Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 34.djvu/311

 The Ln.boden It aid and Its Effects. 30o

waiting for General Averill to return, while 2,500 men were loitering there.

Some wag of a fellow wrote a doggerel verse on the inside walls of the old Courthouse, entitled "Mudwall Jackson/' the principal feature of which was a complaint that "Mudwall Jack- son" would not fight. The writer saw this writing a few days after the retreat of the Federals, and it was understood by the Confederate soldiers as having been put there by a Yankee sol- dier, and as we Confederates understood it at the time, the ani- mus of the verse was because the then dead "Stonewall" had been so hard on the Yankee, and the live "Mudwall" had escaped their net.

THREW THE SCOUTS OFF.

So much for the explanation of the title "Mudwall." When the Confederate troops in the Greenbrier Valley were put in motion for the raid into Northwestern Virginia, the marching orders were to go east, and the common opinion among the sol- diers was that they were to be sent to the Valley of Virginia. This false movement on the part of the Confederates was made in order to throw the Federal scouts off the track, which it did most completely. Beginning at Lewisburg, the 22nd Virginia Infantry Regiment, under the command of Colonel George Pat- ton, marched east to the White Sulphur, and there turned north and passed through the Eastern part of Greenbrier and Poca- hontas counties into Highland county. The troops in Pocahon- tas county, consisting of the Nineteenth Virginia Cavalry and Dunn's battalion of mounted infantry, were ordered towards the Warm Springs, and after one day's march turned north. The soldiers of this command had no idea of their destination when they received the marching orders. At this time the writer, a been told, was not an enlisted soldier, but the fact that within the last year the Federal raiding parties had seized and carried away more than two hundred head of my father's cattle, and a number of fine horses, there would be an oppor- tunity now of recovering this stock; this fact more than any- thing else, led me to accompany the expedition.

Another thing, my father the fall before had given me the most beautiful saddle horse that I have ever owned in my life. The horse was five years old, a blood bay, 15 1-2 hands tall.