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 8 A Good “ Breaking-In” W inter on the U pper P otomac , 1 8 6 2 Set Down in the Mud The regiment rode in first-class cars on the Central Ohio Railroad eastbound out of Columbus.1 A half day out of Columbus it was clear they were headed east, in the direction of the war’s big things. At the end of this road lay the land of newspaper headlines and mighty armies. Their competitors in Wade’s Second Ohio Cavalry had drawn a far less lucky card and were putting in their time performing dusty, tedious scouts down in Kansas, far from the war’s exciting center.2 They dismounted the cars at Bellaire, on the Ohio River, unloaded themselves and their baggage, loaded it onto wagons, and unloaded and loaded again onto to a ferry that took them across the river and to the western Virginia side. The quality of the transport furnished them by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad for the next leg of their journey did not please them. They were crammed onto dilapidated freight cars better suited to hauling cattle to market than men to war.3 Rough planks had been installed down each side for seating, and one ran the center. If a man wished to recline, it was on a floor covered in wet straw.4 When the soldiers of the Sixty-Seventh Ohio, coming up behind them, saw the condition of the cars, they balked and would not get on. These cattle cars were the last straw, but the real issue was they had not been paid. They would sit the war out right here at this rail siding if need be, and the government could go to hell.5 Lt. Col. Alvin Voris gave the stump speech of his life, and a mutiny was averted. As the Twenty-Ninth’s train ascended the west slopes of the Allegheny Mountains, the weather turned cold and rainy. The cars leaked, both through the roof and the sidewalls from which some of the boards had been knocked off, but riding in them was preferable to squatting in the open on a flat car, which some of the Boys were forced to endure for want of enough boxcars.6 Capt. Josiah Wright believed shady government contractors were responsible.7 The Boys were flatlanders and few of them had ever been in such a country. They had entered a region of deep-cut valleys and mountains so high their flanks disappeared into the clouds before a soldier’s eye could measure their full height. The track hunted the course of creek bottoms when it could, with the thick brush crowding in so close a man could snatch a handful of it through the open door. The steam engine struggled to climb passes and flew down the reverse pitch like a runaway bobsled, with brakes screeching and the soldiers hooting. The train twisted along a road the Boys thought the most crooked they had ever seen, steel or dirt.8 Each of these miles-wide valleys had side spurs, anyone of which could conceal an entire army. The valleys grew successively wider as the train picked up and followed the Potomac River. In the 84 A Good “Breaking-In” easternmost of these ran the fabled Shenandoah. But they were not going that far south and east. They were entering a neighborhood more forbidding than the Shenandoah. Here, the valleys were steeper and narrower, the weather more tempestuous. Most of them were farmers, and on this first journey, and on all the others that would follow, they surveyed the land with the interest of prospective buyers. Capt. Josiah Wright rendered his opinion: “I can say it consisted of log cabins, dilapidated frame houses, dirty women and children, and big hills dipped in rain and mud and hung up to dry where they couldn’t dry. . . . If a man owned a thousand acres of such land, and should show himself in Summit County, he would be sure to be put in the poorhouse.”9 Why the rebels would want to fight to keep such a worthless country they could not fathom. Their adversary in this campaign and in those that would occupy them in the coming months valued every square inch of this countryside very highly. Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson had concluded the season’s campaign in this area bordering the upper Potomac River with most of his goals achieved. His men had torn up track...

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