At Charleston the Kanawha River usually flows in a bed forty or fifty feet below the plateau on which the town is built; but the waters now rose above these high banks and flooded the town itself, being four or five feet deep in the first story of dwelling-houses built in what was considered a neighborhood safe from floods.

The inundation almost stopped communication, though our quartermasters tried to remedy part of the mischief by forcing light steamers up as near to the Kanawha Falls as possible.

But it was very difficult to protect the supplies landed upon a muddy bank where were no warehouses, and no protection but canvas covers stretched over the piles of barrels and boxes of bread and sacks of grain.

There was enormous waste and loss, but we managed to keep our men in rations, and were better off than the Confederates, in regard to whom Floyd afterward reported to his government that the eleven days of cold storms at Sewell Mountain had "cost more men, sick and dead, than the battle of Manassas Plains." It has been asserted by Confederate writers that Lee was executing a movement to turn Rosecrans's left flank when the latter marched back from Sewell Mountain.

If so, it certainly had not gone far enough to attract our attention, and from my own knowledge of the situation, I do not believe it had passed beyond the form of discussion of a possible movement when the weather should become settled.