River of Blood – author notes
"River of Blood" is a translation of the Cherokee word Chickamauga - a creek running through northwest Georgia that was the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. This story would not have been possible without the patience, eagle eyes, suggestions and encouragement of my betas, in the beginning by shallowz and throughout the whole journey by Lisa a.k.a. miz24601. You gals rock (and not just for your mad beta skillz)! That being said, I confess to tweaking further after their input, and all mistakes are my own.
Dean and Sam Winchester (as we all know) are fictional characters, created by the genius of Eric Kripke.
Because I'm a bit of a history geek, all the other characters named in this story are actually real, not fictional. (Yes, even the guy playing the harmonica, Emancipation Proclamation Coggeshall, General Thomas's horse Billy - all of them were real). Lew and Leamon Griffith, however, are more than just names on census rolls and regimental histories to me.
Lew Griffith was actually my great-great-grandfather.
Lew lived to be almost 80 years old. He had 18 grandchildren, and he told them stories about his time as a soldier in the Civil War. One of those grandkids was my own grandpa, Harry Griffith Hammond. When Harry was young boy, he lived near the battlefield of Chickamauga, where monuments had been placed throughout the woods to tell visitors where various regiments had fought. Harry and his brother used to explore the grounds, looking for spent bullets and re-enacting the stories Grandpa Lew had told them.
Here is one of those stories. The details are skimpy as they were passed down to me, more than 100 years after it happened.
Lew was an officer in the Civil War, and fought in "a terrible battle" near Tennessee. After the first day's fighting, Lew was told that his brother Leamon had been killed. Lew went to find his brother on the battlefield, and not only was he successful, he found Leamon still alive! Lew got his brother back to their lines, and then Lew returned to his men for the next day's battle.
And – that's all she wrote. Literally. I jotted those notes the summer I was 14 and visiting my grandma, picking her brain about anything genealogical. About 10 years after that, I went to the cemetery in Hamilton, Indiana, where she'd told me Lew and Betsy were buried. Near them I found the family plot for Lew's parents, and there was Leamon's grave too, a carved flag draped over the corner of the marker. The tombstone carried his name, death date, and the poignant "age 25".
Two things happened after this (admittedly, a long time after this).
[1] I had the idea for a story where I could play with parallels between Dean and Sam as brothers and Lew and Leamon as brothers, and somehow tie Dean to Lew and Sam to Leamon. It was a small leap to decide to make this a story involving a Civil War ghost. Maybe Lew didn't go in search of Leamon originally, and his spirit wasn't at rest because he was tormented by guilt. Who could understand something like that better than Dean Winchester? So Dean and Sam go back in time, 'fix it' so that Lew does find his brother, and that stops the haunting.
(My secret is out. My first fandom was Quantum Leap!)
[2] If I was going to play with my ancestors' history, I wanted it to root my fiction in as many facts as possible. Of course, I invented the characters' dialogue and motives and actions (I definitely made up the reason Leamon enlisted and the estrangement between brothers!), but any biographical information given for any character is basically true.
In particular, I was determined to discover what had happed at Chickamauga, as I couldn't know what would happen to Lew and Leamon in my story (and by extension, to Dean and Sam) until I did.
This is what I found.
It's true that 22 year old Lew Griffith enlisted the summer war broke out in 1861. He married a 17 year old schoolteacher named Betsy (a neighbor and daughter of the local preacher) just a few days after signing up. Then he left to join his regiment, leaving Betsy with her parents.
The following summer, Lincoln called for 300,000 more volunteers, and Leamon (nearly 21) enlisted too. From then on, he sent his pay ($13 a month) home to his widowed mother in Indiana to support her and the younger children still at the farm.
By September, 1863, Leamon had been promoted to corporal, but his regiment (the 74th) was largely untested, having only fought in minor skirmishes till then. On the other hand, after two years fighting, Lew was a lieutenant with the 44th, promoted up through the ranks for his leadership and courage at previous battles such as Shiloh and Stones River in Tennessee.
Both the Union and Confederate armies recognized the significance of Chattanooga, near the Georgia border. Whoever controlled the railroad lines and rivers controlled the ability to move men and supplies, and Chattanooga was both a major hub and a path through the Appalachian Mountains that could open the way to Atlanta. Both sides were jockeying for position, more than 124,000 men in total, when they stumbled across each other by the Chickamauga Creek in northwest Georgia (about 10 miles from Chattanooga).
Leamon's regiment was with Colonel Croxton's brigade when they encountered the Confederate Army near Jay's Mill on the morning of September 19th, triggering the bloodiest two-day battle in the Civil War. His military records from the National Archives confirm that Leamon suffered a gunshot wound that day resulting in "a shattered knee joint. The ball entered above and outer part of leg, passed obliquely through the knee joint of right leg; its exit was below joint and inner part of leg."
There isn't any way, of course, to prove the family legend that he was left for dead, and that Lew found him. However, others who were at Chickamauga wrote of similar sights.
Sgt. Alfred Philips, of the 36th Ohio, privately printed his Civil War memoirs ("Fighting with Turchin"). He wrote of another soldier in his regiment, William Burton, who was told that his brother (with the 92nd Ohio) had been killed in that afternoon's fighting. After dark, William went out to search for his brother's body, and found him still alive, but unconscious and mortally wounded with a bullet in his head. William carried him back to his own lines.
