the Army of Northern Virginia. And the German immigrant community of St. Louis would enlist in large numbers to help defeat the Confederacy.

But the violence which had butchered 3 men in a lonely cabin in 1860, would eventually lead to the 30 most iconic seconds of violence in the history of the American frontier, just 8 miles from that dark and bloody adobe, in a town called Tombstone.

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FLY FISHING

I would like to have visited the fishing village of Palos de la Frontera, along the south facing Atlantic coast of Andalusia. This sun drenched region has been a crossroads of cultures since the Phoenicians arrived a thousand years before Christ. The Romans mined copper here, and stained the Tinto River red with their industrial waste. In 1492 the unwilling citizens were pressed into service as crews for Christopher Columbus' ships. The beaches here even captured some of the flotsam of the Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October, 1805. And at about 9:30 in the morning of 30 April, 1943, off Shady Point (Punta Umbria), Frontera fisherman José Antonio Rey Maria pulled a body out of the sea, and secured a minor role in an adventure worthy of a James Bond thriller.

Ian Flemming (above), the man who invented James Bond, invented this adventure,  too. Shortly after World War Two began in September of 1939, he and a friend named John Godfrey applied to join the Twenty Committee, so named because it's title in Roman numerals would be “XX”, which would also be its mission - double cross. Their application became known as the Trout Memo, because in it Godfrey compared espionage to fly fishing. It listed 54 possible ways to tempt the Nazi's to swallow false ideas. Number 28 was to drop a dead body carrying false papers from an airplane over Germany.  But that idea was rejected because the Germans would be suspicious of top secret papers carried over Germany, itself.

That objection became moot by the fall of 1941, after Nazi Germany had conquered all of Northern Europe, and, along with their Axis ally Italy, controlled most of the Mediterranean as well. The only land left unoccupied along that central sea was Spain, ruled by the German ally, fascist dictator Franco, and the outpost of Gibraltar,  the tiny island of Malta, and Egypt – the latter three tenuously occupied by British forces. And then the tide turned. In the winter of 1942 British and American forces had cleared Axis troops from all of North Africa. Their problem now was plainly explained by Prime Minster Winston Churchill; “Anyone but a bloody fool would know” he said, that the western allies' next target must be Sicily.

The object in fly fishing is not to get the trout to swallow the hook, but to follow its natural inclination and swallow the fly, which hides the hook. In this case the Twenty Committee considered what the world must have looked like to their fish - Adolf Hitler. He was obsessed with the east. The vast majority of his army was locked in battle with Russia, and the oil which powered his armies came mostly from eight refineries around the Romanian town of Ploisti. An allied invasion of Greece made little sense to the western allies, but it would threaten both Hitler's oil supplies and outflank his armies in Russia. So the hook would be an Allied invasion of Greece. But where to cast the fly?

That problem fell to Twenty Committee member Lt. Commander Ewen Montagu (above), who chose Ian Flemming's invention number 28. Montegu realized that an officer's  body found floating in the Mediterranean and carrying secret plans for an invasion of Greece would arouse suspicion.  But Allied aircraft were required to fly around the Iberian peninsula to reach Gibraltar. And eighty miles to the north of that British outpost was the Spanish regional capital of Huelva, where a German agent, Adolf Clauss, had shown himself to be particularly ambitious and generous in bribing Spanish officials. A fly, disguising a fly, dropped in front of Clauss would surely elicit a response. What Montagu  needed first, was the fly -  a dead body.

Having consulted pathologists, Montegu knew he was looking for a man in his mid thirties who had died of pneumonia. The body they drafted was that of a 34 year old Welshman named Glyndwr Michael. His father had died twenty years earlier, and his mother was three years passed. With no family, Glyndwr had become lost, alcoholic, and drifted into homelessness. He was found barely alive in an abandoned warehouse near the King's Cross underground station on 26 January, 1943. He was rushed to the hospital suffering from walking pneumonia and “acute chemical poisoning”, probably from swallowing a large dose of “Battle's Vermin Killer”, a commercially available rat poison. The poison attacked his central nervous system, eventually produced a coma, and then kidney failure. He died on 28 January. As he had no family, his body was drafted by Lt. Montegu, and kept chilled in the hospital morgue, until the hook could be prepared.

