Camp Ewing, Mountain Cove, Six Miles Above
Gauley Bridge, Wednesday, October 9, 1861.
Dearest: – Captain Zimmerman and I have just returned from a long stroll up a most romantic mountain gorge with its rushing mountain stream. A lovely October sun, bright and genial, but not at all oppressive. We found the scattered fragments of a mill that had been swept away in some freshet last winter, and following up came to the broken dam, and near by a deserted home – hastily deserted lately. Books, the cradle, and child’s chair, tables, clock, chairs, etc., etc. Our conjecture is they fled from the army of Floyd about the time of [the] Carnifax fight. We each picked up a low, well-made, split-bottom chair and clambered up a steep cliff to our camp. I now sit in the chair. We both moralized on this touching proof of the sorrows of war and I reached my tent a little saddened to find on my lounge in my tidy comfortable quarters your good letter of October 1, directed in the familiar hand of my old friend [Herron]. Love to him and Harriet. How happy it makes me to read this letter.
Tell Mother Webb not to give up. In the Revolution they saw darker days – far darker. We shall be a better, stronger nation than ever in any event. A great disaster would strengthen us, and a victory, we all feel, will bring us out to daylight.
No, I don’t leave the Twenty-third. I have been with them all the time except six days. I am privileged. In the Twenty-third I am excused from duty as major being judge-advocate general. On the staff I am free to come and go as major of the Twenty-third. This of course will not relieve me from labor, but it makes me more independent than any other officer I know of.
Dr. Clendenin and Joe tent together and mess with us. Dr. Clendenin’s connection with us is permanent. We are in General Schenck’s brigade. He lives in our regiment and we like him.
We are now in easy two days’ ride of Cincinnati by steamboat, all but thirty or forty miles. We shall stay at this place ten days at least. We are building an entrenched camp for permanently holding this gateway of the Kanawha Valley. . . .
I feel as you do about the Twenty-third, only more so. There are several regiments whose music and appearance I can recognize at a great distance over the hills, as the Tenth, Ninth, and so on, but the Twenty-third I know by instinct. I was sitting in the court-house at Buckhannon one hot afternoon, with windows up, a number of officers present, when we heard music at a distance. No one expected any regiment at that time. I never dreamed of the Twenty-third being on the road, but the music struck me like words from home. “That is the band of my regiment,” was my confident assertion. True, of course.
We have lost by death about six, by desertion four, by dismissal three, by honorable discharge about twenty-five to thirty. About two hundred are too sick to do duty, of whom about one fifth will never be able to serve.
I was called to command parade this evening while writing this sheet. The line is much shorter than in Camp Chase, but so brown and firm and wiry, that I suspect our six hundred would do more service than twice their number could have done four months ago. . . .
You need not get any shirts or anything. We get them on this line, very good and very cheap. I bought two on the top of Mount Sewell for two dollars and forty cents for the two – excellent ones. I am now wearing one of them.
One of the charms of this life is its perpetual change. Yesterday morning we were in the most uncomfortable condition possible at Camp Lookout. Before night I was in a lovely spot with most capital company at headquarters. . . .
[R]
Mrs. Hayes.