Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided (29 page)

A chilling rain set in as Rust's soldiers labored to the summit and descended upon Shavers Fork. Forced into the rocky riverbed by laurel thickets, they waded the ice-cold waters for miles. Each man clung to the jacket or belt of his file leader on the final leg of the journey in darkness. “Many slipped and fell and some were right much hurt,” wrote John Cammack of the miserable march. Despite great hardship, Rust's brigade reached the designated ridge on the evening of September 11, little more than a mile from Cheat Fort. “[W]e lay there all night, without fire, in a drenching rain,” recalled a member of the Thirty-seventh Virginia, “many of our men chilled almost to insensibility.”
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Two Confederate brigades marched from the vicinity of Valley Mountain on the morning of September 10. A dense fog enveloped the Tygart Valley below, swirling uniformly along the slopes and circumscribing ridge tops to give the appearance of tiny islands on a vast inland sea. Beyond that surreal landscape laid the enemy to be dislodged.

General Daniel Smith Donelson's brigade was made up of the Eighth and Sixteenth Tennessee Regiments, more than sixteen hundred strong. Donelson was something of an antique: gray, sixty years of age, a West Pointer, former speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives, and a nephew of Andrew Jackson. Each member of his brigade carried antiques as well—flintlock or percussion smoothbore muskets weighing close to ten pounds, old-fashioned cartridge boxes stuffed with forty rounds, a bayonet and scabbard, a blanket or quilt rolled up and tied over the shoulder, a canteen filled with water, and an empty haversack—thanks to a cooking detail that failed to show up with rations.
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General Donelson's route led more than twenty miles across rugged mountain spurs. There was no road, often not even a path. Fortunately, the general had local guides, including a mysterious old character known by his surname, Samuel. One member of the Eighth Tennessee thought Samuel looked “just out of some dark cavern or hollow tree, and was a second cousin to the ground squirrel family. He wore an old-fashioned bee-gum hat, and there was fully as much of the hat as there was of the guide, and each was about the same age, both relics of the Revolutionary war…. Around this old hat was tied a white rag, which could be seen through the dense timber and huge mountain cliffs, bobbing along like an old crippled ghost…bell-wether of the flock.”
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A detail of pioneers roughed out the trail. The soldiers joined hands to climb perpendicular ridges and descend into frightful chasms. Field officers weaved their horses tediously along the slopes as if following an imaginary worm fence. One sheer precipice caused many to speculate how the animals could follow at all. It was said the old guide Samuel possessed mystical powers—that he took the horses apart and carried them piece by piece up the slope, laid them in a heap, and commanded “Horses come forth” to reassemble the parts. No one was inclined to question the old guide's magic.

On the morning of September 11, the hungry brigade descended a gorge into Stewart Run. Confederates bowed under a steady rain as the little watercourse was followed downstream. A meager ration of bread or hardtack was shared among the troops. One swore that a pickaxe or bayonet was needed to work it into fragments, for no man in the army could chew it.

Musket blasts snapped every head to attention. Four “well dressed fat looking Yankees” were soon paraded to the rear. Quite a curiosity, they were the first enemy soldiers the Confederates had ever seen.
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Leading Donelson's brigade were two companies of the Sixteenth Tennessee Infantry, commanded by Colonel John Savage, a Tennessee Congressman and Mexican War veteran. As the column marched down Stewart Run, more Yankee pickets were encountered. All were captured or shot down before they could escape. Most had been lounging or blissfully fishing, astonished to find an entire Confederate brigade in their midst.
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From the prisoners, Colonel Savage learned that a company of Federals occupied the Simmons house, masked by an angle of woods just below. Ordering his men forward at “double-quick” time, Savage spurred his mount over a fence and landed in the midst of the startled Yankees. “Down with your arms or you die!” he cried, flourishing a huge pistol. Confederate troops swarmed into the yard to confirm his threat. The entire Federal company—fifty members of the Sixth Ohio Infantry—surrendered without a shot.

With the captured Yankees in tow, Donelson's Confederates followed a rough path from the Simmons house over the ridge to Becky Creek. As troops filed over that ridge, a bundle of Union dispatches were uncovered in the leaves. Addressed to the commander of the pickets, they warned of the danger of surprise—a bit too late.
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Donelson's brigade continued down Becky Creek. As darkness fell, the men bivouacked on a high ridge overlooking the Federals at Elkwater. Hundreds of enemy campfires flickered below. The night was one of “Egyptian” darkness—so thick that some Tennesseans swore they cut it into pieces and others, equally as serious, claimed they tried to eat it. Rain descended in “perfect torrents.” Not a gun would have fired in the downpour. The Confederates hunkered against trees, punished by the howling storm. Adding to their misery, a bear wandered through camp near midnight, throwing the brigade into terror. During that fracas, the prisoners made an aborted effort to escape. Donelson's men endured a horrible night, christening the place “Flood Mountain.”
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Confederate General Samuel R. Anderson's brigade also left camp near Valley Mountain on the morning of September 10. Anderson, a Mexican War veteran, directed the First, Seventh, and Fourteenth Tennessee Regiments along a path that led to the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike, two miles west of Cheat Fort.
Commencing the march from Mingo Flats, members of the First Tennessee spied a “comely Virginia lass” at her cabin window. As admiring regiments filed past, each gave her a tremendous Rebel yell. The boys hoped it was an omen of success.

