Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 9, 2025
He halted on the ridge of Cotton Hill, covering the road to Gauley Bridge, and was there joined by five companies of the Forty-seventh Ohio, also sent to his assistance by Lightburn. Loring followed and made a partial attack, which was met by the rear-guard under Captain Vance and repulsed, whilst Siber's principal column marched on to Montgomery's ferry on the Kanawha.
He therefore retreated across the Gauley in the night, having great difficulty in carrying his artillery down the cliffs by a wretched road in the darkness. He had built a slight foot-bridge for infantry in the bit of smooth water known as the Ferry, though both above and below the stream is an impassable mountain torrent. The artillery crossed in the flatboats.
The topography of the wild mountain region was such that an army could only pass from the lower Kanawha to the headwaters of the James River by the road Loring had used in his advance, or by that leading through the post of Gauley Bridge to Lewisburg and beyond.
The men cheered lustily, and tore the rails apart, and had rousing fires and were comfortable; but the next morning Stonewall Jackson suspended from duty the donor of his own fences. The brigades of Loring undoubtedly suffered the most. They had seen, upon the Monterey line, on the Kanawha, the Gauley, and the Greenbriar, rough and exhausting service.
It was now almost dark, but the arrangements were soon made to have wagons ready at the building on the Kanawha front used as a magazine, and to move all our ammunition during the night to the place I had indicated in the ravine of Scrabble Creek, which runs into the Gauley. The telegraph station was moved there and connection of wires made.
Floyd had intrenched a line across a bend of the Gauley River, where the road from Cross Lanes to Lewisburg finds its way down the cliffs to Carnifex Ferry. His flanks rested upon precipices rising abruptly from the water's edge, and he also intrenched some rising ground in front of his principal line.
The necessity of transporting forage as well as subsistence and ammunition through this mountainous belt forbade any extended or continuous operations there; for actual computation showed that the wagon trains could carry no more than the food for the mule teams on the double trip, going and returning, from Gauley Bridge to the narrows of New River where the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad crossed upon an important bridge which was several times made the objective point of an expedition.
Our method of forwarding supplies was to assemble the wagon trains near my lower camp during the day, and push them forward to Gauley Mount and Tompkins farm during the night. The ferry-boat at Gauley Bridge was kept out of harm's way in the Gauley, behind the projection of Gauley Mount, but the hawser on which it ran was not removed.
At Gauley Bridge he burned the structure which gave name to the place, and which had been a series of substantial wooden trusses resting upon heavy stone piers. My orders definitively limited me to the point we had now reached in my advance, and I therefore sent forward only a detachment to follow the enemy and keep up his precipitate retreat.
Then I heard the sound that the horse was listening to, but at the great distance it was only a sound, a faint, wavering, indefinite echo, coming up from the far-away bend of the Gauley. The rim of the moon was rising now out of the under world, and I watched the road trailing away into a deep shadow by the river. As I watched, I saw something rise out of this gloom and sweep down the dim road.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking