November 6, 1863. |
 |
| Samuel Jones. |
 |
| W. W. Averill. |
This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
[113]
by the Confederate cavalry.
Averill's loss was two hundred and seven men, and a Parrott gun, which burst during the fight.
The Confederate loss was one hundred and fifty-six men.
Much later in the year, Averill, still watching in West Virginia, made another aggressive movement.
He left Beverly, in Tygart's Valley, early in November, with five thousand men of all arms, and, moving southward, again encountered “Mudwall” Jackson.
He drove him until the latter was re-enforced by General Echols, who came up from Lewisburg, when the Confederates took a strong position on the top of Droop Mountain, in Greenbrier County.
Averill stormed them there,
and pushed them back into Monroe County, with a loss of over three hundred
men, three guns, and seven hundred small-arms.
Averill reported his own loss at “about one hundred, officers and men.”
West Virginia was now nearly purged of armed rebels, and not long afterward, Averill started on the important business of destroying the communication between Lee and Bragg over the Virginia and Tennessee railway.
With the Second, Third, and Eighth Virginia mounted infantry, the Fourteenth Pennsylvania (Dobson's battalion) Cavalry, and Ewing's battery, he crossed the mountains over icy roads and paths, in the midst of tempests a part of the time, and, on the 16th of December, struck the railway at Salem, on the headwaters of the Roanoke River.
There he destroyed the station houses and rolling stock, and a large quantity of Confederate supplies;1 cut and coiled up the telegraph wires for half a mile; and in the course of six hours tore up the track, heated and ruined the rails, burned five bridges, and destroyed several culverts in the space of about fifteen miles. This raid aroused all of the Confederates in that mountain region, and seven separate commands2 were arranged
in a line extending from Staunton
1 He destroyed 2,000 barrels of flour, 10,000 bushels of wheat, 100,000 bushels of shelled corn, 50,000 bushels of oats, 2,000 barrels of meat, several cords of leather, 1,000 sacks of salt, 31 boxes of clothing, 20 bales of cotton, a large amount of harness, shoes, saddles, and tools, and 100 wagons.
2 These were the commands of Generals Early, Fitzhugh Lee, Jones, Imboden, Jackson, Echols, and McCausland.
Scanned printed 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.