The lumbermen who came down in scores of thousands from Michigan,
Wisconsin and Minnesota, were a stalwart crowd. War, save for the
bullets and shell, offered to them no hardships to which they were not
used. They had often worked for days at a time up to their waists in
icy water. They had endured thirty degrees below zero without a murmur,
they had breasted blizzard and cyclone, they could live on anything,
and they could sleep either in forest or on prairie, under the open sky.
It was such men as these, including men of his own state, and men of the
Tennessee mountains, whom Johnston, who had all the qualities of a great
commander, had to face. The forces against him were greatly superior in
number. The eastern end of his line had been crushed already at Mill
Spring, the extreme western end had suffered a severe blow at Fort Henry,
but Jefferson Davis and the Government at Richmond expected everything
of him. And he manfully strove to do everything.
There was a mighty marching of men, some news of which came through to
Dick and his comrades with Grant. Johnston with his main army, the very
flower of the western South, fell back from Bowling Green, in Kentucky,
toward Nashville, the capital of Tennessee. But Buckner, with his
division, was sent from Bowling Green to help defend Donelson against
the threatened attack by Grant, and he arrived there six days after the
fall of Henry. On the way were the troops of Floyd, defeated in West
Virginia, but afterwards sent westward.
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