On December 20th Gen. E. O. C. Ord, commanding a brigade, moved westward along the chain-bridge road, toward Dranesville, for the purpose of making a reconnoissance and gathering forage. Near Dranesville, when returning, he was attacked by a Confederate force consisting of five regiments of infantry and one of cavalry, with a battery. The attack came from the south and struck his right flank. Changing front so as to face the enemy, he found advantageous ground for receiving battle, and placed his artillery so as to enfilade the Centreville road on which the enemy's battery was posted. Leaving his cavalry in the shelter of a wooded hill, he got his infantry well in hand and moved steadily forward on the enemy. His guns were handled with skill, and soon exploded a Confederate caisson and drove off the battery. Then he made a bayonet charge, before which the Confederate infantry fled, leaving on the field their dead and wounded, and a large quantity of equipments. His loss was seven killed and sixty wounded. The Confederate loss was about a hundred. That portion of Virginia west of the Alleghanies (now West Virginia) never was essentially a slaveholding region. The number of slaves held there was very small, as it always must be in a mountainous country; and the interests of the people, with their iron mines, their coal mines, and their forests of valuable timber, and their streams flowing into the Ohio, were allied much more closely with those of the free States than with those of the tide-water portion of their own State. When, therefore, at the beginning of the war, before the people of Virginia had voted on the question of adopting or rejecting the ordinance of secession as passed by their convention, troops from the cotton States were poured into that State to secure it for the Confederacy, they found no such welcome west of the mountains as east of them; and the task of driving them out from the valleys of the Kanawha and the Monongahela was easy in comparison with the work that lay before the National armies on the Potomac and the James. Major-Gen. George B. McClellan, then in his thirty-fifth year, crossed the Ohio with a small army in May, and won several victories that for the time cleared West Virginia of Confederate troops, gained him a vote of thanks in Congress, and made for him a sudden reputation, which resulted in his being called to the head of the army after the disaster at Bull Run. Some of the battles in West Virginia, including Philippi, Cheat River, and Rich Mountain, have already been described. An account of other minor engagements in that State is given in this chapter.