Battle of Wauhatchie

The fight is remembered for its darkness and for a joke. Longstreet ordered Micah Jenkins's division to crush John Geary's isolated 1,500 men; the attack slipped from ten o'clock to midnight and hit Wauhatchie Station in the dark. Geary's son, an artillery lieutenant, died in his father's arms. Union camps later joked that stampeding mules, mistaken for cavalry, had driven the Confederates off, though the mules disordered one regiment only briefly. Union losses were 78 killed, 327 wounded and 15 missing, and Geary reported burying 153 Confederates. The supply line to Chattanooga stayed open.

What the plaque says

Battle of Wauhatchie 2½ mi. Here 3 brigades of Hood's Division, Confederate Army of Tennessee under Brig. Gen. Micah Jenkins, made a night attack against Geary's Division of the XII Corps, guarding the recently opened "Cracker Line" to Bridgeport, Ala. The attack was repulsed with heavy losses on both sides.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Point Park on Lookout Mountain — 1.6 mi
  The Tennessee end of Lookout Mountain, where a ten-acre Park Service memorial overlooks Moccasin Bend and the November 1863 fight called the Battle Above the Clouds.
• Ross's Landing — 3.7 mi
  The Tennessee River landing where Chattanooga began and where Muscogee (Creek) and Cherokee people were put on boats and ferried out in 1837 and 1838.
• Bessie Smith Cultural Center — 3.8 mi
  Chattanooga's African American museum and performance hall on the old Ninth Street, named for the Empress of the Blues, who started out singing for change on that same street.
• Tennessee Aquarium — 4.0 mi
  A river-themed aquarium that opened on May 1, 1992, on the Chattanooga bank where John Ross kept a trading post, tracing a raindrop from the Appalachians to the Gulf.

More markers nearby

• The University of the South — 2.2 mi
• Randolph Miller — 2.6 mi
• Sallie A. Crenshaw — 3.2 mi
• Carver Memorial Hospital — 3.4 mi