University of Virginia Library

4. CHAPTER IV.
END OF THE RAID.—NOW FOR FOOD AND SAFETY.

Hunter had done a noble work up the valley—
how noble did not become known until the capture
of the rebel archives showed that Early's
corps of thirty thousand picked men, thrown upon
us finally by Lee, had been collected and were
designed as a reinforcement for General Johnson,
who was then facing our Sherman before Atlanta
—a reinforcement which, about equally balanced as
the opposing forces in the south-west then were,
might very materially, and to our detriment, have
altered the results in that region, had Lee's primary
intention been carried out.

But Hunter's successful raid beyond the barrier-lines
of Mount Crawford, never passed before
by any Union army, nor ever afterwards passed
until the close of the war, summoned Lee to defend
instantly and at any cost, the valley whose
maiden soil—untrodden heretofore, at least south
of Harrisonburgh—contained, in a very great
measure, the granary and armory of the main
rebel army holding Grant in check before Richmond.
The cloth-mills to clothe his men, the

flour mills to feed them, the gun-stock factories,
shoe-shops, saddle and harness factories, the countless
furnaces and foundries from which came the
main munitions for his army—ill-able to afford
such a loss—all these had been “going up in a
balloon” incessantly, with every mile of our march
from Port Republic to Lynchburgh; and it was,
indeed, as a picture of the scenes of this raid,
considered in a generic light, and as symbolizing
all other raids, that the following lines were subsequently
written by our distinguished Ex-Orderly,
in regard to General Sherman's yet more famous
march from Atlanta to the Atlantic:

THE RETURN COMMENCES.—WAS IT A DEFEAT
OR VICTORY?

That we could not capture Lynchburgh became
very painfully evident during the operations of
June 18th, some details of which were given in
the preceding chapter. Indeed the question now
to be considered—and with all the odds heavily
against any answer in our favor—was: whether
Lynchburgh would not capture us? Short of ammunition,
cut off by hundreds of miles and two

ranges of mountains from our base, and wholly
out of supplies save a little coffee and sugar left
in the train of that excellent officer, Major-Gen-George
Crook, we were in presence of an enemy
already heavily superior to us in numbers, close to
his main army, operating in his own country, and
every moment being further reinforced from Richmond,
as we could both see and hear by the trains
incessantly arriving, and the steady stream of
troops hurrying from the railroad terminus to the
scene of action during the torrid day—day hot in
a double sense: and neither pleasant.

It was in view of these facts, that our trains had
been sent back on the road towards Salem at
about noon on the 18th, although the fighting—
sometimes furious, sometimes desultory — continued
with but slight intermission until after sundown;
every possible demonstration being made,
and indeed our own soldiers firmly believing, that
we meant to renew the attack next morning. But
that night about ten o'clock, with our picket-line
doubled and in the strictest silence, that nothing
might be known of our movements, the march of
our little army away from Lynchburgh and towards
Salem began—our poor boys trudging along
wearily enough, after a long day of incessant conflict,
or preparation for conflict; and with the depressing
conviction of defeat upon their spirits
which soldiers can never shake off when failing to

attain any point against which their efforts—even
in a feint—have been directed. It may only have
been a feint or a diversion to the general, but all
such matters are solemn verities to the rank and
file. They knew they had not been either broken
or beaten; but still they had not entered Lynchburgh;
and this, therefore, was to them a defeat—
an opinion in which the wise Northern newspapers
seemed fully to agree.

But was it a defeat?—a question only, but
easily to be answered by referring to the instructions
under which the expedition had been organized,
and the objective point at which it struck.
The orders of Lieut-General Grant to Hunter, on
that officer's relieving Sigel, were to the effect that
he should “reörganize Sigel's beaten army, and
with it reädvance up the valley, demonstrating
for the capture of Stanton, but not attacking it in
case either the enemy or the fortifications, or both
together, should appear too strong; in which case
he was to avoid any general engagement, but keep
his column moving, and find employment for as
many of the enemy as possible, in various directions.”

