At that time, one company of Americans and ninety-three Slavic Legionaires composed the Onega or right wing of the Allied army which was at Chekuevo, some hundred and forty miles from Archangel on the Onega River. A landing party of the original Poole force, expert rifle marines from the United States warship, _Olympia_, had taken the port of Onega after a noisy fight in September, and a few days later, gave it over to this Russo-American detachment, three hundred strong, whose object was to accord right lateral support to the Railway Column, and above all to safeguard the significant winter road connecting the Railway with Onega, along which the winter mail came sporadically, and the only reinforcements, three companies of British Yorks, were brought from Murmansk during the cold days of February. As the Americans, verst post to verst post, fought their way south along the Railway line, so this detachment went forward at bloody experience and kept abreast, until the Bolsheviks, following the Railway victory at Verst Four Forty Five, grew cautious, and drew back up the Onega Valley to Turchasova. And when winter came, the forty miles between Turchasova and Chekuevo, were a shadowy No Man's Acre along the twisting, snow highway of the river, where hostile patrols prowled, and life was held by uncertain tenure; but the disputed ground was narrowed by half when the Americans moved up part of their small number nearly midway to the Bolshevik village, and took station at Kyvalanda, in order to watch a southern trail inlet to the important Railway road, along which were regularly dispatched visiting patrols to the scattered villages of Bolshie Ozerki, that they might hearten and keep contact with the few pathetic Frenchmen and Allied Russians who made an audacious pretense of maintaining a post there, and far off on the snow, deserted many miles from the Railway, reminded one of a choice morsel of tenderloin, baited for puma. The Onega detachment joined in the operation for Plesetskaya, which the new Commander-in-Chief, in furtherance of his defensive policy of consolidation, was anxious to take before the intense cold. Plesetskaya was an important base, and had they lost it, the Bolsheviks would have encountered great, almost insurmountable obstacles, in bringing troops from Vologda, and concentrating them in an aggressive winter warfare, for this point was a junction of the principal highways leading from the Railway line to Onega, Kochmas, Tarasovo and Shenkurst. But this Allied advance failed, primarily for the same cause that the whole Expedition failed, through ridiculous paucity of numbers, and in the second instance (although there were several more), because it was impossible to maintain any semblance of liaison over the difficult lateral terrain which separated the five Columns, theoretically converging in the push for Plesetskaya.