Saturday, Sept. 17, 1864.
Warm and pleasant: gentle south breeze; looks like a southern storm. General Grant came to-day, but has gone. It looks like a move. Fifty men from our regiment went on picket this afternoon. We have been moving camp, another indication of a move. Let it come. Orry Blanchard and Nate Harrington have been over this evening.
Sunday, Sept. 18, 1864.
It's cloudy with a gentle south breeze. We had company inspection at 9 o'clock this forenoon and monthly at 4 o'clock this afternoon. The supply train came at 8 o'clock a. m. with four days' rations. We got orders at 3 o'clock p. m. to strike tents which we did, and march at once, but the order was countermanded. We shall probably move early in the morning. There's a high south wind this evening, but it doesn't look like rain. Sheridan's army now consists of three infantry corps, three divisions of cavalry and the usual complement of artillery, in all about 30,000 men, as follows; The Sixth Corps, Major General H. G. Wright, U. S. V. commanding; the Eighth Corps, Major-General George Crook, U. S. V. commanding; the Nineteenth Corps, Brevet Major-General W. H. Emery commanding; Brevet Major-General A. T. A. Torbert, U. S. V., Chief of Cavalry; the First Division of Cavalry, Brigadier-General Wesley Merritt, U. S. V. commanding; the Second Division of Cavalry, Brigadier-General W. W. Averell, U. S. A. commanding; and of the Third Division of Cavalry, Brigadier-General James H. Wilson, U. S. V. commanding. Lieutenant-General Jubal A. Early commands the Confederate army with about the same force.
Monday, Sept. 19, 1864.
We received orders at 10 o'clock last night to march at 2 o'clock this morning which we did. Daylight brought us up near Opequan Creek on the Winchester-Berryville pike. Wilson's Cavalry had charged and carried the enemy's picket line and earthworks protecting the pike near both the East and West entrance of the gorge through which this road runs, taken a goodly number of prisoners, and it looked like business again. A large number of troops moved in two or more columns across the Opequan for about a mile and then up the narrow winding pike in one column through a little valley or gorge, known as the Berryville canyon to us, but as Ash Hollow locally, with second growth or scrub oak and ash trees and underbrush coming close down its scraggy abrupt banks two hundred feet high more or less in places after crossing Abraham Creek, to the road and rivulet winding along the gorge for nearly three miles—the source of which stream is wrongly given on all maps pertaining to this battle—on past General Sheridan near the west end of the canyon towards Winchester sitting on his horse a little off the road to the right in the open field on slightly ascending ground watching the column our brigade was in which, owing to its plucky fight under great disadvantages at the Battle of the Monocacy which largely saved the city of Washington barely nine weeks before, he had selected for the most important point in his line of battle at the head of the gorge on the pike to Winchester with our valiant regiment and the Fourteenth New Jersey planted across it even the colors of each which were in the centre of the regiments, being in the center of the pike and the rest of the army ordered to guide on us. Surely this was the place of honor in the battle that day for the Sixth Corps followed the pike in all the assaults of the day which was quite crooked including the first one until the enemy was driven completely routed through the city of Winchester when night put an end to the fighting Sheridan restlessly urged the men across a small ravine opposite where he sat, his eyes wandering occasionally everywhere over the large open space which gradually rose to the vast comparatively level but slightly rolling battlefield in our front, as the men looked curiously at him so near I could touch him as we marched, little dreaming that three years after I should be honored for my work that day, which he saw, by being a member of his staff, or that he would be instrumental in saving my life when ill with malignant yellow fever and threatened with fatal black vomit in New Orleans, La. in 1867, by sending his cook, a faithful old colored woman, who was an expert nurse of yellow fever patients, to care for me. It was the nearest we had ever been to him, and as our regiment passed slowly by fours, the line being congested ahead, the men took a good look at him for he was already famous and every soldier's ideal hero; and as they did so they unconsciously slackened their sauntering pace a little which was what caused Sheridan to urge them on.
No. 1.
Where Sheridan's army crossed Opequan Creek, Va., Sept. 19, 1864; steel bridge built 1907; view of Winchester-Berryville pike looking west towards Wood's Mill and Winchester, taken from the spring June 29, 1908.