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continuous line but placed helter-skelter with huge, heavily forested gaps in between. The whole of the PittsburgLanding area had become a virtual tent city, with more than 5,000 of the big, conical eight-man Sibley tents occupying the five division encampment areas.
    William Camm, lieutenant colonel of the 14th Illinois, had located for himself a swimming hole in Owl Creek where he liked to bathe. One day while he was enjoying his ablutions, two soldiers appeared, carrying squirrels they had shot for dinner. He inquired if they had seen any pickets protecting the outer edges of the encampment. They had not, they said, and neither had he. “We must have some queer generals,” Camm remarked that night to his diary, “with the enemy in force only eighteen miles away.”
    Even worse, although the Federal army had begun arriving at Pittsburg Landing more than two weeks earlier, neither Sherman, Grant, nor anyone else had made the slightest attempt to entrench or erect fortifications, which in all probability would have deterred a Confederate attack. Instead, they spent their days teaching the men drill formations in the farm fields and holding spit-and-polish dress parades.
    What has never been satisfactorily explained is the role of Grant’s engineering officer, Lt. Col. James Birdseye McPherson, first in his West Point class of 1853 and destined to become a major general and commander of the Army of the Tennessee before his untimely death during the Battle of Atlanta. 2 It remains unknown whether McPherson protested the placement of the campsites insuch indefensible and unfortified positions, but in any case Grant, as Maj. Gen. Charles F. Smith’s successor, must have approved the arrangement, even tacitly. For his part, Sherman seemed to rely on his original assessment of the area on March 18, not long after his arrival, when he wrote to Grant, “Magnificent plain for camping and drilling, and a military point of great strength.”
    And it might have been, if advantage of the military opportunities had been taken. Since the position was protected on both flanks by water, if either Grant or Sherman had told the engineers that the mouth of the cornucopia must be strongly fortified with embrasures, protected batteries, head logs, abatis, 3 with cleared fields of fire and other expedient military architecture, the encampment would have been nearly impregnable. But this was not done, and to Grant, and to a lesser extent Sherman, great blame attaches; their later excuses that it was more desirable for the soldiers to train and learn how to drill than it was for them to fortify seem lame and self-serving, especially in light of what happened. Sherman even went to the point of excusing himself “because [building fortifications] would have made our raw men timid,” as though fortifying would have somehow suggested that the Yankee soldiers were scared of their Rebel adversaries. Equally cavalier was the notion that the Confederate army would never come out from behind its own fortifications at Corinth. In fact, what Sherman and Granttook for a “military point of great strength,” with its flanks protected by water, was viewed by the Rebel generals as a trap for the Yankee army, if they could catch them napping.
    It so happened that among Grant’s orders from higher headquarters in St. Louis was a directive from his superior Maj. Gen. Henry Wager Halleck ordering him not to bring on a general engagement with the enemy until the arrival of the imposingly named general Don Carlos Buell and the 25,000-man army he was marching overland from Nashville. Buell had set his men in motion on March 15 and was supposed to reach Grant at Savannah by April 6. But Grant and Sherman’s determination to wait for Buell led them to ignore any possibility that the enemy might be so obliging, and this seemed to create a kind of blindness even as the evidence of danger mounted.
    There were ample warnings, the first of which should have been that