“ONE OF THE MOST BRILLIANT AND IMPORTANT
SUCCESSES OF THE ENTIRE WAR.”

This formed the substance, and the whole substance,
of Grant's original instructions; and with
these data kept in view, the public will at once
perceive how much better than he had been ordered
to do, General Hunter did. He not only
captured Stanton, as the result of the battle of
Piedmont, but Lexington, Buchanan, Liberty, and
all the intermediate towns from Port Republic to
Lynchburgh—towns heretofore inviolable, and all
busily engaged in pouring eastward to Lee supplies
of everything that commander required for
his army. He had not only employed all the Valley
Forces, but beaten them into a disorganized
rabble; and finally drew off to check him thirty
thousand picked men of the veteran army of
Northern Virginia under General Early, who had
been collected and were designed by the rebel
general-in-chief for the reinforcement of General
Joe Johnson before Atlanta. He had given to
the flames the better half of Lee's commissary,
quartermaster, and ordnance departments—certainly
all of these that lay between Harrisonburgh
and Lynchburgh; and no wonder, knowing and
appreciating the inestimable value of these services
(as, it would seem, the Hon. Charles A.
Dana did not), that General Grant wrote the very

noble eulogy of Hunter's success which was, for
the first time, published in our last chapter.

As to the alleged barbarity of General Hunter
in “burning private houses” during this expedition,
we have already shown that he burned but
five—each on a specific charge and proof that its
owner was a bushwhacker; but what would the
pensive public have thought had he received in
time General Grant's subsequent instructions, or
had he been able to retreat down the Shenandoah
on his return, in which case they would have been
most faithfully complied with? These second
instructions were—in order to prevent another
incursion by the enemy down the valley into
Maryland, such as Early subsequently made—to
“make the Shenandoah a wilderness over which
the crow purposing to fly would have to carry his
own provender in his claws”—orders afterward
partly carried out by Sheridan, who never, however,
got up the valley any further than Harrisonburgh,
though a raiding party of his cavalry are
said to have been for some few hours in Stanton.
So, also, Hunter was blamed for an order that
wherever any of his men or officers were assassinated
by bushwhackers, the country for five miles
around the spot should be laid utterly waste; and
yet when young Lieut. Meigs, of the Engineers,
was murdered by some roving miscreants, the gallant
Sheridan caused that precise order to be precisely

executed, and there was general approval
through the Northern press; so true is it that
“one cat will be praised for doing what another
cat will be killed for looking at.”

But now to cast aside these digressions, and resume
the story of our return from Lynchburgh:

THE ENEMY AWAKE AT LAST.—ACTIONS AT LIBERTY
AND ELSEWHERE.

So perfectly had our retrograde movement been
concealed, and so fully convinced were the enemy
of our determination to fall back, if at all, down
the Shenandoah, that it was not until the morning
of the 20th—as our rear-guard were repassing
through Liberty—that their cavalry and mounted
infantry came up in sufficient force to make us
halt. General Averell held them, with his and
Duffié's cavalry divisions, as long as possible;
but finally Crook's infantry had to be sent back to
his support—the carbines of the cavalry being of
but little use against the long-range muskets of
Early's mounted infantry, of course dismounted for
action. At this time, taking our whole little army
through, we had left but twelve rounds of cartridges
per man, while at least one of the cavalry
brigades was entirely out of ammunition; and as
we had no means of judging how long, or in what
force, the enemy would hang around our skirts to

harass us, the prospects were not encouraging.
All efforts were now directed to making our lads
reserve their fire as long as possible, so that not
a cartridge might be wasted; and whenever a
man fell, either killed or wounded, there would
be a dozen squabbling over him in a moment for
the precious contents of the cartridge-box which
he could use no more.