Glyndwr's corpse was to impersonate Captain (acting Major) William “Bill” Martin - and he was a pure invention. The name was chosen because there were several Major Martin's in the Royal Marines who  Montagu could use as camouflage. Martin was to be carrying a personal letter from Lt. General Sir Archibald Nye of the Imperial General Staff, to General Sir Harold Alexander, commander 8^th Army Group, Alexandria, Egypt. Among a handful of other catty issues, the letter discussed landings to be made on two Greek beaches, under the code name Operation Husky.  It also mentioned a diversionary attack, “Operation Brimstone”, to be made against Sardinia. Wrote General Nye, “We stand a very good chance of making the Boche think we are going for Sicily.” In fact, Husky was the actual code name for the invasion of Sicily, and the code name was used here in case the Germans intercepted communications using it. General Nye even wrote this letter in his own hand, should anyone in German intelligence compare the penmanship.

But did the fly look convincing? Montegu invented Major Martin a girlfriend, complete with photo, love letters, and a bill for an engagement ring (above), ticket stubs from a London show dated 24 April, 1943, and notice of an overdraft in his bank account. He carried a “pompous” cold letter from his invented father, and a St. Christopher's medal. And so the entire packet did not look too perfect, his membership card in the officers' club was out of date. Everything was checked and double checked, even down to his underwear.

With an OK from Churchill, on 19 April, 1943, the body of  Glyndwr Michael- Major Martin,  dressed in a uniform and trench coat, with the letters in a briefcase handcuffed to his wrists, was sealed in a metal tank with dry ice, and driven 147 miles north to the Royal Naval base at Holy Loch, Scotland. There Major Martin was loaded aboard the submarine HMS Seraph (above).

At 4:30 in the morning of 30 April, 1943, a mile off Punta Umbria, Major Martin was fitted into a life jacket and slipped gently into the cold Atlantic waters. As planned, the currents carried him inshore and about five hours later, José Antonio Rey Maria pulled the body on board his fishing boat. Shortly thereafter Jose' handed the body over to a Spanish Army officer. That officer passed the corpse to a Spanish naval officer, who sent it to the morgue in the regional capital of Huelva, four miles up the Tinto estuary.

After waiting three days the British Vice-Counsel to Spain asked the local coroner, Eduardo Del Torno, to perform an autopsy on the corpse, and requested the return of the documents he was carrying.  The doctor reported Major Martin had drowned and that the body had been in the sea for from three to five days.  Since Major Martin was a Catholic, and Spain was a Catholic nation, just three days later, on 4 May, 1943, Major Martin was buried with full military honors about 2 miles outside of Huelva, in the "Nuestra Señora de la Soledad” cemetery - Grave number 14, San Marcos Section. When the Twenty Committee examined the returned letters under a microscope, it was discovered they had been refolded, indicating they had indeed been read. Now, had the trout really swallowed the hook?

After the war, British intelligence learned the briefcase and its letters had originally been passed to General Alto Estado Mayor, who appears to have lost them for awhile. Luckily for the British, Nazi Agent Adolf Clauss heard a rumor about the letters, and as expected he told his superiors. It was when the the head of the German Secret Service, Admiral Canaris, personally inquired about them, that the brief case and letters were found again and handed over to the Germans,  to be quickly photographed and returned. And the way they had almost been lost only made their contents more believable to the Germans.

Over the next two months three German armored divisions, one from France and two from Russia, were transferred to Greece, and placed under the command of Erwin Rommel (above), the Desert Fox who had driven the British mad for two years in North Africa. A squadron of coastal patrol torpedo boats were also sent to Greece, was was several hundred aircraft, Three new, large minefields were sown in the waters off Greek beaches. When Italian dictator Benito Mussolini expressed concern about the lack of troops on Sicily, he was told by General Alfred Jodl, head of the German Army, “You can forget about Sicily. We know it's Greece. “

Then on 9 July, 1943 Operation Husky landed 160,000 Allied troops on Sicily. The Germans did not accept it as the real invasion for another three days, by which time the only reinforcements they could provide was a single parachute regiment. Thirty days later the island was completely in Allied hands, at the price of less than 25,000 casualties, compared to 170,000 Axis forces killed, wounded and captured.

