I've just returned from tracing the route of Col. Watkins's fighting retreat south along what is now Highway 193 from around High Point to Cooper Heights in Walker County, in the northwest corner of Georgia. The good people at the Lookout Missionary Baptist Church were very helpful in pointing out the Civil War location of their church a few miles south of the current sancturary. The Fourth and Sixth Kentucky rallied around Lookout Church for a time before being forced further south along the road. Present Highway 136 follows Coopers Gap over Lookout Mountain. It was there, around where a convenience store now stands, at the intersection of current Highways 193 and 136, that Hoblitzell was supposed to be dug in and prepared to cover the retreat of the other two regiments of Watkins' 3rd brigade of the first division of the Union cavalry corps. Once they had got on to that narrow winding road over the mountain, it would have been impossible for the Confederates to flank them because of the difficulty of the terrain. But many never made it to that escape route ( roughly today's Highway 136).
I'll never know exactly where along the route of retreat my great great grandfather and many of his companions were captured. Maybe they would not have made it to Hoblitzell's supposed position anyway, with vastly superior Confederate forces flanking them wherever they tried to make a stand. But then again, maybe if Hoblitzell had carried out his orders instead of rushing to safety, Great Great Grandfather William E. Fleece, Saddler of Company A, Fourth Kentucky Volunteer Cavalry might have made it home to his saddlery in Raywick, Kentucky instead of dying five months later of wounds, "rheumatism" and malnutrition while a prisoner at Belle Isle in the James River at Richmond, Virginia. Maybe we, his descendants might have been able to visit his gravesite in the quiet Raywick countryside, instead of looking out over a vast field of "unknown" Union dead at Richmond National Cemetery. On behalf of the descendants of the men of the Fourth and Sixth Kentucky Volunteer (Union) Cavalry regiments, whom Colonel Hoblitzell apparently abandoned, I would protest terming his service at Chickamauga "honorable," in light of the evidence now available to me. If there are other facts to justify Colonel Hoblitzell's speedy retreat, I would love to know of them and would happily revise my attitude toward him if warranted. The "fog of war," especially viewed at the distance of a century and a half makes all conclusions tentative and counsels humility in all who would seek to reconstruct the past.-- Steven M. Fleece, Clark County, Indiana, smfleece@hotmail.com