Jake Donelson, a feisty game rooster and the mascot of Co. H, 3rd Tennessee Infantry (CSA), became one of the more colorful participants in the Civil War after Sgt. Jerome B. “Joe” McCanless of Cornersville bought him for a silver dime from a farmer selling chickens to soldiers. Seeing Jake’s martial potential, McCanless spared him from the stewpot, clipped his red comb, and had him fighting other companies’ roosters. At Fort Donelson, Jake prowled the breastworks, crowed at the enemy, encouraged his companions, and warned soldiers of incoming shells with low guttural sounds. After the Confederates surrendered the fort to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in February 1862, McCanless took Jake with him as a prisoner of war to Camp Douglas near Chicago. Seven months later, the regiment was exchanged for Federal prisoners of war at Vicksburg. While still in Mississippi, McCanless paid an itinerant artist to paint Jake’s portrait from a tintype made earlier. When Jake died in 1864, his old friends in Cornersville placed him in a handsome casket and gave him a military burial, though his final resting place there is unknown. In 1897, McCanless exhibited Jake’s oil portrait at a Confederate reunion in Nashville, where Buford McKinney later recalled the rooster riding on McCanless’s knapsack through city streets and giving a cock-a-doodle-doo that prompted the regiment’s Rebel yell.