This story inspired the book and film “The Man Who Never Was”, but it was sixty years before the identity of the the man laying in grave 14, under the the sun of Andalusia, would be correctly identified on his tombstone. But the principles of espionage (and fly fishing) have not change since. To catch a fish, you must merely encourage the fish to do what it wants to do.

It is something the George Bush administration ought to have remembered in the spring of 2003.

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NOT SO FAMOUS LAST WORDS

I can prove Gaius Caligula was the stupidest Roman Emperor of them all. According to Tacitus, who was never wrong, in 41 A.D., after having been stabbed by his own bodyguards, the lunatic’s last words were, “I am still alive!” Playing opossum never seems to have occurred to him. Neither did offering money to his assassins. Listen, if you are already falling to your death, what could be the harm in trying to fly? Or in keeping your big mouth shut, instead of alerting your killers they had not yet finished the job.  Last words such as those are self defining; you are dead because you deliver them. Consider Billy the Kid’s last words, as he walked into a darkened room, in which Sheriff Pat Garritt, was waiting with his finger on the trigger of a loaded shotgun. Said Billy,“Who’s there?”

There is a school of thought that last words reveal some insight into character. I’m not referring to suicide notes or pompous words meant for posterity, but the spontaneous utterances of those who know they are facing an imminent death; as in 1790 when French Reign of Terror victim Thomas de Mahay, the Marquis de Favras, actually spent his last moments on earth reading his own death warrant as he climbed the steps of his scaffold. He might have been searching for a legal loophole. Instead his last words were addressed to the clerk, there to confirm his execution, Thomas handed the clerk his death warrant while pointing out, "I see that you have made three spelling mistakes.” That was not a helpful remark if he was hoping for a delay the proceedings, but it did tell us a great deal about Thomas.Or consider the final words of the clever, acid tongued Lady Nancy Whitcher Langhorne Astor, the first female member the English Parliament (above), who awoke from a coma to discover her family had gathered around her. From her own deathbed she asked, “Am I dying or is this my birthday?” She then promptly died. Unfortunately, the family’s response was not recorded, and I am the kind of person who wonders what they might have replied to a question like that.I have also wondered about the last words of Margaretha Geertfuida Zella, the little Dutch girl better known by her stage name, Mata Hari. She was a dancer who became a stripper because, as she admitted, “I could never dance very well.” During the First World War she became a famous spy because she was so bad at it.  It is not clear even today who she was spying for, if anybody.

But at 5:00 A.M. on 15 October, 1917, as she stood in front of the French firing squad, Margaretha was asked if she had any last words. Her reply was, “It is unbelievable.” And then the idiots shot her without asking what she meant by that.  What was unbelievable, unbelievable to whom? I would like to know.There is a story told about the last words of Pietro Arentino, (above) the father of modern pornography, and thus one of my heroes. Pietro was a good friend of the painter Titian. And it was helping out his friend that got Pietro killed. See, in 1556 Guidobaldo Il della Rovere, the Duke of Urbino, hired Titian to paint a portrait of his wife, Giulia da Varno. Titian needed the money, as usual, but the problem was that Giulia was not only rich, and middle aged but she was also “vain and ugly” and rich; a dangerous combination. If the portrait didn’t look like her she would be offended. If it looked too much like her, she would be offended. Luckily for Titian, Pietro came up with the solution.At Pietro’s suggestion, Titian (above) hired his favorite prostitute from a local brothel, and had her pose for the painting of the body. But in place of the prostitute’s head he painted a glamorized portrait of Giulia, based on paintings done of her as a young woman. It sounds like a bad joke but in the hands of a genius like Titian such absurdity can become great art, i.e. the Venus Urbino (below).

