Part of Tom Cutters instructions to his men: "We will have something original on this drive. Out artist, Artie Cohn, has painted a map all the way to Abilene on the chuck wagon canvas. He'll be painting our progress each day all the way to our destination as well as incidents that may happen along the way." On the other side of the wagon he has painted another map for our trip back home. Check with them to know where we are, how far we've gone and how far we have to go."

THE MAP ON THE CHUCK WAGON CANVAS

By Tom Davy

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2010 Tom Davy
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4520-4918-2

Chapter One

Corporal Art Cohn set his tin coffee cup on a large, flat rock and sat down next to it. He leaned back against an adjacent tree keeping the cup within easy reach. With his belly full and his seat fairly comfortable, his coffee seemed to be the proper finishing touch to his lunch. Cohn decided to relax and maybe draw another picture. That was his job, to draw historical pictures of the War.

As far as camps went, Cohn observed, this one was quiet and serene, carefully selected in a wooded area that created large blotches of shade next to a clear, fast-running stream. It was so hidden by surrounding woods and hills the camp would be difficult to see from very far away. Even the heavy campfire smoke was being diffused by heavy leaf cover, and that too would soon die down now that the noon meal was complete.

The Army tents were in neat double rows facing each other, spacing trees where needed and fanning out from the centrally located cooking fires. The horses were pastured in a grassy meadow just beyond the tents, but still close by and handy. It was a good place to rest-up and lick their wounds, ideal in fact. Nobody else knew they were there; in fact, they weren't real sure where they were either.

The sun was shining and the early spring warmth of the South was comforting and spirit-lifting for all the troopers. That was something the unit needed after their last skirmishes with the Yankee patrols as they made their move to get out of Georgia in a roundabout way and into Tennessee. They'd had to cut through the western part of South Carolina first, but that was no problem.

April showers had made travel and fighting dismal affairs as they rode, ate and slept in the rain. They had fought in mud and slop most of the way just to get where they were, but the men all knew that and accepted the weather as soldiers. They would probably have to continue their struggle to reach a still unknown destination in Tennessee. Maybe they were already in Tennessee, Cohn thought. He knew they were somewhere close to the border if they were not already there. It really made no difference; neither place was safe.

Across the campfire from Cohn was Major Thomas T. Cutter, C.S.A., 96th Cavalry, Company R, who was conferring with fellow officers. Cohn studied the man with his artist's eye as he had done many times before. He watched his lifelong friend—once a fun-loving cowboy who now looked a gaunt and tired leader of men, which he was. The weight of his command was taking its toll on the man, Cohn realized.

Cohn thought back to the day that General Longstreet had called Cutter to his field tent. Cutter was infantry then, he remembered. What Longstreet wanted, as Cohn later found out, was a cavalry unit like the one Lee had in JEB Stuart. He wanted and needed a unit that could keep an eye on the Union's strategy, but also one that could harass and raise havoc with the Union's daily routine just to simply slow them down. He wanted a man from Texas who knew horses and could ride like a cowboy. He had sent for Thomas T. Cutter.

Longstreet laid out his plans for Cutter. What he needed, he said, was for Tom to lead cavalry in a prescribed manner that grew from the imagination of the general. He then told Tom he would immediately be assigned the rank of captain, and he was to pick his own fifty men as long as all of them were good horsemen. For some reason, Longstreet insisted on that.

Tom would be assigned a captured, well-stocked bread wagon along with a driver and a team. The last thing Longstreet said to Cutter as he stroked his long brown beard was "We have no horses to spare. After you get your men together, you'll have to steal mounts from the Union cavalry. How you do that is up to you. While you're sneaking around their camps, pick up any information you can on the Yanks and report it to me along with where they are headed. I'll try to get word to you whenever we move camp and where it is that you'll report with your information."

"Whenever you find extra `qualified' men," he said, "just show these orders to their commanding officers and add them to your cavalry of renegades." Longstreet stopped his orders, smoothed his long, full beard with his hands again and smiled. "Because you won't know if you are `up or down,' being out there all alone, I have taken the liberty to name your group the 96th Cavalry because you can turn the number upside down and it still reads the 96th ." Cohn had always tried to find some kind of hidden meaning to Longstreet's statement but it never came to him. It was Longstreet's own, private little joke to Cutter as he smiled explaining it, but the name stuck, besides, they had to call it something.

Then Longstreet added, "You'll be Company R for Renegade. Your company will be a 'hell-bent-for-leather' kind of outfit, so don't let it grow to more than two hundred troopers." Longstreet leaned back in his chair and laughed out loud at the thought of his newly reorganized patrol, already proud of it. One of the few times the officer had any reason to laugh, feeble as it was at the time.

Getting serious again, Longstreet moved forward in his chair and emphasized the importance of Cutter's new command. That part was no joke, they needed that cavalry. Then he dismissed the new captain and returned to his study of maps, orders, thoughts and strategies for his Army.

Captain Thomas T. Cutter's first recruit was Artie Cohn. Artie was proud of that; it also gave him one more stripe on his uniform's sleeve; now he had two. The two men put their heads together to decide their first step in recruiting others. They found the other Texans from their previous unit who they knew to be cowboys. Later, they learned there were some fine horsemen from Virginia whose families owned horse farms. That spurred them on to find other horsemen from Kentucky and Tennessee who were fighting for the South. There were twenty-eight in all and to a man were anxious to join the new 96th, jumping at a chance to ride instead of marching everywhere. Ten days later, Cutter had his fifty men and marched out on their first horse-stealing mission.

All of the men decided among themselves to steal only officers' horses, or maybe others that were of good quality. To do that, they knew they would take others and move them to a faraway place in order to have more time to pick and choose. Other Confederate units could have the mounts that were left over; they definitely did not want the Union cavalry to have them. Later, they decided to run off all the Yankee horses they could just to put the Yankee cavalry afoot. What was a cavalry without horses?

Anticipation for action rose from day one; it was infectious, the new recruits picked up on it immediately. They could feel the pride of being in the 96th; they rode tall and straight in the saddle, anxious to make their mark. It was to nobody's surprise when Cutter's Renegades gained well-deserved reputations by both the Blue and the Gray. They became a force to be reckoned with by the North.

At first, the 96th worked their craft only at night. They grew bold and looked for dangerous missions to test their mettle. Sometimes in the beginning, they would sneak between and past pickets to take only officers' horses that were kept separate from the enlisted men's mounts. They were not hard to find, or to pick out. There were times when they could boldly lead them right out of Yankee camps without being challenged or detected, but that was...