This text is part of:
[827] the perils are not averted, nor the sufferings. The loss of the greater part of the train compels the Federals to live on what they are able to gather on their way. Frozen, famished, exhausted by marches and want of sleep, they cannot halt long enough to rest themselves: even the fires which would warm them are forbidden to the outposts. In fact, the enemy still surrounds them on three sides: Jackson follows them closely; Jones, hastily returning from Sweet Springs, occupies the passes of the Alleghanies and the Lewisburg road; Fitzhugh Lee, with his cavalry, can easily, while following the Lexington road to Huntersville, prevent the return of the Federals on the north. Fortunately, a mountain-pathway which crosses the Alleghanies and runs in the small valley of Anthony's Creek allows Averell to avoid—at the cost of great suffering, it is true—the Lewisburg road: he reaches in this manner the Greenbrier Valley, close to Droop Mountain, without meeting Jones, who is looking after Duffie. The demonstration made by Moor farther to the north has decided the Confederates to leave Huntersville and the western sides of the Alleghanies, so that Averell can reach, without any impediment, the Traveller's Repose, and cross the passes which bring him to Elkwater in the basin of the Monongahela. A well-supplied train which the Federals meet at this point makes them forget their sufferings, and, returning by short marches through the friendly country, they reach at last their encampments on the Ohio Railroad on the 1st of January, 1864. The small column which Averell has led to the heart of the Virginia mountains has lost about a hundred prisoners and a small number of wagons, but not one gun, despite the impediments it has encountered. Not being able to keep all the prisoners whom they have captured, they bring back a hundred and twenty, among whom are forty officers. They have, we have said, interrupted for a fortnight one of the main railroad lines of the Confederacy and destroyed depots precious to the enemy's army; they have kept on the move forces fourfold their own. Although this expedition can have no decisive influence on the grand operations which winter has just interrupted both in the East and in the West, we have related it in detail, because it has been skilfully conducted and can give the reader an idea of the
Philadelphia, Jos. H. Coates and co., 1883.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.