John Milton Hoge and Timothy Elijah Mitchell:
Breakfast Interrupted (1864)
John Milton Hoge writes that after an engagement August 4, 1864, with Union soldiers at the New Creek Depot (Keyser, Mineral County, West Virginia), the 8th Virginia Cavalry (under Gen. Jubal Early's command) encamped the next day “four miles below Moorefield.” The following incident occurred on the early morning of their second night in camp. (John Milton Hoge, A Journal by John Milton Hoge 1862–5, written August 1865, published 1961 by Mary Hoge Bruce, Cincinnati, Ohio, pp. 28–29.)
Aug. 7
At 3 o'clock A.M., we were ordered to get our horses and be ready to move at a moment's warning.…T. E. Mitchell and I were all of our mess present; we had gotten some green corn, and had our breakfast ready by daylight. (A fine mess of corn soup.) We had just sat down, when we heard a gun fire; then another, and another, and we soon saw it was no time to be eating.…It was a complete stampede to Moorefield; we retreated all day and night across the mountains and got near Mt. Jackson; we stopped a while there. I never saw my horse again. We lost a great many men and horses and all our artillery.
Note
- Timothy Mitchell discusses the earlier New Creek Station action and a second raid there, along with John Milton Hoge's search for another horse, in his December 6, 1864 letter.
- Research provided by Patricia B. Mitchell, great-granddaughter-in-law of Timothy Mitchell.
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