with mounted enemies. Being ordered to drive the rebels beyond Tuscumbia, they had a considerable fight with them at Cane Creek, and occupied the town on October 27.
On October 24, an aide-de-camp of General Grant personally delivered to General Sherman despatches conveying the first information that General Grant had been put in command of the three departments and armies of the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Ohio, and that Sherman himself had been appointed to the command of the Department and Army of the Tennessee. He at once issued general orders placing West Tennessee under General Hurlbut, and Mississippi under General McPherson, and ordered the former to select 8000 men from the best troops of the Sixteenth Corps and send them under General G. M. Dodge after him. While his fourth division was crossing the Tennessee at Eastport by the use of two gunboats and a scow, a messenger arrived who had floated down the river in a boat, and brought General Grant's order of October 24, already mentioned. It had been sent to General Crook, who had forwarded it by the water route — a rather risky venture, it would seem, but successful in this case. The order was executed instantly, the two divisions called back to Eastport, the only practicable crossing, the railroad work abandoned, and every nerve and muscle strained to expedite the further march to Bridgeport.
The leading division, with General Sherman at the head, reached Florence on November 1. Marching on to Rogersville and the Elk River, the column found the latter impassable and was obliged to follow it up to Fayetteville. Here, orders reached Sherman from Grant to march to Bridgeport with the Fifteenth Corps and to leave General Dodge's command at Pulaski, to guard the railroad from Columbia to Decatur. Accordingly, General Blair was ordered to march with the second and third divisions by way of Newmarket and Bellefonte, while, of the other divisions, the first moved by Decherd and Stevenson, and Smith's by University Place and Sweesden's Cove. General Sher-
