On the 6th of January the rebel Major-General George B. Crittenden, commanding the division to which Zollicoffer’s brigade was attached, arrived at Mill Spring, and established his headquarters. He brought to his position three Tennessee and one Mississippi regiment, and was afterwards reinforced by three regiments from Bowling Green, and still more recently by some fifteen hundred Virginia troops from Knoxville. This gave him, all told, over ten thousand men. A very effective portion of his force was a body of cavalry, from two thousand to three thousand strong, in which he was superior to General Thomas, but which was of no service to him in the engagement. General Buell, the Federal commander in Kentucky, having now at his disposal a competent army to commence offensive operations, ordered General Thomas to advance with his division against General Crittenden’s position at Mill Spring. With two brigades under his command General Thomas broke up camp near Lebanon and marched, by way of Columbia, toward the rebel stronghold. On Thursday, the 16th of January, the Ninth Ohio (German), Colonel McCook, brother of the General in command at Mumfordsville, the Second Minnesota, Colonel Van Clear; Tenth Indiana, Colonel Manson; Fourth Kentucky, Colonel (formerly Judge) Fry of Danville, and Colonel Wolford’s Kentucky Cavalry, and one battery, with General Thomas and staff, arrived after a most fatiguing march of many days. They came in incessant rain, over horrid roads, via Jamestown, at a point about eight miles south-west of Somerset, on the road leading to Hart’s Ford, and the rebel intrenchments, and pitched their tents near a fork of country roads, upon what is known all through that section as “Logan’s place,” a very extensive plantation of several thousand acres. On Friday, the Fourteenth Ohio, Colonel Stedman, and the Tenth Kentucky, Colonel Harlan, three detached companies of the First regiment of Michigan Engineers and Mechanics, and an Ohio battery, reached within eight miles north-west of the position of General Thomas. After undergoing indescribable hardships in making their way on a direct line, through the wild, rugged, heavily-timbered, and almost untravelled country intervening between that point and Columbia—(they had to construct a road as they went)—they encamped there.