McCook crossed the Tennessee, with their corps, and took possession of the passes of Lookout Mountain on Bragg's flank, and Crittenden took post at Wauhatchie, in Lookout  Valley, nearer the river, the Confederates abandoned Chattanooga, passed through the gaps of Missionary Ridge and encamped on the Chickamauga Creek near Lafayette, in northern Georgia, there to meet expected National forces when pressing through the gaps of Lookout Mountain and threatening their communications with Dalton and Resaca. From the lofty summit of Lookout Mountain, Crittenden had observed the retreat of Bragg from the Tennessee River, and he immediately led his forces into the Chattanooga Valley and encamped at Ross's Gap in Missionary Ridge, within three miles of the town.
General Burnside was then in command of the Army of the Ohio, and had been ordered to co-operate with Rosecrans. With twenty thousand men he climbed over the Cumberland Mountains into the magnificent Valley of East  Tennessee, his baggage and stores carried, in many places, on the backs of pack-mules. On his entering the Valley, twenty thousand Confederates in East Tennessee, commanded by General Buckner, fled to Georgia and Joined Bragg, when Burnside took a position near the Tennessee River, so as to have easy communication with Rosecrans at Chattanooga. The latter, meanwhile, erroneously supposing Bragg had begun a retreat toward Rome, had pushed through the mountain passes, when he was surprised to find that general, instead of retreating, concentrating his forces to attack the attenuated line of the Nationals, the extremities of which were fifty miles apart. Rosecrans proceeded at once to concentrate his own forces; and very soon the two armies were confronting each other in battle array, on each side of Chickamauga Creek, in the vicinity of Crawfish Spring, each line extending toward the slopes of Missionary Ridge. General Thomas, who was on the extreme left of the National line, opened the battle on the morning of the 19th of September. It raged with great fierceness until dark, when the Nationals seemed to have the advantage. That night General Longstreet, whom Lee had sent from Virginia to assist Bragg, arrived with fresh troops which swelled the Confederate army to seventy thousand men, and gave to it a far better soldier than the chief leader. Rosecrans's army did not then exceed, in number, fifty-five thousand men.
On the morning of the 20th the contest was renewed after a thick fog had risen from the earth. There was a fearful struggle. A furious charge upon the National right had shattered it into fragments, and these fled in disorder toward Chattanooga. This tide carried with it the troops led by Rosecrans, Crittenden and McCook; and the commanding-general, unable to join Thomas, and believing the whole army would speedily be hurrying pell-mell toward Chattanooga, hastened to that place to provide for rallying them there. Generals Sheridan and J. C. Davis rallied a part of these troops, and Thomas stood firm, frustrating every effort to turn his flank. Fortyeight hours after the battle the army, which had been withdrawn to Chattanooga, was strongly intrenched there.
Victory crowned the Confederates in the battle of Chickamauga, but at the fearful cost of about twenty-one thousand men killed, wounded, and made prisoners. The Nationals lost about nineteen thousand men. During the contest a
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