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| Pontoon Bridge at Cincinnati.2 |
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for the battle,” --Wallace had demanded the services of all able-bodied men. The response was wonderful.
In the course of a few hours he had at his command an army of workers and fighters forty thousand strong.
While many did not believe that danger was so nigh,1 all confided in the General, and the citizens and soldiers of Cincinnati, and Dickson's brigade of colored men, and the “Squirrel Hunters” from the rural districts of Ohio, streamed across a pontoon bridge that had been erected in a day under Wallace's
directions, and swarmed upon the hills around Covington.
There was a most stirring and picturesque night-march over that floating bridge, on which tons of supplies and many heavy cannon were also passing.
Within three days after the proclamation was issued, a line of intrenchments, ten miles in length and semicircular in form, was thrown up, extending from the river bank above Cincinnati to the river bank below it, well armed and fully manned.3 Steamers had been suddenly converted into gun-boats, and the river above and below the pontoon bridge was patroled by a large number of them.
The work for protection, so promptly commenced and vigorously carried forward, was scarcely completed when General Heath, with full fifteen thousand of Smith's invading troops (whose ranks had been swelled by volunteers
1 “If the enemy should not come, after all this fuss,” said a doubting friend to the General, “you will be ruined.” --“Very well,” he responded; “but they will come, and if they do not, it will be because this same fuss has caused them to think better of it.”
2 this is a view of the passage of the troops over the pontoon Bridge at Cincinnati on the night of the 3d of September, 1862. the Bridge was laid along the line of the Suspension Bridge since erected. The unfinished piers of that Bridge are seen on each side of the Ohio, in the picture.
3 The principal work was named Fort Mitchel, in honor of the brave commander and philosopher then in the army.
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