Chapter 18

SCHEMES AND PLANS TO ESCAPE--SCALING THE STOCKADE--ESTABLISHING THE DEAD
LINE--THE FIRST MAN KILLED.

The official designation of our prison was "Camp Sumpter," but this was
scarcely known outside of the Rebel documents, reports and orders.
It was the same way with the prison five miles from Millen, to which we
were afterward transferred. The Rebels styled it officially "Camp
Lawton," but we called it always "Millen."

Having our huts finished, the next solicitude was about escape, and this
was the burden of our thoughts, day and night. We held conferences, at
which every man was required to contribute all the geographical knowledge
of that section of Georgia that he might have left over from his
schoolboy days, and also that gained by persistent questioning of such
guards and other Rebels as he had come in contact with. When first
landed in the prison we were as ignorant of our whereabouts as if we had
been dropped into the center of Africa. But one of the prisoners was
found to have a fragment of a school atlas, in which was an outline map
of Georgia, that had Macon, Atlanta, Milledgeville, and Savannah laid
down upon it. As we knew we had come southward from Macon, we felt
pretty certain we were in the southwestern corner of the State.
Conversations with guards and others gave us the information that the
Chattahooche flowed some two score of miles to the westward, and that the
Flint lay a little nearer on the east. Our map showed that these two
united and flowed together into Appalachicola Bay, where, some of us
remembered, a newspaper item had said that we had gunboats stationed.
The creek that ran through the stockade flowed to the east, and we
reasoned that if we followed its course we would be led to the Flint,
down which we could float on a log or raft to the Appalachicola. This
was the favorite scheme of the party with which I sided. Another party
believed the most feasible plan was to go northward, and endeavor to gain
the mountains, and thence get into East Tennessee.

But the main thing was to get away from the stockade; this, as the French
say of all first steps, was what would cost.

Our first attempt was made about a week after our arrival. We found two
logs on the east side that were a couple of feet shorter than the rest,
and it seemed as if they could be successfully scaled. About fifty of us
resolved to make the attempt. We made a rope twenty-five or thirty feet
long, and strong enough to bear a man, out of strings and strips of
cloth. A stout stick was fastened to the end, so that it would catch on
the logs on either side of the gap. On a night dark enough to favor our
scheme, we gathered together, drew cuts to determine each boy's place in
the