At Williamsburg, a cavalry force under Col. Byrd, of the 1st Tennessee Regiment, was detached for the purpose of making a demonstration on Knoxville, by way of Big Creek Gap, and at Montgomery a cavalry force was detached with orders to pass through Winter’s Gap and occupy Knoxville. The main body of the command moved on the direct road to Kingston, which point the advance reached on the 1st of September. Col. Foster arrived at Knoxville September 2nd, captured several engines and cars, which he sent up the railroad to Morristown, Greeneville and near Jonesboro, and took also large quantities of supplies. Little resistance was met with by the Federal troops, throughout their entire march from Kentucky--the enemy in all cases retreating before them. Their main body, with Gen. Burnside in person, moved forward from Kingston and reached Knoxville on the 3rd. In his opinion, “nothing could be better than the conduct of the officers and men of the Twenty-third corps; from the time it left Kentucky, their labors were most difficult, but were performed with the greatest accuracy and efficiency.” The mountainous route by which the army traveled was long and fatiguing, but it was the only one possible. At the end of the journey the army was, he said, “in the midst of friends;” it “found the people generally loyal and disposed to do all in their power for its comfort and welfare.” At the same time it was more than two hundred miles from the Ohio River, and one hundred and fifty miles from the nearest point where the mountains and ridges that traverse Southeastern Kentucky give place to the fertile and garden-like “blue-grass region.” From beyond those highlands, supplies for the army must be transported in wagons drawn by mules, whose mongrel nature, hardy as it is, was so unequal to the roughness and toil it had to bear in the work of transportation, that the number of their dead bodies lying on sides of the road over the mountains might be named Legion. It was currently estimated, as aggregating from first to last, ten thousand. Although the army occupied Knoxville and other important points in East Tennessee, it had not exclusive possession of that region. The great body of the population was friendly, but there were hostile troops in several directions.