ering
Gauley Bridge--Floyd at Cotton Mountain--Rosecrans's methods with
private soldiers--Progress in discipline.

General Rosecrans had succeeded McClellan as ranking officer in West
Virginia, but it was not until the latter part of September that the
region was made a department and he was regularly assigned to
command. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. v. pp. 604, 616, 647.]
Meanwhile the three months' enlistments were expiring, many
regiments were sent home, new ones were received, and a complete
reorganization of his forces took place. Besides holding the
railroad, he fortified the Cheat Mountain pass looking toward
Staunton, and the pass at Elkwater on the mountain summit between
Huttonsville and Huntersville. My own fortifications at Gauley
Bridge were part of the system of defensive works he had ordered. By
the middle of August he had established a chain of posts, with a
regiment or two at each, on a line upon which he afterwards marched,
from Weston by way of Bulltown, Sutton, and Summersville to Gauley
Bridge.

[Illustration Map--Affair At Carnifex Ferry]

As soon as he received the news of Floyd's attack upon Tyler at
Cross Lanes, he hastened his preparations and began his march
southward from Clarksburg with three brigades, having left the Upper
Potomac line in command of General Kelley, and the Cheat Mountain
region in command of General J. J. Reynolds. His route (already
indicated) was a rough one, and the portion of it between Sutton and
Summersville, over Birch Mountain, was very wild and difficult. He
crossed the mountain on the 9th, and left his bivouac on the morning
of the 10th of September, before daybreak. Marching through
Summersville, he reached Cross Lanes about two o'clock in the
afternoon. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. v. p. 129.] Floyd's
position was now about two miles distant, and, waiting only for his
column to close up, he again pressed forward. General Benham's
brigade was in front, and soon met the enemy's pickets. Getting the
impression that Floyd was in retreat, Benham pressed forward rather
rashly, deploying to the left and coming under a sharp fire from the
right of the enemy's works. Floyd had intrenched a line across a
bend of the Gauley River, where the road from Cross Lanes to
Lewisburg finds its way down the cliffs to Carnifex Ferry. His
flanks rested upon precipices rising abruptly from the water's edge,
and he also intrenched some rising ground in front of his prin