That night we crossed the Alleghanies through
Buford's Gap, and halted within some seven or
eight miles of Salem, after a march of twenty-seven
miles—some few dozen men and many hundreds
of the horses giving out; but the spirits of
the army, as a whole, being much better than
might have been expected, when our destitute
condition was considered, the mountainous and
utterly sterile character of the country which yet
lay before us, and the incessant heavy skirmishing,
both by night and day, which the enemy—as if to
harass us and drive away all sleep—kept up
around our rear and flanks. At Salem we saw
the débris and railroad ruins of Averell's famous
raid made during the preceding January, in which
he “rode, slid, climbed, and swam” seven hundred
miles in an incredibly brief number of days—how
many, or rather how few, we forget; but such is
fame. That expedition, we may here remark,
used up a great many hundred men, chiefly frost-bitten,
and many thousand horses—indeed pretty

nearly every horse that was engaged in it; while
its results—only such injury as cavalry could inflict
on a railroad track in a few hours—were not,
perhaps, in any substantial degree commensurate
with its enormous cost; nor had it any military
value otherwise than as a proof of what our
Northern men could endure and yet survive.

The day following came rumors of the enemy
at Fincastle in great force, threatening our right
flank, and, indeed, to cut off our retreat altogether—a
rumor rather supported by the increasing
severity of the skirmishing—which soon amounted
to quite a skirmish as we neared Newcastle,
where some supplies were found; but only a
mouthful, so to speak, for an army already beginning
to starve. It was just beyond Newcastle,
and while crossing Craig's mountain—a portion
of the Catawba range—that we lost, though the
enemy did not gain, six pieces of artillery belonging
to Sullivan's division; and as this matter has
been much discussed, and almost invariably misrepresented,
we may as well here set the story at
rest as allow it to travel further.

HUNTER'S ONLY DISASTER.—SIX OF HIS GUNS
DESTROYED.

Our march was over wild, waterless, and abrupt
mountains—forest-clad precipices yawning beneath
us on either side of the road, while forest-covered
mountains towered thousands of feet above us on
the other. All the soft and beautiful characteristics
of the Blue Ridge were missing here. The
valleys were rocky, sterile, scrubby, and repulsive,
and water could only be found in some of the
largest creeks in the deepest ravines; whereas on
the Blue Ridge clear springs gushed forth in cool
and crystal abundance from beneath every jutting
stone almost to the highest peaks of the mountains.
But few tracts of reclaimed land could
anywhere be seen except in the Catawba valley.
The few houses along our line were for the most
part deserted and in ruins—three years of incessant
military operations, and guerilla and bushwhacking
fighting, having apparently convinced
the inhabitants that “green fields and pastures
new” in some other region had become a necessity.

With the heavy skirmish or engagement near
Newcastle, we appeared to have shaken off the
greater part of the enemy's pursuing force, but
flying squadrons or columns of their cavalry still
appeared at intervals; and General Duffié, who
led the advance, was ordered to strongly picket

all side-roads and bridle-paths leading in upon our
main line of march. This duty in one instance he
neglected; and the result was that the enemy,
who could see all our movements from the surrounding
hills, suddenly sent in a picked force of
about two hundred mounted men, upon an unguarded
side-road, to attack the artillery of
Sullivan's division—said artillery having, by a
blunder, got mixed up with the wagon-train. Of
these mounted men, about fifty carried hatchets,
with which they hacked the wheels of about ten
pieces of the artillery train of our first division.
While they were at work, however, a section of
Captain Du Pont's regular battery wheeled into
position and sent grape and spherical case through
the bodies of over thirty of them. Col. Schoon-maker's
brigade of General Averell's division also
arrived quickly on the scene from the rear, which
Averell was guarding; and of the two hundred
picked men who formed the attacking force, it is
questionable if over seventy got back to their
camp. Four of the ten injured guns were immediately
remounted on the spare wheels of the balance
of the artillery; and the six guns that could
not be toted away were so effectually destroyed
as to remain mere lumber on the road, of no
possible future use in warfare.

