During the Knoxville campaign, after Confederate Gen. James Longstreet’s failed move against Union Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside and his army’s shift east to winter quarters at Russellville, small clashes continued through the winter in East Tennessee. Here on December 29, 1863, Confederate Gen. William T. Martin’s cavalry attacked Union Gen. Samuel D. Sturgis’s troopers, who were pressuring Confederate soldiers preparing winter camp at Russellville. Martin’s late-morning attack bent but did not break the Union line, in part because Capt. Eli Lilly’s 18th Indiana Artillery, posted a few yards away across the road, performed with great effectiveness in what Lilly later regarded as the battery’s most glorious and successful action. A few months afterward Lilly transferred to a cavalry unit that surrendered to Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest in Middle Tennessee, and he remained a prisoner for the rest of the war, though after the war his small Indianapolis drug store grew into the Eli Lilly Pharmaceutical Company beginning in 1876. Another Union officer, Capt. Elbert J. Cannon of the 1st Tennessee Cavalry, led a daring saber charge against the 11th Tennessee Cavalry, C.S.A.; after some Confederates dismounted and fired carbines from kneeling positions, both Cannon and his horse were hit and fell as the charge swept on into the woods. Two Confederate soldiers found him barely alive and left him to be recovered by his own men, and they also notified his mother, who lived near the Confederate camp; she was escorted through the lines and stayed with him until he died on January 1, 1864. Cannon was buried nearby in Branner Cemetery.