The Duke was thrilled with the finished product. When he  saw the painting he confided, wistfully, to both Titian and Pietro, “If I could have had that girl’s body, even with my wife’s head, I would have been a happier man.” Pietro laughed so hard he had a stroke.They carried him to a room out of the way and when it became clear that he was not likely to recover the Duke called for a priest to administer extreme unction. First the priest prayed for Pietro, and then offered to hear his last confession. But since Pietro was still unconscious, the priest continued, anointing Pietro with holy oil on his eyelids, ears, nostrils, lips, hands and feet, each time repeating the chant, “By this holy unction and his own most gracious mercy, may the Lord pardon you whatever sin you have committed.” As the priest finished the last prayer, Pietro’s eyes opened and he said clearly said distinctly, “Now that I’m oiled. Keep me from the rats.” And then he died. There was no doubt about what he meant, and that in effect he had died laughing.And then there are last words for which no explanation is required because the act of dying is the explanation; such as when the great amateur botanist Luther Burbank delivered his last words on earth; “I don’t feel so good”. Or when the poet Hart Crane delivered his last words, “Good-bye, everybody”, from a ship’s railing, just before he jumped into the sea. What more explanation could you require from such people?But I retain my deepest affection for the actor, poet, playwright and historian, Ergon Friedell, whose last words revealed a sweet and gentle heart, to go with the quick, funny and facile mind he had exhibited his entire life. One of his last performances was a parody of a speech by Adolf Hitler.  On the night of 16 March, 1939 two Nazi thugs arrived to arrest Egron. While his housekeeper delayed them at the front door, Ergon climbed onto his bedroom window ledge and before he jumped to his death warned those who might be beneath him in the dark, “Watch out, please.” Only then did he jump. God bless, him.

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VICKSBURG Chapter Fifty-Three

In the center of the Federal line, General Alvin Hovey's 12^th division was in trouble. By about 2:30pm on Saturday, 16 May, 1863, his 1^st brigade had been badly mauled during their three hour fight atop Champion Hill.  With them now driven off the crest, Hovey threw his 2nd^rd brigade, under the nearsighted 30 year old Colonel George Boardman Boomer, back up the hill, to breakup the enemy assault he was certain would follow. 

Pomeroy Martin remembered how , “Gallantly they went up the Hill.” And behind them Hovey lined up the bloodied 1^st brigade survivors and every cannon he had - the 16th Ohio light, the 2nd Ohio and Battery A of the 1st Missouri Light – 18 guns in total. At the moment, they held their fire, fearful of injuring Boardman's troops. But for a few long minutes those guns and the exhausted 1^st battalion were the only back up for the vital federal wagon train around the Champion house.

Years later the 2nd brigade's second in command, 36 year old dentist Colonel Benjamin Devor Dean, of the 26^th Missouri, recalled, “...the 10th Iowa and 93rd Illinois immediately engaged the enemy... Colonel Boomer...seeing the enemy approaching on our right flank, ordered the 26th Missouri to meet them, which it did on the double quick... getting possession of a deep ravine which the enemy was trying to secure.” For ten minutes or so the 26^th stood up against a larger 52^nd Georgia regiment. But the engagement cost the 26^th Missouri 2 officers and 16 enlisted killed, and 3 officers and 66 enlisted men wounded.

Watching from the the bottom around the Champion house, gunner Pomeroy Martin saw that “...the whole line... was pressed back slowly, as the rebels were massing all their forces to crush us here. But now...batteries reached further around to the right, poured in an enfilading fire, which was so terrific as to check effectually the rebel advance, and they gave way and fled in confusion.” The cannon to the right, were from General Logan's division.

At the same time, rebel General Seth Barton (above), in command of the 1^st brigade, on the extreme right flank of the rebel line atop Champion Hill, perceived a need for action. He could see Logan's division stumbling up the slope toward him, and decided it would be better to strike the Yankees while they were discombobulated than to passively wait for them to slam into his men. 

Barton posted the 52^nd Georgia regiment with the 4 Parrott rifled cannon of Corputs battery to defend the only bridge over Baker's Creek (above). Certain these men could hold the vital position, Barton drove the 40th, 41st, and 43rd Georgia regiments down the slope, hoping to fall unexpectedly on the Yankee's.

