Fishing on Deep River, Civil War Memoir of Private Samuel Baldwin Dunlap, C.S.A.

Fishing on Deep River is the Civil War Memoir of Pvt. Samuel Baldwin Dunlap, C.S.A., a DeKalb resident, who at seventeen left behind his classes at the Bloomingdale Academy in Buchanan County, Missouri, and enrolled in the Missouri State Guard, as his brothers, James Wallace and Robert Dunlap, had done. The decision set him upon a path that would ultimately take him into the Confederate States Army and deposit him a thousand miles from home on Deep River in North Carolina. By the time he saw Northwest Missouri again four years later, he had been in the Battle of Blue Mills Landing, the Battle of Lexington, the Battle of Pea Ridge, the battles at Iuka, Corinth, Hatchie s Bridge, Port Gibson, Big Black River, Champion s Hill, Vicksburg, Atlanta, Franklin, and Murfreesboro. Sam writes from a private s perspective as a cannoneer, detailing the endless marches and camping experiences in between battles. The reader meets Sam s mess-mates, laughs at the jokes the boys play on one another, and shudders at Sam s misery when he is the one responsible for getting his brother Caldwell to the surgeon following the Battle at Kennesaw Mountain, and when he walks the battlefield at Franklin to witness the carnage after one of the shortest, but bloodiest defeats for the Confederacy.