Near starvation in Northern Georgia, Confederate private Henry Wallace of Hood's Texas Brigade accidentally ingests psychotropic mushrooms before marching into the second day of the Battle of Chickamauga, but lives to tell about it in a long (forty-one-foot) letter to his dead comrade's father. Or does he? As Private Wallace's meandering tale, scrawled on a roll of wrapping paper, unravels, historians and scholars battle in footnotes over whether this document full of peculiar claims, internal inconsistencies, and anachronistic content is a first-hand report or an elaborate forgery.