The 21st Ohio was heading at the double quick toward Snodgrass Hill as midmorning of a warm September Sunday in 1863. They were sure something was going terribly wrong with this battle on the banks of the Chickamauga, but then, many things had been going wrong with this Union army lately.

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The Army of the Cumberland had been given to understand that they were chasing Confederate General Braxton Brag's army which was fleeing before them into Georgia. But the triumphant 'chase' had begun to have ominous overtones, and yesterday a big battle had flared in the dark woods. The fighting had raged all day. But even worse, some bewildering thing was happening off to the Union right among the tangled ravines and forests drained by Chickamauga Creek. One thing was certain. In the 21st's front, the Rebels were running in only one direction-straight at the left wing of the Army of the Cumberland.

The 21st Regiment, Ohio Volunteer Infantry, hailed from the northwestern part of their state, a region that was still frontier in 1863. They came from the Black Swamp, a huge morass that for generations had turned back the tide of settlement. During the early part of their enlistment, an old man in Kentucky had found it impossible to believe these men lived in the dreaded Black Swamp. He had marched through it with General Harrison in 1814 and still remembered with horror its dark and brooding vastness.

Despite the legend that no white man (and few Indians) could live there, these men were taming the swamp when they were interrupted by Lincoln's call for troops. They formed a very tough outfit, short on discipline but long on endurance. Perhaps for this reason, or for no reason, in May of 1863 they had been chosen to receive some rather special arms. They had turned in the usual motley collection of muskets carried by Western regiments and had been given in exchange brand new weapons. Two companies got English-made, muzzle-loading Enfields, but the remaining six companies were issued Colt's Revolving Rifles.

Few of the men had seen any kind of repeating breechloader and this five-shot Colt was received with wonder. It was a .56-caliber percussion rifle with the distinctive Colt revolving breech mechanism. It had a solid frame and a Root patent side-hammer. The guns used a .56-caliber paper or linen cartridge, and with a little practice the Yanks found they could load five shots into the Colts in less time than it had taken to load one minié ball in their muskets.

They mastered their weapons so well they were given the dangerous honor of being brigade skirmishers and sharpshooters. As they marched and fought their way south, they neither knew nor cared that the Colts were 'unsuccessful experiments' in the family tree of gun design. If the Ohioans were appalled at the blast of gas from the cylinder, they failed to record it. If there were accidents from flying bits of the percussion caps, if occasionally all five cartridges exploded together, if they suffered powder burns on their jaws, the riflemen of the 21st made no loud or lasting complaints. Like most practical men used to bending a hostile environment with their own hands, they did not expect perfection. They weighed the fast-shooting, quick-loading accuracy of the Colts against the pitiful, junked European muskets carried by other outfits, and counted themselves supremely lucky. They adopted an unorthodox grip on the gun that lessened the danger to their hands and gloated happily over the fact that they could fire and reload the Colts while lying down behind a nice, thick tree trunk. As dawn that 20th of September the 21st Ohio, as part of the 3d Brigade, 2d Division, XIV Corps (Thomas's), had been drawn up in line behind some sturdy breastworks they had lost sleep to build during the night. Though part of Thomas's corps, they had recently been under McCook's command. The men were sure the battle would resume, and skirmishing had begun on their front when orders came for the entire division to move out.

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