"The climbing of Lookout, if it were only by a pleasure party, would necessarily be attended by amusing and stirring incidents; and though Osterhaus's men believed they were engaged in a hazardous and apparently foolhardy movement, they joked and laughed at one another all the way up. Every fall was the signal for a shout of 'grab a root,' in allusion to a camp story about a certain colonel who issued that novel command to his regiment just as he lost his footing while making a rather inglorious retreat down a hill, on an occasion not now to be mentioned. One man, a Sergeant-Major in one of the Missouri regiments, did 'grab a root' to swing himself round a sharp and protecting ledge of rocks in the way of his ascent. The root, however, proved rotten, or was not deeply imbedded in the ground, and broke just at the critical moment. The sergeant executed an involuntary somersault or two, and alighted on his feet unhurt. His regiment witnessed the acrobatic feat extraordinary, and set up such a shout of applause and laughter as, I have no doubt, made the butternuts quake in their boots.
"The Twenty-ninth and Thirty-second Missouri Regiments have the honor of being first to plant foot on the summit. They were closely followed, however, by the whole of General Osterhaus's Command, and General Geary's Division shares with this the honors of an achievement which was beyond the hopes of one party or the fears of the other. So far as I could learn, there was not a single regiment or even a single individual that shrank for a moment from the appalling looking service. An incident will serve to illustrate the common feeling. When the order to charge up the mountain in the face of the Rebel works was received, Colonel Peckham of the Twenty-ninth Missouri, an officer who was himself wounded and who lost over sixty per cent. of his regiment in the memorable charge upon the enemy's works in the Chickasaw Bayou fight, in December last, and who was again wounded on the 19th of May following, in the abortive charge made by his division (Blair's) upon the enemy's works in the rear of Vicksburg, was fully impressed with the idea that he was now in the way of another such slaughter. He turned to one of his men in whose fate he felt a deep personal interest, and pulling from his pocket a watch presented him by another regiment in which he had at one time served, told the man to fall back to the camp and take this watch and a message to his wife in case he should be killed. The brave fellow demurred to the order, saying he preferred staying with the regiment. 'I tell you,' said the Colonel, 'your going with the regiment will be but a useless sacrifice of one more life.' 'I will not leave the regiment,' was the reply, 'unless you make the order a peremptory one, and I beg you not to disgrace me in that way.' The Colonel yielded the point. His fears for the man proved groundless, but when I met him the next day, he could not shake hands with me. He had a severe wound in the right shoulder, received making his way on foot up the mountain at the head of his command."