two years the Seventh had been in numberless
engagements, and its list of casualties in battle, made good by
recruiting, was said to have reached a thousand. Better soldiers
there were none, and Creighton proved himself a lion in every fight.

Casement, who rallied and led the most of the regiment from Cross
Lanes over the mountains to Charleston, became afterward colonel of
the One Hundred and Third Ohio. He came again under my command in
East Tennessee in the winter of 1863, and continued one of my
brigade commanders to the close of the war. He was a railway builder
by profession, had a natural aptitude for controlling bodies of men,
was rough of speech but generous of heart, running over with fun
which no dolefulness of circumstance could repress, as jolly a
comrade and as loyal a subordinate as the army could show.

After the Cross Lanes affair I fully expected that the Confederate
forces would follow the route which Casement had taken to
Charleston. Floyd's inactivity puzzled me, for he did no more than
make an intrenched camp at Carnifex Ferry, with outposts at Peters
Mountain and toward Summersville. The publication of the Confederate
Archives has partly solved the mystery. Floyd called on Wise to
reinforce him; but the latter demurred, insistent that the duty
assigned him of attacking my position in front needed all the men he
had. Both appealed to Lee, and Lee decided that Floyd was the senior
and entitled to command the joint forces. [Footnote: Official
Records, vol. v. pp. 155-165, 800, 802-813.] The letters of Wise
show a capacity for keeping a command in hot water which was unique.
If he had been half as troublesome to me as he was to Floyd, I
should indeed have had a hot time of it. But he did me royal service
by preventing anything approaching to co-operation between the two
Confederate columns. I kept my advance-guards constantly feeling of
both, and got through the period till Rosecrans joined me with
nothing more serious than some sharp affairs of detachments.

I was not without anxiety, however, and was constantly kept on the
alert. Rosecrans withdrew the Twelfth Ohio from my command,
excepting two companies under Major Hines, on the 19th of August,
[Footnote: My dispatch to Rosecrans of August 19; also Official
Records, vol. li. pt. i. p. 454.] and the imperative need of
detachments to protect the river below me was such that from this
time till the middle of September my garrison at Gauley Bridge