On our extreme right, a cavalry division, under command of my friend Colonel Edward M. McCook, led the advance, passed over Raccoon and Lookout Mountains into the valley of the Chattanooga River, and pushed on in a general south westerly direction toward Rome as far as the towns of Alpine and Summerville. The whole Twentieth Army Corps followed in its wake as fast as possible. The Fourteenth Army Corps crossed Sand Mountain and had descended into Lookout Valley by September 6. Continuing up Lookout Mountain, it seized the passes at Johnson's Brook and Cooper's and Stevens's Gaps without resistance, and by the 10th had made its way down Lookout Mountain and over the southern end of Missionary Ridge into McLemore's Cove. It proved an exceedingly difficult march. General Thomas describes the roads as the worst imaginable. The ascents and descents were so long and difficult that teams had to be doubled in hauling over wagons and guns, thereby causing great delay. The Twenty-first Army Corps marched from Shellmound on the Tennessee to Hunting Water Creek, issuing from a narrow valley, up which extended the Nashville & Chattanooga railroad track to a long tunnel, with a wagon-road alongside leading over Raccoon Mountain, as the northern end of Sand Mountain is called. The whole corps followed this road into Lookout Valley, and, by the evening of September 6, General Wood's division, forming the left, was at the junction of the Nashville & Chattanooga with the Trenton branch railroad up the valley, only seven miles from Chattanooga.
In the meantime, the two infantry and two cavalry brigades under Hazen, Wagner, Minty, and Wilder had thoroughly performed their part of a feint against Chattanooga by continuously and ostentatiously demonstrating with all three arms at different points opposite the town for a distance of fifteen miles up the river. On September 8, Colonel Wagner, who had taken position in the narrow bend of the river directly opposite Chattanooga, discovered indications that the enemy was withdrawing from the town, and sent word to that effect to the army headquarters.
