NORTH MISSISSIPPI 445 1894 OLE MISS FOOTBALL TEAM The University of Mississippi was founded in 1844, but the university’s football program was not launched until 1893. In 1894, C.D. Clark became the first head football coach to be paid to lead the Ole Miss team. Between 1893 and 1895, the team had a 12-3 record. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI ARCHIVES nicknamed the “Dead House,” as corpses piled up awaiting burial.At first the deceased were buried in pine boxes, but as the corpses overwhelmed the workers, a slave remembered that “they just buried them in bunches like dead chickens” in anonymous mass graves.Almost half of the Shiloh casualties, more than 700, died after reaching campus for treatment. The long-dreaded invasion of North Mississippi arrived in the shape of Ulysses S. Grant and his army of the Tennessee. By November 1862, the Confederate forces under General James Pemberton were in full retreat in the face of the superior Union forces, leaving North Mississippi exposed to the Yankees. Ulysses S. Grant’s 50,000 soldiers followed the line of the Mississippi Central southward. As the Union soldiers marched into Holly Springs, they noticed the town was almost completely abandoned, except for cheering slaves and scowling women. The fleeing rebel troops left a path of destruction burning cotton bales, cutting telegraph lines, tearing up railroad track, and destroying bridges. Grant wrote in his memoirs: “The Tallahatchie, which confronted me, was very high, the railroad bridge destroyed and Pemberton strongly fortified on the south side.” Grant sent his cavalry swinging around to outflank the rebels, forcing them to abandon their position. Grant’s troops advanced, repairing the track as they went. From the beginning of the conflict, soldiers on both sides routinely “foraged”—their polite term for looting—the civilian population. “Stragglers” falling out of the marching columns spread out across the countryside breaking into corncribs, smokehouses, and chicken coops to supplement their meager diets of salted meats and hardtack. In Oxford, a panicked exodus of older men, women, and children followed the retreating Southern forces down muddy country roads to Grenada.