It was on this march from Catlettsburg to Louisa that the Forty-second Ohio began, for the first time, that process of seasoning which soon made veterans out of raw civilians. The hardships of that march were not such as an old soldier would think terrible; but for men who but five days before had left Columbus without any experience whatever, it was very rough. On the morning of the eighteenth the first division started, twenty-five mounted on horses, and one hundred going by boat. The cavalry got on very well; but the river was quite low, and after a few miles of bumping along, the old boat finally stuck fast. Leaving this wrecked concern, the men started to tramp it overland. The country was exceedingly wild; the paths narrow, leading up hill and down hill with monotonous regularity. That night when the tired fellows stopped to rest, they had advanced only eight miles. The next day, however, they reached Louisa, where the mounted company had taken possession and prepared to stay; meanwhile the remaining companies were on the road. Rain set in; the north wind blew, and soon it was very cold. The steep, rocky paths scarcely afforded room for the wagon-train, whose conveyances were lightened of their loads by throwing off many articles of comfort which these soldiers, with their unwarlike notions of life, hated to lose. But advance they must, if only with knapsacks and muskets; and on the twenty-first all were together again. About this time Garfield arrived. Paintville, where it was intended to attack Marshall, is on Painter Creek, near the west fork of the Big Sandy, about thirty miles above Louisa. The first thing to be done, therefore, was to cross that intervening space, very quickly, and attack the enemy without delay. A slow campaign would result in disaster. While this advance was being made, it would also be necessary to see to the matter of reinforcements; for Marshall had thirty-five hundred, Garfield not half as many. The only possible chance would be to communicate an order to the Fortieth Ohio, under Colonel Cranor, at Paris, one hundred miles away; that hundred miles was accessible to Marshall, and full of rebel sympathizers. The man who carried a dispatch to Cranor from Garfield, would carry his life in his hand, with a liberal chance of losing it. To find such an one, both able and willing for the task, would be like stumbling over a diamond in an Illinois corn-field. In his perplexity, Garfield went to Colonel Moore, of the Fourteenth Kentucky, and said to him: “I must communicate with Cranor; some of your men know this section of country well; have you a man we can fully trust for such a duty?” The Colonel knew such a man, and promised to send him to head-quarters. Directly the man appeared. He was a native of that district, coming from the head of the Baine, a creek near Louisa, and his name was John Jordan. What kind of a man he was has been well told by a writer in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for October, 1865: