The Maryland battalion was badly cut up in a fight with infantry at Bridgeport, caused by charging among the post and rail fences on the Rail Road, in which Col. Brown was wounded.
The attack on the Cheat River works was a failure, owing to the 6th Regiment being driven back by a heavy infantry force, which defended the ugly mountain gorges leading to the rail road, and which fought from barricades inaccessible to cavalry, even with no enemy to hold them.
Beaching Philippi, the General sent back to the Valley all the prisoners and stock, and marched his command to Buckhannon, in Upshur county, where he halted for a short time to watch a party of the enemy that came down from Clarksburg, intending to guard the party conveying the stock and prisoners from an attack by these fellows; and after all danger from this source was over he passed on by Weston, Lewis county, to West Union in Doddridge county, near which place he again operated on the Rail Road at Cairo Station, where there were quite a number of short tunnels. These tunnels had been blasted and bored through almost solid rock, and inside of them a frame work was built wide enough for the track, and the space between the frame and side of the tunnel was filled with cord wood, an immense quantity of which was used for the purpose. There was a large force of home guards and militia at the station, and by the way, all the troops of this kind were invariably in U. S. uniform, and armed with U. S. muskets, while the “bushwhackers,” or “Swamp Dragons,” carried only their old sporting rifles, and dressed in homespun.
The Yankees only made a show of fight, and a cavalry charge soon brought them to terms without losing a man; some of them, of course, escaped, but about three hundred were made prisoners.
The Rail Road buildings were burned, and White’s men were detailed to work on the tunnels, which they did most effectually by pouring coal oil on the cord-wood and setting it on fire, which caused the rock to burst and fall in, so that the destruction was complete.
From Cairo the march was continued through the counties of Pleasants, Ritchie, and Wirt, to the Little Kanawha river, and at every turn the bushwhackers enlivened the route by popping away with their old rifles, but they would not venture in range of the Sharpe’s carbines and Colt’s revolvers carried by the brigade, and consequently did no damage, but on the contrary did much good, in acting as provost guard, to keep up the stragglers; and their sprightly style of warfare kept Jones’ men in a good humor all the time, in fact the most pleasant part of the whole raid was through the bushwhackers’ special territory, for without anything to vary the monotony of the march, this continual roaming through that apparently interminable sea of mountains was a very tiresome business.
The command reached the oil works about noon, and a detail was sent forward to Elizabeth City, while the main body halted at Oiltown. There were a large number of wells in operation, worked by steam engines, and up to the last moment the oil men kept busily engaged, but after awhile they learned the character of their visitors, and surmising their object, the workmen turned away from the wells, and shutting off steam, remarked, with doleful faces, “I guess oiling is played out now,” and of a surety their guess was correct, for destruction was the watchword of Jones’ brigade at Oiltown, and nowhere, except in a powder mill, could it be more speedily and generally accomplished. The oil was all around, some of it in barrels piled up, and some in flatboats in the river, the boats being built water-tight and filled with the oil, some of them holding a thousand barrels each, which was run into them by pipes directly from the wells.
These boats, after being set on fire, were cut loose from the shore and allowed to float away, and as they burst, letting the blazing oil spread over the water from shore to shore, the truly wonderful spectacle of a river on fire was presented, while to heighten the grandeur of the scene, explosion after explosion boomed out upon the night air, and columns of dense black smoke twined with the red flame from the wrecks of the boats, loomed skyward a hundred feet from the blazing sea; and on shore the oil barrels were burning and bursting, their contents flowing in streams of liquid flame all over the ground, and from the wells themselves great fiery pillars rose up, and added to this, the many buildings contributed their quota of flame to the great conflagration; in fact no better illustration, on a small scale, could be presented of the popular idea of the burning brimstone lake, where
“The devil sits in his easy chair,
Sipping his sulphur tea,