United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Anecdotes
necessary for the first man to be raised up on the shoulders of two
others in order to open the door. Once inside, the other men were
tossed up to him and he pulled them in like bags of meal. Finally there
were only two left and these jumped, caught the outstretched hands of
two inside and were hauled up into the car. Not until then did Andrews
step aboard under the very nose of the suspicious sentry. The engineer
was so anxious to start that he pulled the throttle wide open and for a
few seconds the wheels spun round and round without catching on the
rails. He finally slowed up enough to allow the wheels to bite and the
engine started off with a jerk which took all the soldiers in the
baggage-cars off their feet. Just at this moment the fat engineer
waddled out of the eating-house shouting at the top of his voice,
"Stop, thief! Stop, thief!" He was followed by the fireman who bellowed
to the sentry, "Shoot 'em, shoot 'em! They're Yanks!" It was too late.
The General was taking the first curve on two wheels, leaving the quiet
little station swarming and buzzing like a hornet's nest struck by a
stone. The train had been captured without losing a man.
Now came the even more difficult part of the undertaking, to run the
engine for two hundred miles through an enemy's country and to force it
past all the other trains between Big Shanty and Chattanooga. The first
thing to do was to prevent any message of the capture being sent on
ahead. There was no telegraph station at Big Shanty, but there was no
telling how soon word would be sent back to the nearest telegraph
operator. Accordingly, four miles out the engine was stopped and a man
named Scott, who had been a great coon-hunter before entering the army,
shinned up a telegraph pole and sawed through the wires. While he was
doing this, the rest of the party took up one of the rails and loaded
it into a baggage-car. Others piled in a lot of dry railroad ties to be
used in burning the bridges. The General was an old-style engine the
like of which is never seen nowadays. It had one of the round, funny
smoke-stacks which we still see on old postage stamps and it burned
cord-wood instead of coal, but it was a good goer for those times and
was soon whirling through the enemy's country at what seemed to the
raiders a tremendous rate of speed. Before long they were compelled to
stop at one of the stations to take in wood and water. Andrews
explained to the station-agent that they were agents of General
Beauregard running a powder-train down to the Confederate headquarters
at Corinth. At one station named Etowah, they found an old locomotive
belonging to a local iron company standing there with steam up. It
carried the name of Jonah and so far as the raiders were concerned, it
certainly lived up to its name. Brown, who was acting as engineer,
wanted to stop and put Jonah out of business, but Andrews decided to
push on. It was a fatal mistake. At Kingston, thirty miles from their
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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