This disaster, so much paraded and prated
about, formed the sole injury of materiel inflicted

by the enemy upon Hunter's command during the
expedition. They never captured one of our
wagons or ambulances, though we had to burn or
destroy greater part of both on our return, in consequence
of the horses that should draw them
dying off for want of forage. They never broke
our lines in any engagement, save the brief disorder
on our left in the second day's struggle before
Lynchburgh; and they never took a prisoner
from us, except those of the Ohio men who got
over their works and could not get back; and
some wounded, sick, and starving stragglers who
fell to the rear—in considerable numbers, it must
be confessed—during the terrible marches of the
next half-dozen days. What we lost of materiel,
however, they did not gain. Even the saddles
were taken off the dying cavalry horses—dying
now by many hundreds daily—and either thrown
into the empty commissary and quartermasters'
wagons and brought along, or burned in convenient
piles. None of the men threw away
their arms. Nothing could be more admirable
than their conduct; and nothing but the pinched
faces of those who were continually falling out of
line and to the rear, told the story of their hunger
and weakness, for there was no grumbling save in
the headquarters of one conspicuously grumbling
brigadier; and even he too good, brave, and careful
a soldier in other respects to be censured by
name even for this. But he was “an almighty
grumbler.”

CROSSING THE ALLEGHANIES.—TERRIBLE SUFFERINGS
FROM HUNGER.

Beautiful, indeed, in its wild and forest-covered
sublimity and ruggedness was the country through
which we were now passing, had any of us been
in the mood to enjoy such scenery. None of us
were, however—at least not much; for some
pounded corn, with a rasher of bacon or an onion,
formed a feast only too rarely attainable even by
the highest officers; while day by day the few cattle
we had driven along ahead of each division
began to fail, and there was literally no food—no
cattle, sheep, hogs, or corn—in the ever-rising,
ever-falling wilderness of mountains through
which our diminishing column trailed its weary
length like a wounded, all but dying, serpent.
Each mountain-ridge that had risen before us
seemed of interminable height; but to be—thank
Heaven!—the last we should have to climb.
“Meadow Bluffs” was the cry and thought in
every heart. “Meadow Bluffs” where, as was
reported, there were a million rations left by Crook
and Averell only some fifteen or twenty days before
under charge of a battalion of the Ohio One
Hundred Days' Militia. “Never mind, boys!
bear up as well as you can. Only three more—

only two more—only one more day's march to
Meadow Bluffs, and then—a million rations!”

Ah, how the hunger-pinched faces brightened
up at those glad but deceptive words! How the
struggling men bent their breasts against the next
hill, scorning to throw away the burden of arms
or knapsacks—yea, even the burdens of useless
relics or plunder which some of them had picked
up along their line of march. We found one
company, sharp-set by the pangs of hunger and
half dead from fatigue, but carrying along with it
a wooden-bedded billiard table which the boys
thought would be “a nice thing to have in the
house” if they ever got back to any Christian
camp. “Hang me,” said Captain Towne, our
chief signal officer, “hang me, if I don't expect
to see my rascals carrying a privy along with them,
plank by plank, in hopes of setting it up for general
delectation when they reach Meadow Bluffs!”
It was the grotesqueness of the thought, perhaps,
which impressed this sentence, as one irresistibly
ludicrous, on a memory from which many brighter
and better things have faded.

But mountain still towered above mountain,
each apparently taller than the last; and from the
top of each as we gained it, our saddened and
sickening eyes dropped down into the deep gulfs
of valleys, beyond which towered mountain-walls
apparently blacker, steeper, loftier, more sterile

and waterless than any we had yet traversed.
The limited diet of mere fresh beef, too, without
salt, corn, biscuit, or vegetables of any kind, began
to revolt the stomachs of the weary men, and
cases of aggravated diarrhœa soon became an epidemic.
Still, as a whole, the men bore up wonderfully,
such of the infantry as were not actually
sickened growing more rugged, sinewy, bronzed,
and soldierlike—confident that their sufferings
were not in vain; that they had inflicted far
greater loss on the enemy than paid for all they
were enduring; that Grant would not overlook
the help their division had given to his main operations—as
he did not; and that in a few days
more—a few miles more—there would be plenty
for all of them, and a fortnight's—perhaps a
month's—rest in well-provisioned camps before
any renewed assumption of the war-path.

