This Stunning Novel is set near the end of the Civil War in the mountainous farm country of North Carolina—bordering on the Hiwassee River—a region where neighbor turned on neighbor and helpless families were preyed on by deserters from both armies and by violent gangs pretending to be military units. Madison Curtis and his wife Sarah live on a plantation that lies in the path of a gang of Union partisans, led by a vicious bushwhacker named Bridgeman. The Curtises are hiding their eldest son Andy, who was wounded in the Confederate Army. They risk torture and death to protect him from Bridgeman. We meet also the Curtis's younger sons, Jack and Howell, who are caught up in the great battle of Chickamauga, far away in Georgia, and we are offered a unique glimpse of war as the common soldier saw it—confusing, monotonous and terrifying by turns and without any discernible meaning. There too is the rebel soldier Oliver Price, a poor kindly shoemaker who hardly ever met a black man, much less owned one, but fought on to the end for his home, long after many others with much more at stake had lost heart and quit. This is a perfect little gem of a novel: beautifully written, historically accurate and shedding light on a little-known corner of the Civil War behind the lines of the Border South. Once read, it will never be forgotten. "A grim, convincing, remarkably assured first novel about the darker byways of the Civil War." — Kirkus Reviews "... a tight, almost elegantly written, yet piercingly honest novel all readers of historical fiction will appreciate." — Booklist Charles F. Price has enjoyed careers as a journalist, urban planner, management consultant, and Washington lobbyist. Hiwassee A Novel of the Civil War By Charles F. Price Chicago Review Press Incorporated Copyright © 1996 Charles F. Price All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-89733-517-1 Contents Book One: The Raid, Book Two: The Battle, Book Three: The Return, Afterword, Glossary, Maps, CHAPTER 1 1 Near the end of August, Bridgeman the bushwhacker and fifty of his Yellow Jackets left Davenport Gap and turned up the valley of the Pigeon River along the old Indian war trail towards the blue wall of the mountains. Although Bridgeman pretended to be a colonel in the regular service and claimed he carried orders given him by General Burnside up on the Cumberland, in fact he held no rank at all and the Yellow Jackets were nothing but a crowd of renegades. They said they were part of George Kirk's band of partisans, but since Kirk's people were themselves infamous robbers, this hardly improved their standing. Bridgeman boasted that he meant to chastise the secesh in all the country back of the Nantahalas. The Government of the United States had yet to lay its hand on the damned rebels in Macon and Clay and Cherokee, he said, as if there was a way any man could tell the unionists from the disloyal in those tormented highlands where the fathers were divided against the sons, neighbors lay in ambuscade for one another, and deserters from both armies lurked at the head of every cove. The truth of the matter was that Bridgeman had been raised an orphan on Downings Creek at the foot of the Tusquittees and had had a thin time of it, and there were scores he wanted to settle in that region. Ahead of them, as they followed the winding valley of the Pigeon, stood line on line of high tops with the fog lifting off them, and there was a veil of mist over the river that they climbed above and looked down on, that resembled a boll of cotton drawn out thin. The air smelled of pine and as they rode higher it cooled and blew the odor of the river into their faces. They camped the first night by the rapids in a grove of yellow birch with sheer cliffs towering over them that seeped water so fresh and cold it made the jaws ache to drink of it. On the second day they rode single-file along a narrow track over the gorge, in and out of sun-glare and twilight as they ascended through the layers of cloud that were clinging to the crowns of the red spruce and walnut and oak. Swathes of warm rain would drench them, then presently the sun would come to burn the damp off them in coiling wisps of steam. Towards evening a thunderstorm moved out of the Smokies and they took shelter under granite overhangs where deer laurel grew in thickets and woodbine hung down in tendrils, and they held the heads of the horses while rainspouts roared off the rock faces around them and lightning crackled in the valley at their feet. The third day they moved up Cataloochee and into the open country around Richland Creek. Ever since the old days when Bishop Asbury used to preach at Jacob Shook's, there had been a Methodist campground at that place, and it happened that a parson named Talley was holding a meeting there by the river behind Shook's old house, when Bridgeman and the Yellow Jackets came up the road from Iron Duff. Talley ventured out to meet them, clasping