Chickamauga Valley

The Chickamauga Valley is the low, broken country between Lookout Mountain and the Armuchee Ridges, drained north by the creeks that gave it its name. Georgia’s 1976 survey describes valley floors of limestone and dolomite with low ridges capped by the cherty rock of the Knox Group, the ridge tops near 1,000 feet and 200 to 300 feet above the valleys. The streams run in a rectangular pattern that follows the rock. West Chickamauga Creek gathers in Walker County and runs northeast more than 37 miles, along the edge of the battlefield and through Fort Oglethorpe, to meet South Chickamauga just over the Tennessee line. South Chickamauga, about 35 miles long, comes through Ringgold and reaches the Tennessee River at Chattanooga.

The name is older than the battle. In March 1775 older Cherokee leaders sold away a vast hunting ground, and Dragging Canoe would not accept it. In the winter of 1776 to 1777 he led his followers down the Tennessee to where the Great Indian Warpath crossed Chickamauga Creek, and they became the Chickamauga after the creek. Virginia and North Carolina troops burned their towns in April 1779. The people rebuilt farther down the river, and when militia burned those towns in 1782 they moved down again.

Then came September 1863. The armies met along West Chickamauga Creek on September 18, and after three days Rosecrans’s Union army left the field in disarray. By the American Battlefield Trust’s estimate the battle cost 34,624 casualties, 16,170 Union and 18,454 Confederate. The creek itself had little to do with how the fighting went. In 1890 the ground became the country’s first national military park. Two months after the battle, Patrick Cleburne held Ringgold Gap against Joseph Hooker’s pursuit and slowed the Federal advance into Georgia.