In the 1930s and ’40s, Pulley’s dad played with Civil War-era Enfield rifles in nearby Giles County, where he grew up. An acquaintance-a longtime relic hunter-enjoys telling stories of unearthing dozens of rare Whitworth bullets, Confederate belt plates, and thousands of other artifacts from area fields, woods, and construction sites. In the 1920s and ’30s, war relics were plentiful here in Maury County, where ground was trampled, camped on, and fought over by both armies. I’m no expert, but the one-legged, one-armed Hood probably didn’t curl up with the Confederate battle flag bedspread on that heirloom. John Schofield’s Army of the Ohio marched past his soldiers in the dead of night in late November 1864-one of the war’s gutsiest moves. Months ago at the museum, I examined the bed Army of Tennessee commander John Bell Hood slept in while Union Maj.

Roughly a Napoleon cannon shot away stands the National Confederate Museum at Elm Springs, where the remains of the former Klansman were recently transferred from Memphis for reburial. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the cavalry genius and infamous slave trader. Earl Van Dorn, a notorious womanizer and married father of five, attended the nuptials at Rally Hill, a circa-1830s mansion that still stands. Fabulous stories linger in the beautiful, rolling countryside a Confederate soldier called “God’s country.”Ī couple miles from where Pulley and I meet south of town, Union officer-turned-Confederate cavalry commander Frank Armstrong married President James Polk’s great-niece on April 27, 1863. Still ornery, I drive the next morning to Columbia, Civil War country about 50 miles south of downtown Nashville, for a rendezvous with Pulley, an expert on obscure Davis Ford and the Battle of Columbia. In a plastic box in the trunk rests a fluorescent, yellow cycling jacket-the perfect hiking attire. Poorer by $7.87, I toss my purchase into my duct-taped car and almost immediately suffer from buyer’s remorse.

But in the men’s clothing section, another quarry is cornered: a gawd-awful, orange sweatshirt. No fan of becoming an inadvertent target of a deer hunter, I scour a big-box chain store for an orange vest.

A Hike to Davis Ford, Where 22,000 Confederates Crossed the Duck River in 1864 Closeĭays before my visit to Davis Ford, a remote Duck River location near Columbia, Tenn., where 22,000 Confederates crossed in the late fall of 1864, guide Neal Pulley shoots me an eye-opening text: “Bring some orange.

Duck! Second Chances by Tana Ford