SWEET SPRINGS AND THE WHITE SULPHUR.—
SOUTHERN WATERING PLACES DURING THE
WAR.

At length, on the 24th, we reached Sweet
Springs—that loveliest watering-place of the inland,
and with the sweetest water; and on the
day following, after a long and tedious march over
hills apparently interminable and through forests
of the densest shade, we descended into the little
valley of the White Sulphur Springs, where at

least and at last our horses were able to enjoy one
day's good grazing. A glorious place the White
Sulphur must have been—will be again—in days
of peace, despite the sickening stench of its yet
pure and wholesome waters. Surrounded by vast
hills bearing the finest and largest timber conceivable,
the nestling valley lies like an emerald bottom
to a great bowl of green and purple porphyry.
Here were immense hotels of red brick and white
stucco-work, with terraces and rows of tributary
Italian and Swiss villas farmed out to separate families,
but all depending on the now empty hotels
for such proud and joyous life as they contained
in the happy days gone by. As to the waters—
the main well was pellucid and pure, but emitted
such an odor of sulphuretted hydrogen, as if a
thousand baskets of the rottenest eggs or worst-decayed
mackerel ever known lay festering at its
bottom. The hotels had been closed and deserted
from the commencement of the war—the largest
one, able to accommodate with its sub-buildings
over one thousand guests, standing open, but
not inviting, as our soldiers crowded and shouted
through its deserted rooms and corridors. The
mirrors remained on the walls, as useless and not
portable lumber. So the iron bedsteads and beds,
pitchers and basins, remained in the multitudinous
rooms; but the carpets and curtains had been
long since cut up to furnish clothing or bedding
to the rebel troops, and the furniture had either
been carried away or burned. Alas! there was
nothing to eat in the vast dining-room, once so
hospitable; and the scene, perhaps, appeared to
the writer all the sadder for the reason that it was
witnessed in company with “Porte Crayon,” who
never wearied of relating droll and varied anecdotes
of its former greatness and splendor before
the “chivalry” had determined that Southern
rights must be achieved by war.

At Sweet Springs, the White Sulphur, and the
Red Springs—all tenantless, all deserted—a contrast
with our own Newport, Saratoga, and Cape
May, not favorable to the men, nor eke the ladies
of the North, was forced on the attention. These
resorts had been abandoned from the first day
of the war—as much abandoned in 1861 and 1862,
when the South was practically triumphant and
the North covered with disgrace and threatened
with defeat, as in 1863 and 1864, when the tide
began visibly turning. Was this so at Newport,
Cape May, Saratoga, Lake George? Did not the
women of the South give more help, more sympathy,
more passionate devotion, more self-sacrificing
denial and heroism to their side of the struggle
than did our colder Northern dames? How
often have we been told in various parts of the
South, when asking some lady at whose house we
had made headquarters, to sing: “You would not

like my songs. Since the war, we Southern women
have sung only the songs of our country;”
and then, when assured that those, of all others,
were the songs we most wished to hear—with
what dazzling passion—almost frenzy—of voice,
eye, swelling figure, and gesture, as of an inspired
Pythoness, would be sent shrilling forth “Stonewall
Jackson's Way,” “The Bonnie Blue Flag,”
“On to Richmond,” or that noblest lyric of the
war, “Maryland! my Maryland!”