"Through the long hours of the night he sat by his dying brother alone, listening to his labored breathing, till near morning, he was quiet. He pressed his ear close to his heart to hear it beating, held his cheek close to his mouth in the darkness to catch the faintest breath, but he was dead. Then he borrowed a shovel from the battery and dug a grave at the bottom of a large tree. He gathered twigs of pine and lined it carefully, sides and bottom. Then he wrapped him in his blanket, a man from the battery assisted him to lower the body into the grave and he covered it with twigs of pine and earth."
The following letter was written about that night by George Turner, also of the 92nd Ohio, to his sister just after the battle of Chickamauga:
"The thunder of battle had ceased and everything was still. We were on a road over which the tide of battle had not rolled, though the fighting ground was not far off. Along this road, as we moved, as noiselessly as possible, I saw by the roadside more touching, affecting sights than in all the battle. Every little way was one and sometimes two soldiers bearing along or resting with and bending over in the moonlight a wounded comrade or brother. I had seen men falling on every side, torn, mangled and trampled, had passed over parts of the field where were scores of wounded and dead, but nothing was so touching as to see a soldier bearing, by manly strength, the body of a wounded or dead comrade or relative along the road, half a mile from the battlefield, or sitting by the side of a body wrapped in a blanket, as if waiting for the strength to come and carry it further to a place of safety, or expecting to see life come to the form in the pale moonlight. And I saw others sitting by lifeless and wounded forms in the dark shade of trees or rocks, as if they wished to shut out the world from themselves and their dead."
I can imagine Lew searching for his brother like that, finding Leamon and carrying him to safety. And obviously, I like to imagine Dean and Sam the same way!
The Union Army had almost 5,000 men missing in action at Chickamauga - soldiers most likely left for dead on Rebel-held territory; some never to be found. Many of the Union dead that were found couldn't be identified by the Confederate soldiers who discovered them. They were buried in unmarked graves; their families never to know their fate. Perhaps because Lew did find his brother, Leamon was among the ranks of the almost 10,000 Federal wounded instead.
The field hospital for Leamon's division was set in the sanctuary of Cloud's Church, about 2 miles from where Leamon's company fought that day. By 11 p.m. Saturday night, the hospital was overflowing, even filling a nearby cooper's shop. Surgeries were conducted in shelter, where possible, but otherwise the wounded were left to lie outdoors.
The Confederates won the battle on Sunday. Lew's regiment, the 44th Indiana, was one of the valiant few who held Snodgrass Hill against the Rebels, giving the rest of the army time to safely retreat through McFarland's Gap as darkness fell. (Lew's regiment was so decimated that after the fight for Chattanooga was finally resolved in November, the survivors of the 44th were assigned to remain there on provost duty and would see no further action for the rest of the war.)
While Lew's regiment was involved in the brave effort to provide covering fire for the massive Union retreat, all the field hospitals were captured. The Confederates had over 13,000 wounded of their own; they didn't have sufficient supplies or staff to care for their own wounded, much less their prisoners.
After 11 days of suffering, the 2,270 most seriously wounded Union prisoners were exchanged under a flag of truce, and Leamon's military records confirm he was one of them.
The succeeding events summarized in the story are true. Leamon spent several months in Union hospitals, then was allowed to visit home before rejoining the Army, albeit at headquarters as he wasn't fit for action. Lew was also allowed to go home on furlough, and nine months later, in November 1864, his wife Betsy gave birth to their first child, a daughter they named Emma, while Lew was away.
After the war ended in 1865, Leamon and Lew (and their brother Frank, who'd enlisted when he turned 18) were all honorably discharged and returned home. They had their first Christmas together since their father died in 1860. Emma, a toddler of one, was joined by seven little cousins. The next youngest was named Leamon, after his soldier uncle. He was born in 1864, the son of Lew and Leamon's sister Lydia, who had married Betsy's brother George Carpenter.
Because Leamon had financially supported their widowed mother Jemima, she was later able to apply for a pension as his dependent. With that application, the National Archives has statements from several local doctors describing Leamon's last months after he returned to Indiana. He was unable to walk and the wound continued to fester. The little they could do was give him something for the pain and let him know that his time was short. In February, 1866, Leamon made out his will; his brother Lew was the executor. Leamon died at home just before midnight, April 8th, 1866. The cause of death given was the gunshot wound incurred at Chickamauga.
I have in my possession a letter written by Lew's granddaughter Ruth (my grandpa's little sister). She writes that 50 years after the war, Lew used to hold her in his lap in a big wicker rocking chair and sing "Tenting on the Old Campground", the song I used in chapter 10 of River of Blood. (It was written by Walter Kittredge, and published in 1863.)
Alas for those comrades of days gone by
Whose forms are missed tonight.
Alas for the young and true who lie
Where the battle flag braved the fight.
We are tired of war on the old camp ground,
Many are dead and gone,
Of the brave and true who've left their homes,
Others been wounded long.
We've been fighting today on the old camp ground,
Many are lying near;
Some are dead, and some are dying,
Many are in tears.
Many are the hearts that are weary tonight,
Wishing for the war to cease;
Many are the hearts looking for the right,
To see the dawn of peace.
Dying tonight, dying tonight,
Dying on the old camp ground.
When Lew died in 1918, he was buried in Hamilton Cemetery a short distance from his brother.