Visit the infamous Wilderness, confounder of Union and Confederate
armies! And
find one of the geocaches in the Railroad Knutz series while you
are there!
The cache is not at the
posted coordinates!
The posted coordinates are your departure point for an
off-trail hike to the cache. Read on for an explanation.
Early settlers in the area had cut down the native forests to fuel
blast furnaces that processed the iron ore, leaving only a
secondary growth of dense shrubs. This rough terrain, which was
virtually unsettled, came to be known as the Wilderness and was
nearly impenetrable to 19th-century infantry and artillery
maneuvers.
In 1864 General Ulysses S. Grant was anxious to get his Union army
through the Wilderness and meet the Confederate army opposing him
on open ground south of there, but 
Confederate General Robert E. Lee knew
that it was imperative to fight in the Wilderness because his army
was massively outnumbered and had inferior artillery. Fighting in
the tangled woods would eliminate the Union advantage in artillery,
and the close quarters and ensuing confusion there could give the
outnumbered Confederate force better odds. Lee, therefore, ordered
his army to intercept the advancing Union army in the Wilderness
and thus began the Battle of the Wilderness and of the Overland
Campaign that finally brought an end to the Civil War.
However, at this point the war was far from over and the case can
be made that this Battle of the Wilderness was a victory for the
Confederate army that fought it. Fortunes were turning poorly for
the Confederate army in the early fighting, though, until General
James Longstreet ordered a flanking maneuver on the Union left
using 
the railroad bed of an unfinished
railroad that would later become the Virginia Central Railway. In a
bizarre episode, shortly after this successful maneuver and in the
confusion inherent in fighting in such a dense wilderness,
Longstreet was shot by his own troops not more than a mile from
Brock Road, which is one of the roads that Stonewall Jackson had
used for a flanking maneuver a year earlier just before he, also,
was shot by his own troops. The difference was that Longstreet
survived, although his recuperation took several months and one of
his other general officers wounded in the same incident was not so
fortunate.
To get a sense of how difficult fighting in the Wilderness must
have been you can hike through an untouched portion of the
Wilderness preserved by the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania County
Battlefields Memorial, a national military park. A parking area for
a trailhead is on Orange Plank Road just west of its intersection
with Brock Road. A short trail into the woods has been established
there, but to get a true sense of the Wilderness, when you reach
the stone monument memorializing the casualties suffered by one of
the brigades that fought there, depart from the trail and start
forging your way southward through the woods. After a mile in the
Wilderness you should have a good sense of how difficult things
were for soldiers of both armies back in the 1800s long before the
advent of our beloved GPS.
But then after just one more tenth of a mile you will come upon the
then unfinished and now abandoned railroad bed used so successfully
by the brigades of General Longstreet, and it is here beside the
railroad bed that you will find the cache, before the long march
back through the Wilderness of Spotsylvania.
To determine the exact bearing to guide you through the Wilderness
to the cache, at the monument subtract the number of casualties the
brigade suffered from the year in which they were suffered,
multiply that difference by the number of years in a century, and
then divide that product by the number of degrees in a full circle;
the quotient is the true bearing. Don't be fooled by the electric
power line clearing you will come across. You need to go a full
1.1 statute miles from the monument to reach the railroad bed and
the cache. There are a few watercourses to traverse along this
route but each can be done in a single leap; nevertheless, because
there is always a chance of misjudging a leap, the Cachew
Knutz recommend water resistant hiking boots for this trek
through the Wilderness of Spotsylvania.
Spotsylvania County has plans to open the
old railroad bed as a public greenway and hopes that the City of
Fredericksburg to the east and Orange County to the west will do
the same, so that a 38 mile long greenway can be established. Not
only would this link those localities, but it would also provide a
recreational trail connecting three of the four major Civil War
battlefields that are part of this park, and future plans call for
tying in the fourth battlefield to create The Spotsylvania
Battlefields Loop. For more information about the history of the
Virginia Central Railway and plans for its re-development as a
public greenway, please go to Virginia Central Railway Trail.
This cache is part of the Railroad Knutz series by
the Cachew Knutz. For information about the series and the
fabulous golden spike for the first to find the whole series,
please check out the ultimate cache in the series, RR Knutz: The Golden
Spike.