Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided (21 page)

Key to his defense was the important pass over Cheat Mountain, on the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike. From that pass, the turnpike wound across the Alleghenies more than eighty miles southeast to Staunton and the Virginia Central Railroad, a main line to Richmond. Cheat Mountain Pass was, in effect, a gateway to the Shenandoah Valley, its agricultural bounty and railroads leading to the capital of the Confederacy. But the pass was also a gateway for the enemy. An incursion by the Rebels could be expected there. Rosecrans ordered General Joseph Reynolds, new commander of the First Brigade, “Army of Occupation,” to guard that vital crossing.
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Joseph Jones Reynolds was a thirty-nine-year-old Hoosier, lanky, pale, and unassuming. A sworn teetotaler, he had curiously befriended U.S. Grant at West Point. Graduating from the academy in 1843, he returned to teach there under Robert E. Lee. Reynolds quit the army in 1857 to join his brother in the grocery business, but impending war brought him back as a brigadier general of U.S. volunteers. John Beatty fairly described the soft-spoken Reynolds as “an untried quantity.”
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General Reynolds made headquarters under canvas about two miles south of Huttonsville, on a rocky little stream at the foot of Cheat Mountain. “Cheat Pass” was the name given his camp, often confused with the strategic gap in the mountain above. Indiana and Ohio regiments pitched rows of white tents at Reynolds's encampment. A steep wooded ridge fronted headquarters; from its crest
waved a large American flag, visible for miles in every direction. Federal troops and supplies moved from this camp to the front.
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Meanwhile, loyal Virginia troops patrolled the countryside. Guards or pickets occupied every road and bridle path, for it was impossible to maintain a chain of sentinels in that rugged terrain. Day and night the pickets paced their lonely beat. Large squads might remain on watch at distant outposts for days without relief, but the camp guard was changed six times nightly.

“Halt! Who comes there?” rang the sentinel as an intruder approached. The ominous click of a musket lock punctuated the call.

“Sergeant of the Guard,” was the prompt reply.

“Advance, Sergeant of the Guard, and give the counter sign.”

The watchful sentinel received his visitor with bayonet at the ready. Failure of either party to strictly follow this procedure could mean death. “A cowardly sentinel is more likely to shoot at you than a brave one,” wrote Lt. Colonel John Beatty from hard experience.
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Pickets fired their guns to warn of danger—an act repeated by every sentinel along the line. Shots in the night jolted slumbering camps to life. “Many men, half asleep, rushed from their tents and fired off their guns in their company grounds,” recalled John Beatty of the first night alarm at Cheat Pass. “Others, supposing the enemy near, became excited and discharged theirs also. The tents were struck, Loomis' First Michigan Battery manned, and we awaited the attack, but none was made. It was a false alarm. Some sentinel probably halted a stump and fired, thus rousing a thousand men from their warm beds.”
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Leaving the pass, the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike climbed the western slope of Cheat Mountain. There was an air of mystery to the ascent. Enormous moss-covered rocks and huge overhanging trees cast dark shadows on the roadway. Boundless springs gushed forth and plunged across the grade into deep ravines. For nine interminable miles, the turnpike spiraled upward. “So tortuous is its course,” recalled a soldier, “that you may travel for miles without gaining in actual distance more than a few hundred yards, and sometimes the extremes of our column, stretching out a mile
or nearly so in length, would be within a stone's throw of each other.” The steep march tended to dampen military ardor, but “like the man who carried the calf until it grew to be an ox,” the troops got accustomed to it.

As the turnpike climbed, its surroundings began to change. Towering spruces lined the roadway. Gnarled thickets of “laurel” or rhododendron blanketed the slopes. At the mountain crest, weary soldiers fell out to catch their breath and marvel.
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Cheat Mountain was an authentic wilderness. A traveler in 1861 regarded it “as savage as the unexplored [wilds] of Oregon.” The “growl of the bear, the cry of the panther, and the bark of the wolf are sometimes still heard…. Laurel-brakes stretch out like inland seas, and with never-fading leaves and snake-like branches interlaced, forbid a passage to even the light-footed deer; blackberry bushes extend miles in compact masses; superb firs lift up their crowned heads to the height of a hundred and fifty feet; and silvery cascades never cease their solitary murmur.”
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Few had ventured into that wilderness until the turnpike crossed Cheat Mountain in the 1840s. Famed Harvard botanist Asa Gray used the new road to explore, and was rewarded with some of “the choicest botanical treasures which the country affords.” Gray found Cheat Mountain to be a most remarkable place. Along its lonely crest he discovered plants unknown to science. Another curiosity was the Shavers Fork of Cheat River, a stream of considerable size that glides on
top
of the mountain. One amazed visitor insisted it had been “placed there by a mistake of nature.”
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The weather on Cheat Mountain was also quite remarkable. Rain and snow fell in prodigious quantities. During the winter of 1855, the Trotter brothers had a contract to carry mail over the turnpike between Staunton and Huttonsville, a distance of more than ninety miles. At one point, a severe snowstorm brought delivery to a halt. When complaints reached authorities in Washington, the brothers dispatched a terse letter to the postmaster general. “Sir,” it read, “If you knock the gable end out of Hell and back it up against Cheat Mountain and rain fire and brimstone on it for
forty days and forty nights, it won't melt the snow enough to get your d___ mail through on time.”
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Military strategists eyed Cheat Mountain's defensive qualities. The mountain was a formidable barrier. The Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike crossed its summit in a gap nearly four thousand feet high. On the afternoon of July 16, 1861, six companies of the Fourteenth Indiana Infantry under Colonel Nathan Kimball commandeered that gap. Kimball, a robust, curly-haired, thirty-nine-year-old medical doctor and Mexican War veteran from Loogootee, Indiana, was the only member of his regiment with military experience. “Our tents were pitched on a rocky point,” wrote a member of the Fourteenth in his diary that first night, “with a fine forest on every side and a magnificent view of the Alleghenies in front of us, a beautiful romantic, though desolate looking spot.”
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One of the few signs of habitation on Cheat Mountain was here—a hardscrabble farmstead scratched out twenty-two years earlier by an old mountaineer named Mathias White. Regimental historian J.T. Pool called it a “splendid farm of twenty acres on which were about ten rocks to one blade of grass.” Pool described White as a “gaunt, lean, half starved devil,” who “looked as though he had sucked his last meal from the spout of a bellows, and was none the better for it.” He had never been inside a schoolhouse or heard a sermon; his piety was said to consist of “playing
jigs
and
hoe downs
on an old fiddle, and shooting mountain hawks on Sunday.”

