George H. Gordon, From Brook Farm to Cedar Mountain

On the twenty-eighth of November I returned again to camp, bringing with me as visitors from Boston Messrs. Thomas Motley, W. R. Robeson, and E. F. Bowditch. Our camp, though higher and dryer, was a cheerless spot. Though there were only ten or a dozen cases of measles in the hospital, two or three new ones presented themselves every day, while by day or night sounds of distressing colds and coughs were audible. No watchfulness could ward off sickness, or remove that condition which offered such temptations to disease when the right kind presented itself. My hospital tents were crowded, and thirty men sick in their tents. The commissioned officers did not escape,--Captains Savage and Mudge and Lieutenant Wheaton were seriously ill in houses. We had fires in tents; stoves were received about the first of December. I did all I could to make the men comfortable. It was the thirteenth day of December before we received information that this wretched spot was to know us no more, that we were to remove to the much healthier locality of Frederick. So our sick were sent to Washington by the canal.

How over one hundred and fifty or two hundred poor fellows,--typhoid and bilious fever patients, and patients with fractures and ills grievous to be borne,--after waiting from 9 A. M. till 4 P. M., were huddled into the damp hold of a common canal boat, for the hospitals at Washington (a hold in which there was not as much provision as the most indifferent teamster provides for his horse, even straw to lie down upon, until I ordered some to be procured); and how all the unfortunates could not be taken at that single trip, but were hauled home, to be hauled back again