oyd's battery on Cotton Mountain fired
on very slight provocation, and caution was necessary in riding or
moving about the camp. The houses of the hamlet were not purposely
injured, for Floyd would naturally be unwilling to destroy the
property of West Virginians, and it was a safe presumption that we
had removed the government property from buildings within range of
fire, as we had in fact done. Our method of forwarding supplies was
to assemble the wagon trains near my lower camp during the day, and
push them forward to Gauley Mount and Tompkins farm during the
night. The ferry-boat at Gauley Bridge was kept out of harm's way in
the Gauley, behind the projection of Gauley Mount, but the hawser on
which it ran was not removed. At nightfall the boat would be manned,
dropped down to its place, made fast to the hawser by a
snatch-block, and commence its regular trips, passing over the
wagons. The ferries, both at the bridge and at Montgomery's, were
under the management of Captain Lane of the Eleventh Ohio and his
company of mechanics. [Footnote: Captain P. P. Lane of Cincinnati,
later colonel of the regiment.] We had found at points along the
Kanawha the gunwales of flatboats, gotten out by lumbermen in the
woods and brought to the river bank ready to be put into boats for
the coal trade, which had already much importance in the valley.
These gunwales were single sticks of timber, sixty or eighty feet
long, two or three feet wide, and say six inches thick. Each formed
the side of a boat, which was built by tying two gunwales together
with cross timbers, the whole being then planked. Such boats were
three or four times as large as those used for the country ferries
upon the Gauley and New rivers, and enabled us to make these larger
ferries very commodious. Of course the enemy knew that we used them
at night, and would fire an occasional random shot at them, but did
us no harm.

The enemy's guns on the mountain were so masked by the forest that
we did not waste ammunition in firing at them, except as they
opened, when our guns so quickly returned their fire that they never
ventured upon continuous action, and after the first week we had
only occasional shots from them. We had planted our sharpshooters
also in protected spots along the narrower part of New River near
the post, and made the enemy abandon the other margin of the stream,
except with scattered sentinels. In a short time matters thus
assumed a shape in which ou