White was a crude blacksmith, and when unfinished Bowie knife blades were found in his shop, the “old sinner” was placed under arrest—suspected of making cutlery for the Rebels. His home was converted to a hospital, his barn into quartermaster and commissary quarters, and his forge put to shoeing Union horses. Any lingering doubt as to the loyalty of his clan was dispelled when a daughter, known by soldiers as the “Maid of the Mist,” made it clear that bestowal of her heart and hand should only be in exchange for “Linken's Skaalp.”
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Colonel Kimball seized a covered bridge over Shavers Fork, one half mile beyond the gap, and sent out patrols to display a bold front. The Hoosiers delighted in their novel assignment. “ To one who loves the wildly picturesque in nature,” wrote a member of the Fourteenth, “this region could not fail to awe, to please, to fascinate.” They scaled the mountain peaks and mailed fragrant spruce-gum to their sweethearts in letters. Cheat Mountain “was an enchanted land,” declared Ambrose Bierce. “How we reveled in its savage beauties!”
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A typical Federal soldier's day on the summit followed this schedule:

Reveille—5:30 A.M.

Wood and water call—6:00

Sick call—6:30

Breakfast—7:00

Guard-mounting—8:30

Company drill—9:00

Recall—11:00

Wood and water call—11:30

Dinner—12:00

Battalion drill—2:00 P.M.

Recall—4:00

Dress parade (inspection of arms)—5:00

Supper—6:00

Tattoo—8:30

Taps—9:00 P.M.
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The troops breakfasted on huge stacks of well-greased flapjacks. Hardtack or “sheet iron crackers,” pork, beef, beans, or rice made up the daily ration. Blackberries were ripening, and the boys spent hours picking them for pies and cobbler. At night, they gathered around campfires on the mountaintop, singing “Yankee Doodle,” “Hail Columbia,” and even “Dixie Land” with a roar that seemed to shake old Cheat to its very foundation.

When Colonel Kimball decided their amusement made too much noise, prayer meetings and debating societies filled the void. “How is the United States bounded?” might be the question posed to a geography class. A swaggering private would answer: “It is bounded on the South-East by Cheat Mountain and the Fourteenth Regiment of Indiana Volunteers; on the South and West by several regiments from the same State, and we defy all creation to get into them.”
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To keep all creation out, Kimball's Hoosiers cut down the trees around their encampment to give cannons fair play on the turnpike. Tall spruces were felled and lobbed with the tops outward, presenting an “abatis” of sharp points. Then began the construction of an “immense” fort. Logs were stacked in crib fashion above the road and covered with rocks and dirt to form an embankment. “The walls were fourteen feet high,” reckoned one soldier, “eight feet through at the base, narrowing to four feet at the top.”

Breastworks of great strength were laid out across the road, and a blockhouse was erected. After weeks of toil, a massive fortress glowered from the gap. To the soldiers who built it, Cheat Summit Fort seemed impregnable. That fort “surpassed anything of the kind I have since seen,” gloated a veteran of the Fourteenth Indiana, “and with our regiment to garrison it, we felt entirely secure.”
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On July 30, a second fortification was begun along the Tygart Valley River, eight miles south of Huttonsville. Here defensive works were erected across the narrow valley floor to block the Huntersville Turnpike, at a place known as Elkwater. Colonel George D. Wagner of the Fifteenth Indiana Infantry led more than one thousand Federals in plying axe and spade. “Our fortifications are progressing slowly,” John Beatty jotted from his tent at Elkwater on August 8. “If the enemy intends to attack at all he will probably do so before they are complete; and if he does not, the fortifications will be of no use to us.”
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The Federal defenses formed the points of a triangle. At least one thousand men occupied each point. The supply depot at Cheat Pass was the triangle's apex, fourteen miles south of Beverly.

Cheat Summit Fort was nine miles southeast of the pass on the Staunton-Parkersburg pike; Camp Elkwater was nearly as far south on the Huntersville Turnpike. These fortifications blocked the two major roads leading across the mountains to railroads in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. No road traversed the seven miles of ground between them.

From the B&O Railroad, seventy miles north, supplies for the Federals came along the turnpikes. Their grades had been designed for civilian traffic, not the tread of armies. The roads were soon cut up by heavy army wagons until routine travel became difficult. It was necessary to lay out bridle paths between the camps for infantry. These rough paths wound up steep slopes and twisted over narrow mountain crags. Squads might be seen on them at any time of day, guiding mounts along precipices more suited to billy goats.