Greetings:  Larry Stephens, Assistant Librarian at Georgia Highlands College in Rome, GA, is writing a book about John Pemberton Gatewood who served in the Civil War (CSA) under Scott Bledsoe.  He would certainly appreciate any help you may be able to provide.  He wrote the following:   John P. Gatewood was the son of Pemberton and Nancy Gatewood, who were among the largest landowners there in the Wolf River Valley just prior to the Civil War.  They were diehard Confederates surrounded by folks who were either neutral on the war, or pro-Union.  As a historian, I am neutral on taking sides.  My goal is to tell Gatewood’s story as completely as I can.  I understand that mountain guerrilla warfare was a horrible thing and that just about every family was sucked into the fray, and lost kinfolk.  That is a tragedy of monumental proportions.  But anyway, back to the story . . .   According to the handful of sources that I have read, John and his brothers joined the 4th Tennessee Cavalry in the fall of 1861, and rode under the command of Capt. Willis Scott Bledsoe, a prominent Jamestown attorney.  Bledsoe, in turn, rode with Colonel Baxter Smith’s 4th Tennessee.  Sometime in late 1862, the brothers got word from home that their mother, Nancy, and one of their kid sisters, Sarah, had been raped and murdered by pro-Union bushwhackers.  John deserted the outfit and went home to find the perpetrators.  Unable to locate them, he pitched in with Champ Ferguson and for the next year (roughly from January 1863 to February of 1864), he became a disciple of guerrilla tactics under the tutelage of Ferguson.  In March of 1864, John P. Gatewood formed his own bushwhacker gang and went on a reign of terror that afflicted Union families from East Tennessee all the way down into North Georgia, and even parts of Northeast Alabama.  I have consulted over 100 sources, thus far, and have documented over 70 killings that were attributed directly to Gatewood, and members of his gang.  After the war, he rode out to Texas and tried to reinvent himself as a cattle broker and rancher.    You may reply to:  lstephen@highlands.edu