The initial wave, masked by the forested slopes until they were almost on top of the Yankees, drove in the first line, but “...enforced by (the Yankee) second and third lines”, wrote Barton later, “my farther advance was checked..” The troops Barton was hitting were part of Logan's 3^rd Brigade, under 42 year old Brigadier General John Dunlap Stevens - the 8^th and 81st Illinois, and the 20^th and 32nd Ohio regiments. The Federals outnumbered Barton's Georgia soldiers, and were able to bring flanking fire on their attack, forcing the Georgians to to pull back. Under fire, Barton adjusted his line and threw his troops forward again.

Sergeant Osborn Oldroyd, in the 20^th Ohio, remembered the rebels ““succeeded in driving us a short distance” But then the Buckeyes made their own adjustments, stopped the Georgians a second time and forced them to pull back a few yards into the trees for safety.

When first ordered to advance up the heavily wooded slopes of Champion Hill, Grant had asked Logan if he needed more men. The 37 year old “Black Jack” John Alexander Logan (above) assured his commander, “There are not rebels enough outside of hell to drive back the 3^rd division!” In later generations the epithet “Black Jack” would be a demeaning title, indicating the bearer had “stooped” to command African-American troops. But this “Black Jack” - perhaps the original – was a term of familiarity and fondness, which described Logan's jet black hair and blazing black eyes as well as his dark fury in battle. It was a term of respect. He was that rarity in this most political of all America's wars, one of President Lincoln's political generals who was also one of his most respected combat commanders.

Shortly after Logan's division began moving up the northern face of Champion hill, General Hovey, having committed his 2^nd brigade in the bitter fight on the same hill, asked for regiments to stabilize his position. But although Logan directed artillery to lay fire on the rebel's attacking Hovey's men, he sent no troops. Logan's reason for being parsimonious with his support was that he could read a map, and his map indicated that his 3^rd division was being offered the opportunity to destroy the entire rebel army.

It has been an axiomatic that you should not fight with a river at your back since 12 August 490 B.C. E, when Athenian hoplites butchered the larger Persian army in the surf at Marathon beach. A decade even earlier, the Chinese general Sun Tzu had warned “After crossing a river, you should get far away from it”. 

But on Friday, 15 May, 1863, when faced with the rain swollen ford of Baker's Creek, Lieutenant General John Clifford Pemberton (above) had persevered and counter marched his army to the only bridge over that same creek. A day later, this determination was about to be revealed as a deadly mistake, and there was some irony in that the revelation would be made by the 1^st brigade of General Logan's division.

They were the 20^th, 31^st 45^th and 124^th Illinois regiments along with the 23^rd Indiana. Most were men from the Cairo region of the Prairie state, the district called Little Egypt. The Hoosiers were from the adjoining sympathetic section of Indiana. Hoosier 1^st Lieutenant Shadrach Hooper, could have been speaking for the entire brigade when he said, “...it was a case of brother contending against brother, father against son and chum against schoolmate.” The region was strongly pro-slavery with Confederate sympathies. But these regiments had been answered the call to duty because of loyalty and faith in Black Jack Logan, who had been their congressman before the war. And now they were going to deliver Vicksburg over the the abolitionist north.

The brigade general was a 46 year old jeweler named John Eugene Smith (above). His father, John Banler Smith, of Bern, Switzerland, had served in Napoleon's 1812 Russian campaign. After the defeat at Waterloo, the Smith family had emigrated to Philadelphia along with their 1 year old son. In 1834, that son, John Eugene, had moved to St. Louis, Missouri to apprentice in a jewelry store. There he met is wife, Aimee A. Massot, and they were married in 1836. 

In the 1840's, the growing family had moved to the northern Illinois, Mississippi river town of Gelena (above),  

There John operated a Main Street jewelry and watch shop, and had become a friend to the half owner of a leather shop, Orvil Grant  (above,center) - younger brother of Ulysses S. Grant.

These were the men, like most humans, of divided loyalties, struggling in a divided nation,  But in a brief spasm of horrible violence, these men would seal the fate of Vicksburg, Mississippi, and the entire Confederacy.

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