Leaving our Oak Ridge bivouac early this morning we
journeyed fifteen miles more and stopped for the night on the banks of Bayou
Said, only seven miles from Monroe, our destination. During the day we crossed
another ridge known as Pine Ridge, which is eight miles across and about twenty
feet above the surrounding land. It is beautifully covered with yellow pine,
growing so straight and tall, seventy-five to one hundred feet. We noticed a
few small clearings with log huts. This is the worst bivouac we have yet
occupied. It is full of poisonous reptiles and insects, centipedes, jiggers,
woodticks, lizards, scorpions and snakes of all kinds — I have never seen the
like. Some of the boys killed two big, spotted, yellow snakes and put them
across the road—they measured about fifteen feet each. The ground is covered
with leaves ten inches deep, and the water of the bayou has a layer of leaves
and moss fully two inches thick.1
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1 This proved to be our most
dangerous Journey in all our four years' service. The natives told us the next
morning that no Southern soldiers could have been hired to do what we did. I
have often wondered and would like to know, just as we did then, why we were sent
into this forsaken section of the country, and during the most sickly time of
the year, at that! The natives we saw were a white-livered set; they were all
ardent sympathizers of the secession cause.—A. G. D.
Source: Alexander G. Downing, Edited by Olynthus B.,
Clark, Downing’s Civil War Diary, p. 138
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