Andersonville | Page 6

Rebel oppressors.
Had the South ever been able to separate from the North the boundary
would have been established along this line.
Between the main ridge upon which Cumberland Gap is situated, and
the next range on the southeast which runs parallel with it, is a narrow,
long, very fruitful valley, walled in on either side for a hundred miles
by tall mountains as a City street is by high buildings. It is called
Powell's Valley. In it dwell a simple, primitive people, shut out from
the world almost as much as if they lived in New Zealand, and with the
speech, manners and ideas that their fathers brought into the Valley
when they settled it a century ago. There has been but little change
since then. The young men who have annually driven cattle to the
distant markets in Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia, have brought
back occasional stray bits of finery for the "women folks," and the
latest improved fire-arms for themselves, but this is about all the
innovations the progress of the world has been allowed to make.
Wheeled vehicles are almost unknown; men and women travel on
horseback as they did a century ago, the clothing is the product of the
farm and the busy looms of the women, and life is as rural and
Arcadian as any ever described in a pastoral. The people are rich in
cattle, hogs, horses, sheep and the products of the field. The fat soil
brings forth the substantials of life in opulent plenty. Having this there
seems to be little care for more. Ambition nor avarice, nor yet craving
after luxury, disturb their contented souls or drag them away from the
non-progressive round of simple life bequeathed them by their fathers.

CHAPTER II.
SCARCITY OF FOOD FOR THE ARMY--RAID FOR
FORAGE--ENCOUNTER WIT THE REBELS --SHARP CAVALRY
FIGHT--DEFEAT OF THE "JOHNNIES"--POWELL'S VALLEY
OPENED UP.
As the Autumn of 1863 advanced towards Winter the difficulty of
supplying the forces concentrated around Cumberland Gap--as well as
the rest of Burnside's army in East Tennessee--became greater and
greater. The base of supplies was at Camp Nelson, near Lexington, Ky.,
one hundred and eighty miles from the Gap, and all that the Army used
had to be hauled that distance by mule teams over roads that, in their
best state were wretched, and which the copious rains and heavy traffic
had rendered well-nigh impassable. All the country to our possession
had been drained of its stock of whatever would contribute to the
support of man or beast. That portion of Powell's Valley extending
from the Gap into Virginia was still in the hands of the Rebels; its stock
of products was as yet almost exempt from military contributions.
Consequently a raid was projected to reduce the Valley to our
possession, and secure its much needed stores. It was guarded by the
Sixty-fourth Virginia, a mounted regiment, made up of the young men
of the locality, who had then been in the service about two years.
Maj. C. H. Beer's third Battalion, Sixteenth Illinois Cavalry--four
companies, each about 75 strong--was sent on the errand of driving out
the Rebels and opening up the Valley for our foraging teams. The
writer was invited to attend the excursion. As he held the honorable,
but not very lucrative position of "high, private" in Company L, of the
Battalion, and the invitation came from his Captain, he did not feel at
liberty to decline. He went, as private soldiers have been in the habit of
doing ever since the days of the old Centurion, who said with the
characteristic boastfulness of one of the lower grades of commissioned
officers when he happens to be a snob:

For I am also a man set under authority, having under me soldiers, and
I say unto one, Go; and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh;
and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it.
Rather "airy" talk that for a man who nowadays would take rank with
Captains of infantry.
Three hundred of us responded to the signal of "boots and saddles,"
buckled on three hundred more or less trusty sabers and revolvers,
saddled three hundred more or less gallant steeds, came into line "as
companies" with the automatic listlessness of the old soldiers, "counted
off by fours" in that queer gamut-running style that makes a company
of men "counting off"--each shouting a number in a different voice
from his neighbor--sound like running the scales on some great organ
badly out of tune; something like this:
One. Two. Three. Four. One. Two. Three. Four. One. Two. Three.
Four.
Then, as the bugle sounded "Right forward! fours right!" we moved off
at a walk through the melancholy mist that soaked through the very
fiber of man and horse, and reduced the minds