Indeed the women of the South were the backbone—the
life and soul of the rebellion. They
made it disgraceful for any able-bodied man to
remain out of the ranks. All members of the
Home Guard Brigade were presented with bonnets,
fans, petticoats, and rouge-boxes, by committees
of patriotic belles. They wore no foreign
goods, nor coveted any, throwing away their silks
at the beginning of the contest, and writing
“Shoddy” on the brows of all their sex who were
too lazy to make homespun cloth, or too proud to
wear it. Even hoops were discarded from an
early date, and their jewel-ornaments were melted
down in local treasuries for the equipment of
volunteers. That our Northern women might not
have done as well and as bravely, had we been
the invaded side, the writer has no disposition
either to question or assert. He only avers that
they did not; and that few of them—save when

actually compelled by the absence of their male
supporters in the ill-paid ranks of the army—
made any voluntary, or even visible, reduction in
their expenditures or style of living. “Madam,”
we once heard Major Sam Stockton say, with a
graceful and well-turned compliment, to a beautiful
young rebel girl who had just finished an exquisitely
rendered but very furious song against
the “Yankee Invader,” and then asked him, as
she rose with flushed cheeks from the piano, what
he thought of it—“Madam, I think,” said Sam,
“that if we had only had a few such ladies as
yourself in the North, we would have driven
all your armies into the Gulf of Mexico before the
second year of this distressing war.”

And now to return to our muttons—or rather
to our army which had neither mutton nor bread.

NO FOOD AT MEADOW BLUFFS.—GEN. GRANT'S
REBELLIOUS AUNT.

But why enter in detail upon the sufferings of
our further march across the Greenbrier river,
through Lewisburgh, where we found some food
in a few stores, and past Bunger's Mill, where also
was a little corn-meal. We had a sickening disappointment
at Meadow Bluffs, from which the
stores had been removed—partly back to Loup's
Creek on the Kanawha, and partly had been
burned by the militia battalion left to guard them,

under some sudden stampede created by a hundred
or so of mounted bushwhackers appearing
in the vicinity. At the Bluffs, however, we got
some score or two of sheep and a few hogs, the
country now growing more level, and with more
numerous signs (partly in the deserted fortifications
thrown up by General Henry A. Wise) of
having once been inhabited.

It was a tough ride and march across the last
high spurs of the Alleghanies that brought us to
Meadow Bluffs; but on the next day—June 26,
1864—a march of nearly thirty miles brought us
to the house of “the widow Jones,” who is an aunt
to General Grant, and was then—we fervently
hope still is—a remarkably bright, hospitable, and
kindly old body, though excessively rebellious, at
whose well-furnished table for the first time in
many weeks our nearly famishing party sat down
to a meal having no stint of scarcity; and with
such gorgeous accompaniments as iron forks, a
table-cloth, sweet milk in glasses, and tea—actual
tea—in cups, as made our recent existence seem
only a preparative whetting of our appetites to this
banquet of the immortal gods!

Next morning Generals Hunter and Crook,
with an escort of such staff officers and mounted
men as still had horses and could keep up, crossed
the Big and Little Sewell mountains—Hunter
being specially anxious to meet and hurry forward

the supply-trains previously ordered up from
Gauley Bridge, or rather Loup Creek, which was
our then base of supplies in the Kanawha, being
close to the head of navigation on that river.
Half way on the road we met the first of these
trains, lumbering along under a guard of some
Ohio militia—a train with 20,000 rations; and
closely followed by another larger one with 75,000
rations more! Better and better! we learn that
there are a million rations and 12,000 new and
complete sets of uniforms and equipments—for
our entire command was shoeless and in rags—
only ten miles ahead of us, at Loup Creek; and
here—at the Hawk's Nest, looking down into the
loveliest and most perfect triangle of scenery our
eyes ever rested upon, and with the wild shouts
of our poor boys, some miles yet in the rear, as
they meet the first train and empty its contents
into their stomachs, this narrative may most
rightly and welcomely be brought to its conclusion.
Here ended Hunter's campaign of the Shenandoah
proper—the movement of his troops down the
Kanawha to Charleston, and from thence up the
Ohio to Parkersburgh, where we first heard of
Early's invasion of Maryland, and from thence to
Harper's Ferry and Maryland, forming a distinct
episode or branch of history.

