Hey everyone, welcome to episode 206 of our Civil War Podcast.

I'm Rich. And I'm Tracy. Hello y'all. Thanks for tuning into the podcast. With the last show,

as y'all recall, we returned to the Western Theater of the War after a long absence. We talked

about how the Federal victory at Shiloh in April of 1862 was the exclamation point on all that the

Union armies had gained up until that point in the West, and it also seemed to open up brand new

opportunities. But Department Commander Henry Hallock spent the whole month of May

inching his gigantic army the 20 miles down to Corinth, a key real junction in the northeast corner

of Mississippi. At the end of May, with Hallock finally knocking on the door at Corinth,

Confederate General P.G. T. Borragard, who had taken command after Albert Sinney Johnston's death at

Shiloh, withdrew from Corinth under Hallock's nose and successfully retreated 50-year-some-mile south

to Tupelo. With his capture of Corinth, Hallock was now astride the Memphis and Charleston Railroad,

which was one of the Confederacy's major east-west rail lines. In the last show, we talked about how

the prospect of campaigning in the deep south presented Hallock with some daunting challenges,

so he decided that rather than plunging southward after Borragard, he would disperse his forces to

consolidate the gains the Federals had made up to that point in the upper south. While leaving his

most aggressive general, Ulysses S. Grant, to defend the whole area around Corinth in northern

Mississippi and over to Memphis in western Tennessee, Hallock entrusted his one positive move

to Don Carlos Buehl, who, with about 30,000 men, was to advance eastward along the rail road to

Chattanooga, repairing the rail road as he went and using it as his supply line. As we mentioned in

the last episode, significant stretches of that rail line were already controlled by a federal

division commanded by one of Buehl's subordinates, Orm Spimiciel. But Buehl himself set a very leisurely

pace, and his anxieties about his supply lines were made worse by raids by Confederate cavalry

...