General Anderson's route led for twenty miles over winding farm lanes, stock trails, and untrodden wilderness along the western slope of Cheat Mountain. Guides blazed the trees with hatchets to mark the way. Marcus Toney of the First Tennessee called it “the roughest and wildest country that I ever beheld.” The troops marched in single file, strung out for miles. “It was no uncommon thing for a mule to slide twenty feet down a slope,” wrote a surgeon of that march, “and I could see strong men sink exhausted trying to get up the mountain side.” Confederates tumbled into steep ravines, rising painfully only to fall again—a tortuous advance that one Tennessean styled the “perfect roll down.”
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Anderson's Confederates neared the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike by nightfall on September 11. “It was the most awful night I ever spent,” recalled a soldier of the Fourteenth Tennessee of his bivouac on the slopes of Cheat Mountain. “Here we tried to sleep,” wrote another, “but the rain poured so, and the torrents ran down the mountain such a flood of water that we would have been drowned had we lain on the ground.” Nervous soldiers tried to keep their powder dry, for the ominous sound of drumbeats had been heard in the distance.
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On September 11, General Loring's column marched north toward Elkwater, overwhelming Federal outposts along the Huttonsville road. Near Conrad's Mill, members of John Worsham's Twenty-first Virginia Infantry passed their first dead Yankee. “He made a lasting impression,” Worsham noted, “for he lay on the side of the road, his face upturned and a fresh pool of blood at his side, showing that his life had just passed away.” By nightfall, Loring was before Camp Elkwater, and General Henry
Jackson's brigade was on the Staunton-Parkersburg pike in front of Cheat Fort.
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That night, the dreadful tempest lashed Cheat Mountain with a fury. The Federals were confident that no humans lurked about. They had not considered the will of Lee's men. When Anderson's waterlogged Confederates cut the telegraph wire, the operator assumed that a tree had fallen across it in the storm.

“There lay the camp on Cheat Mountain summit,” wrote correspondent J.T. Pool, “and spread out on the slopes were the tents of full three thousand Union soldiers who were that moment under their shelter, snoring away in all the fancied security of men who expected to wake up in the morning with a whole skin and an appetite that would astonish the commissary department.”

Few would have dreamed that five thousand enemy troops surrounded their mountain fortress, waiting for dawn to spring the trap.
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“
The fort on Cheat Mountain is said to be a defense almost impregnable.”

—
Richmond Daily Dispatch

September 12, 1861, opened with great promise for General Lee's Confederates. The brigades of Rust, Anderson, and Jackson surrounded the Union fortress on Cheat Mountain. Despite numbing cold and billowing fog, the Confederates were ready to strike. Union defenders were blissfully unaware of their presence. Lee's aide Walter Taylor relished the dawn, for everything was “just as the most confident could have hoped.”

Matters rested on the broad shoulders of Colonel Albert Rust. “Day at length dawned upon the most forlorn and wretched set of human beings that ever existed,” wrote a member of Rust's mountaintop bivouac. The big colonel seemed indefatigable, but found his wet, shivering Confederates barely able to rise. With almost superhuman effort, Rust prodded his soldiers into line. Down the ridge he led them in single file, to the Staunton-Parkersburg pike, about one half-mile behind the enemy fort.

The Confederates burst upon a pair of Federal pickets, who went screaming up the road and were shot down. Three supply
wagons appeared from the fort; Rust's men captured the teams and drivers. The prisoners told Colonel Rust that their fort held nearly five thousand defenders (the true number was no more than three thousand) and boasted of its great strength. Rust entered a clearing to view the redoubt. A blockhouse and “heavy guns” could be seen, with infantry in the trenches. The Cheat Mountain fortress
was
stronger than he had supposed. It not only looked impregnable in a military sense; it was literally unapproachable, due to the “abatis” of wooden spikes on the perimeter. Summoning his officers, Rust concluded that it would be “madness” to storm those works.
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Now the Federals were aroused. Colonel Nathan Kimball led a detachment to the point of attack. Supposing Rust's brigade was only a scouting party of the enemy, he deployed two companies of the Fourteenth Indiana Infantry as skirmishers. Turning up their slouch hats, Kimball's men plunged into the thick woods and opened fire. Rust's sixteen hundred Confederates broke for the rear, casting aside guns, clothing, blankets—anything that impeded their flight. Colonel Kimball rushed into the fray, swinging his hat in the air. “Hurrah for Indiana!” he roared. “Trail them boys! Trail them!”

Rebel baggage littered the woods in quantity, revealing the stakes to Kimball's men. Inside the fort, bandsmen, teamsters, and sutlers gathered up spare guns and joined defenders in the trenches. Colonel Kimball returned from the action, his face red with excitement. “Our boys are peppering them good out there,” he told the cheering garrison.
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