Here we captured some fifteen hundred stands of arms and a considerable store of munitions which the Confederate general had not been able to carry away or destroy.

It is safe to say that in the wild defile which we had threaded for the last twenty miles there were as many positions as there were miles in which he could easily have delayed my advance a day or two, forcing me to turn his flank by the most difficult mountain climbing, and where indeed, with forces so nearly equal, my progress should have been permanently barred.

At Gauley Bridge he burned the structure which gave name to the place, and which had been a series of substantial wooden trusses resting upon heavy stone piers.

My orders definitively limited me to the point we had now reached in my advance, and I therefore sent forward only a detachment to follow the enemy and keep up his precipitate retreat.

Wise did not stop till he reached Greenbrier and the White Sulphur Springs, and there was abundant evidence that he regarded his movement as a final abandonment of this part of West Virginia.