One of my great great grandfathers, William Angus Russell, wrote in his notebook about a raid on a union supply train or depot at Port Hudson. He says the Confederates got some of the supplies they were seeking and were hotly pursued back to the Confederate lines at Port Hudson. He says he pushed his horse hard and could hear bullets whizzing through the air. The Confederate riders, he said, were laughing at the Yankees as they rode. He had been a teacher before the war, and became a doctor after the war, dying after contracting smallpox from a patient or so the family story goes. His body was disinterred by grave robbers two days after burial near Columbia, MS, and his uniform, pistol, and sword were removed from his body. The sword bore the engraved initials "WAR" for W. A. Russell. Whoever has the sword now probably thinks it simply means WAR. Maybe it was destroyed chopping kindling, as were most of the rest. Does anybody know anything about the raid on Yankee quartermaster stores?

Robert Lawrence, Slidell, LA