ROMANCE OF THE WAR IN THE SHENANDOAH.—
END OF THE RAID AT THE HAWK'S NEST.

In conclusion, let us say that this narrative has
grown upon our hands into far larger proportions
than we either expected or have wished; and yet
we have condensed and suppressed everything
that appeared in anywise compressible or suppressible
with due deference to truth and maintaining
the interest of our readers. In our pocket-book—
a very poorly-kept diary, briefly scribbled in the
scanty moments of leisure that duty did not occupy—there
are many passages of but a few lines
that might well be expanded, with their surrounding
circumstances, into chapters of absorbing and
instructive interest. It is in the beautiful but
bushwhacking, inviting but treacherous, mountain-girdled
but yet most insecure valleys of the
Shenandoah and Kanawha, that the romance
writers of the war will hereafter find their most
fitting ground and appropriate traditions and inspirations.
Great armies like that of the Potomac,
are monstrous hives of men, needing infinite quantities
of pork and beans, wearing out infinite
stacks of quartermasters' clothing, and covering an
immeasurable space of country. They have, however,
but few individual adventures, but few rapid
transitions from scene to scene; and the men who
composed them were brought but little into contact

with any of the Southern people residing on
their own farms, as they lived before the war.
In the Shenandoah and Kanawha valleys, on the
contrary, every movement had the swift vibrations
of a shaken kaleidoscope; forays, surprises, and
feats of individual prowess or adventure were the
order of the day; and love-making in the towns
through which our banners and those of the
rebels fluctuated in alternate waves, was a regular
business with the soldiers on both sides—in which,
truth to say, both seemed to become most perfect
proficients under the tutelage of such able and
charming mistresses as those valleys yield.

In another page of these Recollections, but not
as a continuation of the Valley Raid, we shall
describe the country from Gauley Bridge to Parkersburgh—the
great oil, salt, and coal producing
region of West Virginia and Ohio—in which Gen.
Averell, Colonel Vance, the writer, and many
others who took part in the expedition we have
just described, now hold landed interests very
large, and—as the writer fondly hopes—yet to
become very lucrative. In this connexion, too,
will come in the history of the transfer of Hunter's
command from Parkersburgh back to Harper's
Ferry, to resist, or try to capture General Early's
column of invasion—the last rebel forces ever
seen on Maryland soil; together with secret dispatches
from General Hunter, President Lincoln,

General Grant, Secretary Stanton, and General
Halleck, throwing much light over that still mysterious
episode in our more recent history, and
none of which have ever yet been published.
Meanwhile let us conclude by advising all lovers
of the picturesque, while there is yet time this
Fall, and while the forests wear their richest and
most varied verdure, to hasten up the Kanawha
to the Hawk's Nest, where the last pages of this
hurried and imperfect, but honest history may be
supposed to be written. Here, outlying on a vast
ledge of rock, they will look down over a sheer
descent of fifteen hundred feet—the rock-base on
which they rest forming the apex of a right-angled
triangle, the sides of which are sharp precipitous
mountains covered from ridge to foot with all the
foliage of the forest, and with the dark, wild foaming
waters of the New River or Green River, as
it is variously styled, plunging on in mad and
roaring race beneath them—the mountain-echoes
multiplying and thunder-toning all the chafings
and many-voiced leaps of the imprisoned stream,
and the overhanging mountains for ever gloriously
mirrored in the deep, swift, and narrow channel
through which—striking against the foot of the
Hawk's Nest, and then glancing sharply off—this
impetuous river rushes to join the Gauley, a few
miles further down; these united streams thereafter
forming the bright Kanawha.