or more to the front, the garrison could have protected all the
country which we ever occupied permanently. A similar post at
Huttonsville with detachments at the Cheat Mountain pass and
Elkwater pass north of Huntersville would have covered the only
other practicable routes through the mountains south of the line of
the Baltimore and Ohio Railway. These would have been small
intrenched camps, defensive in character, but keeping detachments
constantly active in patrolling the front, going as far as could be
done without wagons. All that ever was accomplished in that region
of any value would thus have been attained at the smallest expense,
and the resources that were for three years wasted in those
mountains might have been applied to the legitimate lines of great
operations from the valley of the Potomac southward.

[Illustration: GAULEY BRIDGE & VICINITY.]

Nothing could be more romantically beautiful than the situation of
the post at Gauley Bridge. The hamlet had, before our arrival there,
consisted of a cluster of two or three dwellings, a country store, a
little tavern, and a church, irregularly scattered along the base of
the mountain and facing the road which turns from the Gauley valley
into that of the Kanawha. The lower slope of the hillside behind the
houses was cultivated, and a hedgerow separated the lower fields
from the upper pasturage. Above this gentler slope the wooded steeps
rose more precipitately, the sandstone rock jutting out into crags
and walls, the sharp ridge above having scarcely soil enough to
nourish the chestnut-trees, here, like Mrs. Browning's woods of
Vallombrosa, literally "clinging by their spurs to the precipices."
In the angle between the Gauley and New rivers rose Gauley Mount,
the base a perpendicular wall of rocks of varying height, with high