The Army of the Cumberland was one of the principal Union armies in the Civil War, and it was about as good an army as this country ever had. Its soldiers thought very well of themselves, which is one way of saying that it was a high-morale outfit, and they also thought very well of their generals, especially of the one who led them through a couple of the worst battles any army ever had: Major General William S. Rosecrans, a red-faced, excitable, hard-fighting man who was known to his troops as “Old Rosy.” Rosecrans was a good man but unlucky. He lost a big battle, got into the bad graces of General U. S. Grant, and was removed from his command. As an indirect result, he and the army wound up with an unusual memorial in the form of a huge strip of painted canvas 500 feet long, eight feet high, and now more than a century old, some scenes from which are shown here.

First, a word about the Army of the Cumberland itself. It cut its eyeteeth in the fearful Battle of Shiloh in the spring of 1862, fought the hard and indecisive Battle of Perryville, Kentucky, that fall, and at the end of the year engaged in a terrible battle at Stones River, Tennessee. Then, in September, 1863, the army got into an even worse battle at Chickamauga, suffering a severe defeat and retiring to Chattanooga to stand a siege. It was at this time that General Grant removed Rosecrans and replaced him with George H. Thomas.

Two months later the army atoned for its defeat by breaking the siege and, with the help of General William T. Sherman’s Army of the Tennessee, driving its Confederate opponents off Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge and forcing them to retreat to Dalton, Georgia. Sherman’s victorious campaign to Atlanta followed in the spring and summer of 1864, and that fall the Army of the Cumberland returned to Tennessee, beat a Confederate army at the battles of Franklin and Nashville, and insured permanent Federal control of the war in the West.

But the defeat at Chickamauga and the removal of Rosecrans had remained a sore spot with the army’s veterans, and after the war they commissioned an artist to record their achievements on canvas.

The artist was William D. T. Travis, who had accompanied the army as a staff artist for Harper’s Weekly and the New York Illustrated News. Working from his own on-the-spot sketches and his memories, Travis painted a huge panorama—thirty-two scenes on a long roll of canvas, which was arranged on two huge spindles for lecture-hall display.

When this ponderous work was finished, Travis and his younger brother James went on tour with it and displayed it all across the Middle West, the region from which most of the Cumberlands came. For a number of years the panorama was a great success. Then, when everybody