Naked Civil War Battle

An interesting historical anecdote about a nude combat skirmish involving John Hunt Morgan, from the Washington Times:

"The Union pickets didn't know what to think of soldiers fighting as naked as jaybirds," Confederate Lt. Bennett H. Young wrote in an unusual report to his superiors about a skirmish between Union and Confederate forces on the Cumberland River in western Kentucky on July 2, 1863.

In late June, Morgan's men scouted the rain-swollen Cumberland River marking the border between Tennessee and Kentucky. The normally placid river was now half a mile wide, choked with floating logs and other storm runoff. Anxious to get his raid on the road, Morgan began crossing his men on July 2 when the river was still overflowing its banks. He had more than 2,500 with him, 1,000 more than his orders authorized.

The impetuous Morgan should have waited for the swirling river to fall, as it was an impediment to keeping his men together, but because of the flood conditions, the Federals on the Kentucky side had relaxed their patrols. The Federals believed no one would try such a dangerous crossing.

Morgan's men carefully wrapped their cap-and-ball weapons and paper cartridges in rubber blankets and tossed them into make-shift rafts and leaky boats. Many forgot modesty, stripping off their clothes to keep them dry. They jumped into the river, literally swimming bareback or holding onto their horses' tails.

It is hard to hide 2,500 men, scores of wagons and hundreds of mules swimming a river. Union patrols discovered the crossing and rushed to the bank to start shooting at the men in the boats that they could see. What they could not see was that hundreds of Confederates had already landed and were now hidden from view by the bank's slope and trees.

Nineteen-year-old Lt. Bennett Young of Morgan's command, who would gain fame the following year for leading a raid on St. Albans, Vt., remembered: "Those who had clothing on rushed ashore into line. Those who swam with horses, unwilling to be laggard, not halting to dress, seized their cartridge boxes and guns and dashed upon the enemy. The strange sight of naked men engaging in combat amazed the enemy."

The Cumberland Moonbow

There are only a handful of places in the world where one can see a genuine moonbow - Victoria Falls, on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, is one such place where moonbow fans flock to view the phenomenon. And Cumberland Falls, near Williamsburg, KY is another.

What is a moonbow? It's a rainbow produced by moonlight rather than sunlight. They're relatively faint compared to rainbows, and they're always in the opposite part of the sky from the moon. The human eye doesn't often clearly see vibrant colors in moonbows, but they're very evident when long-exposure photographs are taken.

I used to think a rainbowy ring of light around the moon was a moonbow. Technically speaking, it is not. That would be a corona, a light-diffraction phenomenon produced by clouds or mist. Moonbows tend to be 22-degree-angle halos, formed during very rare circumstances, most often near waterfalls but not necessarily.

(Photo above by flickr user Bryce Fields.)

Ghost Bride of Pine Mountain

Michael Paul Henson, in his very interesting book Tragedy at Devil's Hollow, tells of a "ghost bride" allegedly seen near Pine Mountain in 1938. It reads like the typical ghostly-hitchhiker story (like, for instance, the "Large Marge" routine in Pee-wee's Big Adventure) but holds my attention for some reason nonetheless.

As the story goes, one Martin Harmon encountered a woman in a wedding dress who hitched a ride during a rainstorm and warned him that the bridge ahead had collapsed. He dropped her off at her house and watched her walk around behind it. Only then did he realize she'd left with his coat, which he'd handed her to warm up with during the drive. The next day, he stopped by to retrieve his coat but was informed by the woman's mother that she had died years ago, and had been buried in - yes, that's right - her wedding gown. And as it turned out, the bridge had indeed collapsed in floodwaters the night before.

Sounds too good to be true? Well, yeah. But at least this tall tale has some provenance. Unlike some chroniclers of supernatural anecdotes, Henson seems to have actually done some research on these passed-down stories. He notes: "I can learn of no sighting of this phantom in the last thirty-odd years, but the ghost of the bride-to-be was seen on several occasions during the 1930s and 1940s, either near where the old bridge crossed Poor Fork of the Cumberland River, or along the road that used to pass close by this stream. The apparition was always seen during or just before a heavy rain storm."