Confederate wizards of the saddle /

by Bennett H. Young

With bowie knives and pistols are galloping up the glen.”

Each day was full of strenuous work, night marching, incessant fighting, guerrilla firing, obstructions of roads, and on the night of the 12th of July, General Morgan and his men were sixty miles north of the Ohio River and far up into the State of Indiana. The average march for all these days was forty miles, counting detours, under difficulties that sorely taxed human powers.

On the 12th of July the command made thirty-eight miles, although this was the eleventh day in the saddle.

Scattered along the fence corners for four miles, at a little town called Milam on the line of the Ohio & Michigan Railroad, Morgan and his command caught a few hours’ rest. Some subtle and mysterious instinct came to them that the morrow would demand heroic work. They seemed to breathe in the very air that something great was expected of them. The beasts laid down in slumber and rest beside the tired bodies of their persistent riders. Voices of unseen bodies seemed to whisper to them that on the morrow they would attempt the longest continued cavalry march ever said to have been made by twenty-five hundred men in column. Stuart, when he started from Chambersburg, was rested. For twelve hours he had slept. Forrest, when in pursuit of Streight, had briefly halted at Courtland, Alabama, but these Morgan’s men had been marching and fighting for ten days and yet fate was to put up to them the task of excelling human records. Two and a half miles away were twenty-five hundred Federal troops. Although humanity would suggest that the saddles should be stripped from the backs of the tired horses, the calls of the hour were such that mercy could make no response and every man slept with his bridle rein over his arm, and in his weary hand he held his trusted gun.

They were now over four hundred miles from the place where they began their march, in territory held by the enemy. They were beset on every side with forces sent for their capture. Guides were unfaithful, and sometimes the main roads were blockaded and ambuscades frequent. The column was three miles long and already there was a number of sick and wounded in buggies and wagons. Under all these conditions, men might well ask, “Can this great task be accomplished?”

Morgan felt that the men riding with him were thoroughbreds. They were the grandsons of the pioneers given by Virginia, Maryland, Carolina, in the savage work of wresting Kentucky from the Indians, and the pioneers had given Kentucky men a name and fame wherever the English tongue had been spoken. They were sons, or grandsons, of the men who had fought the Battles of Blue Lick, Maumee, Fort Stevenson, the Thames, of the Raisin, Tippecanoe, New Orleans, Cerro Gordo, Buena Vista, and their great leader, with the knowledge of what they had done and faith in what they could accomplish, already in his own mind was asking, “Can this thing be done?”

These troopers had never failed him either in the march or on the field. If it were possible for men to do it, he knew it would be done. He knew that they would try, and if they failed it would be only because the accomplishment of such a task was humanly impossible.

The command to mount was his answer to these curious questionings which forced themselves into his brain, as in the dim light of the early dawn he looked over their sleeping forms and found it hard in his heart to rouse them from their death-like slumber.

Out into the dusty roads before the rays of the scorching July sun should be felt, he bade them wake and ride.

By twelve o’clock thirty-two miles were done. Across the White River into Harrison, Ohio, they rode. The torch was applied to the great bridge that crossed White River and as the blazes lifted hissing tongues high in the air, and while they watched the timbers crumble under the conquering hand of fire, the advance guard of the Federals exchanged shots over the stream with the rear guard of the Confederates.