Tales from the road: 'Disappearing' into Dill Branch Ravine

Dill Branch Ravine (right) on the Shiloh (Tenn.) battlefield

                                  Like this blog on Facebook | My YouTube videos

Minutes after leaving Tom Petty and Bob Dylan behind, I stiff-arm the 21st century and disappear into the woods above Dill Branch Ravine on the Shiloh (Tenn.) battlefield.

“Watch for snakes,” a ranger had warned me earlier.

A stark reminder of the cost of war.

But on this glorious morning, I see no snakes — and no humans, either. I’m apparently the only living soul traipsing toward the ravine where, on the evening of April 6, 1862, Confederates mounted a desperate, doomed attack to break Ulysses S. Grant’s army on the ridge.

As leaves and twigs crunch beneath my hiking boots, I stumble upon an eye-opening, sobering marker: “Burial place. 14th Wisconsin Infantry. Bodies removed to Nat’l Cemetery.”

Shiloh loves to spring these surprises. 

A few yards away, I study the exposed underside of a massive, uprooted tree. Surely a Gardner bullet or sliver of artillery iron once burrowed itself among the mosaic of stones tangled in its roots.

Later, I enter the ravine from the Tennessee River side, skittering down a steep embankment into the muck of Dill Branch. During the battle, two Union gunboats — the wooden USS Lexington and USS Tyler — anchored in the river and hurled their massive shells into this earth. Combined with Grant’s cannons firing from the ridge near Pittsburg Landing, the noise must have been apocalyptic.

“Terrorizing,” a ranger later told me. But apparently the fire accomplished little. 

“Every two minutes, the enemy threw two shells from his gunboats,” Confederate Brigadier General Patrick Cleburne wrote, “some of which burst close around my men, banishing sleep from the eyes of a few, but falling chiefly among their own wounded, who were strewn thickly between the camp and the river…”

"Sounded terribly and looked ugly and hurt but few," Confederate Colonel John D. Martin wrote of the fire from the gunboats. 

Ulysses Grant's artillery protected Pittsburg Landing during the Battle of Shiloh.

Dill Branch Ravine on the Shiloh battlefield

Using cannons like these, Union gunboats in the Tennessee River shelled the ravine.

Surely several of those 32-pound shells still lie buried here — silent, heavy reminders capable of unleashing their contents even now if disturbed. 

A gift from nature.

Deep in the ravine, as sunlight squeezes between the trees, I marvel at its steep, enclosing walls. Climbing back toward my starting point, my heart hammers past 100 beats a minute. Under fire and burdened with equipment, men attacked here? What extraordinary courage.

Yet the ravine offers its own small mercies: a single red leaf blazing among the drab tones, brilliant green moss clinging to a gray rock, a decaying stump the color of rust, a lone cackling bird, a jittery squirrel. 

Maybe I should disappear into Dill Branch Ravine more often.

---

SOURCES

 — War of the Rebellion: Serial 010, Page 582, Kentucky, Tennessee, Northern Mississippi, Northern Alabama and southwestern Virginia, Chapter XXII

 — Ibid, Page 622.