Twenty miles from Valley Mountain was a road running from Beverly, Va., on the Baltimore and Ohio, to Staunton, crossing Cheat Mountain at a place on the mountain called Cheat Pass. It was General Lee’s object of this expedition to dislodge and destroy the enemy at this place. The fort at the pass was garrisoned by some three thousand men, while at Beverly they had some eight thousand men. Besides the fortifications on the mountain, the enemy had felled large trees outward from the fort and trimmed off the limbs and sharpened the many ends, so with a gun and knapsack and without an enemy in sight it would not be an easy matter to crawl through these obstructions to the fort. The plan of the attack was for General Rusk with his Arkansas brigade to cross Greenbrier River, which flowed near the base of the mountain, and assault the fort in front, while General Lee’s troops should take it in the rear. September 12, 1861, at 9 A.M. was the hour, and the guns from General Rusk’s brigade were to be the signal for our moving. We left Valley Mountain on the morning of September 10, with three days’ (scant) rations. We marched on the valley road a while, and then commenced the ascent of Cheat Mountain. Our force for this expedition consisted of the First, Seventh, and Fourteenth Tennessee Regiments commanded respectively by Colonels Maney, Hatton, and Forbes, with General S. R. Anderson as brigadier. The other troops, commanded by Generals Donelson and Loring, moved down the valley road near the base of the mountain. My brigade was to get in the rear of the fortifications and cut off any reenforcements that might come. When we reached the crest of Cheat Mountain I saw the roughest and wildest country that I ever beheld, and we were to traverse it for twenty miles. The mountain was cut up into peaks and crags. Of course we had to march in single file, and our brigade stretched out some three miles. General Lee and our commanders were in advance, and any command from them was passed back from the front man to the next in the rear, and so to the end of the line. We received and passed back many a time: “Keep quiet, keep well closed up.” It was impossible to keep closed up; sometimes my leader would be thirty feet ahead of me, while I would be struggling over a huge bowlder or trying to crawl up the mountain by the aid of a sapling. The night of September 11 we bivouacked on top of the mountain only a few miles from the enemy’s fortifications. It was about the roughest place I ever saw, and on account of the many rocks it was difficult to find a place for a spread. My comrade, George Keeling, was a delicate young man, and I carried his blanket, and after scraping off a lot of stones I spread George’s blanket down, and we bunked together, covering with my blanket. Soon after we had retired it commenced to rain, and all night we had a continuous downpour. We not only got thoroughly wet, but our rations of biscuits washed into dough.