On receipt of these instructions, Garfield began instantly to carry them out. He telegraphed his forces at Catlettsburg to advance up the Big Sandy towards Paintville, Marshall’s advance post. This he did that no delay should be occasioned by his absence. He then visited Colonel Cranor’s regiment, and saw it well established at Paris. Returning thence, he proceeded to hasten after his own regiment, and reached Catlettsburg on the 20th of December. Here he stopped to forward supplies up the river to Louisa, an old half-decayed village of the Southern kind, where he learned that his men were waiting for him.
It was on this march from Catlettsburg to Louisa that the Forty-second Ohio began, for the first time, that process of seasoning which soon made veterans out of raw civilians. The hardships of that march were not such as an old soldier would think terrible; but for men who but five days before had left Columbus without any experience whatever, it was very rough. On the morning of the eighteenth the first division started, twenty-five mounted on horses, and one hundred going by boat. The cavalry got on very well; but the river was quite low, and after a few miles of bumping along, the old boat finally stuck fast. Leaving this wrecked concern, the men started to tramp it overland. The country was exceedingly wild; the paths narrow, leading up hill and down hill with monotonous regularity. That night when the tired fellows stopped to rest, they had advanced only eight miles. The next day, however, they reached Louisa, where the mounted company had taken possession and prepared to stay; meanwhile the remaining companies were on the road. Rain set in; the north wind blew, and soon it was very cold. The steep, rocky paths scarcely afforded room for the wagon-train, whose conveyances were lightened of their loads by throwing off many articles of comfort which these soldiers, with their unwarlike notions of life, hated to lose. But advance they must, if only with knapsacks and muskets; and on the twenty-first all were together again. About this time Garfield arrived.
Paintville, where it was intended to attack Marshall, is on Painter Creek, near the west fork of the Big Sandy, about thirty miles above Louisa. The first thing to be done, therefore, was to cross that intervening space, very quickly, and attack the enemy without delay. A slow campaign would result in disaster. While this advance was being made, it would also be necessary to see to the matter of reinforcements; for Marshall had thirty-five hundred, Garfield not half as many. The only possible chance would be to communicate an order to the Fortieth Ohio, under Colonel Cranor, at Paris, one hundred miles away; that hundred miles was accessible to Marshall, and full of rebel sympathizers. The man who carried a dispatch to Cranor from Garfield, would carry his life in his hand, with a liberal chance of losing it. To find such an one, both able and willing for the task, would be like stumbling over a diamond in an Illinois corn-field. In his perplexity, Garfield went to Colonel Moore, of the Fourteenth Kentucky, and said to him: “I must communicate with Cranor; some of your men know this section of country well; have you a man we can fully trust for such a duty?” The Colonel knew such a man, and promised to send him to head-quarters. Directly the man appeared. He was a native of that district, coming from the head of the Baine, a creek near Louisa, and his name was John Jordan. What kind of a man he was has been well told by a writer in the Atlantic Monthly for October, 1865:
“He was a tall, gaunt, sallow man of about thirty, with small gray eyes, a fine falsetto voice, pitched in the minor key, and his speech was the rude dialect of the mountains. His face had as many expressions as could be found in a regiment, and he seemed a strange combination of cunning, simplicity, undaunted courage, and undoubting faith; yet, though he might pass for a simpleton, he had a rude sort of wisdom, which, cultivated, might have given his name to history.
“The young Colonel sounded him thoroughly, for the fate of the little army might depend on his fidelity. The man’s soul was as clear as crystal, and in ten minutes Garfield saw through it. His history is stereotyped in that region. Born among the hills, where the crops are stones, and sheep’s noses are sharpened before they can nibble the thin grass between them, his life had been one of the hardest toil and privation. He knew nothing but what Nature, the Bible, the Course of Time, and two or three of Shakespeare’s plays had taught him; but, somehow, in the mountain air he had grown up to be a man—a man, as civilized nations account manhood.
“‘Why did you come into the war?’ at last asked the Colonel.
“‘To do my sheer fur the kentry, Gin’ral,’ answered the man. ‘And I didn’t druv no barg’in wi’ th’ Lord. I guv him my life squar’ out; and ef he’s a mind ter tack it on this tramp, why, it’s a his’n; I’ve nothin’ ter say agin it.’
“‘You mean that you’ve come into the war not expecting to get out of it?’
“‘That’s so, Gin’ral.’
“‘Will you die rather than let the dispatch be taken?’