The hill was taken by the Federal troops on the 23d of November, 1863, by way of "overture to the battle of Chattanooga," Grant, Thomas, Hooker, Granger, Howard, and others overlooking the engagement from the ramparts of Fort Wood. The next day, as all the world knows, Hooker's men carried Lookout Mountain, while the multitude below, hearing the commotion, wondered what could be going on above them, till suddenly the clouds lifted, and behold, the Confederates were in full flight. Then, says an eye-witness, there "went up a mighty cheer from the thirty thousand in the valley, that was heard above the battle by their comrades on the mountain." On the day following, for events followed each other fast in that spectacular campaign, Grant and Thomas had established themselves on Orchard Knob, and late in the afternoon the Union army, exceeding its orders, stormed Missionary Ridge, put the army of Bragg to sudden rout, and completed one of the really decisive victories of the war. For a man who wishes to feel the memory of that stirring time there is no better place than Orchard Knob, where Grant stood and anxiously watched the course of the battle, a battle of which he declared that it was won "under the most trying circumstances presented during the war." For my own part, I can see the man himself as I read the words of one who was there with him. The stormers of Missionary Ridge, as I have said, after making the demonstration they had been ordered to make, kept on up the slope, thinking "the time had come to finish the battle of Chickamauga." "As soon as this movement was seen from Orchard Knob," writes General Fullerton, "Grant turned quickly to Thomas, who stood by his side, and I heard him say angrily, 'Thomas, who ordered those men up the ridge?' Thomas replied in his usual slow, quiet manner, 'I don't know; I did not.' Then, addressing General Gordon Granger, he said, 'Did you order them up, Granger?' 'No,' said Granger; 'they started up without orders. When those fellows get started all hell can't stop them.'" In the heat of battle a soldier may be pardoned, I suppose, if his speech smells of sulphur; and after the event an army is hardly to be censured for beating the enemy a day ahead of time. I speak as a civilian. Military men, no doubt, find insubordination, even on the right side, a less pardonable offense; a fact which may explain why General Grant, in his history of the battle, written many years afterward, makes no mention of this its most dramatic incident, so that the reader of his narrative would never divine but that everything had been done according to the plans and orders of the general in command.