The Battle of White Sulphur Springs by Eric J. Wittenberg Page A

of Averell’s Fourth Separate Brigade had just been converted from infantry to mounted infantry at the time of the battle, and they had not yet been redesignated as cavalry. They were redesignated as cavalry in 1864. I have elected to refer to them by their original designations—as infantry regiments—rather than by their subsequent mounted infantry and cavalry designations for the simple reason that the contemporary accounts of this campaign use the infantry designations, and it would be far more confusing to the reader to change them than to simply use their original designations.
    Any errors of interpretation set forth herein are exclusively my own, and I take responsibility for them as such.
    As with any project of this nature, I owe a number of debts of gratitude that may never be repaid. First and foremost, I am grateful to Terry Lowry, the dean of West Virginia Civil War Historians. Terry not only arranged a tour of the battlefield—all of which is private property—and escorted me on it, but he also provided me with the contents of the research files that he has spent years accumulating, greatly shortcutting my process of gathering material for this project. Finally, Terry reviewed this manuscript for me in order to identify and correct the inevitable factual errors that I made along the way. Steve Cunningham, the authority on the 7 th West Virginia Cavalry, also provided me with some research material and many of the photographs of participants that grace these pages and reviewed the manuscript for me. Brian Stuart Kesterson, who had an ancestor who fought at White Sulphur Springs and is also an authority on West Virginia Civil War history, provided me with the benefit of his insight and lots of interesting photographs of artifacts recovered from the battlefield and also reviewed the manuscript for me.
    My friends Daniel Mallock and J. David Petruzzi both read the manuscript for me in order to ensure that even someone without any working knowledge of the battle could understand what happened there, and I appreciate their contributions a great deal. Duane Siskey and Chris Van Blargen both rendered invaluable research assistance, and I appreciate their help. Steve Stanley, the best cartographer in the business, drew the excellent maps that grace this volume, and I appreciate his contribution.
    I also want to give a special thank-you to two people who played an invaluable role in the completion of this project. Finding information about Baron Paul von König proved to be a real challenge. Finding information about his ancient ennobled family proved even more difficult and was further complicated by the fact that I do not speak or read German. Hence, the few sources available on the Internet were useless to me. The current Baron von König, whose name is Dominik, provided invaluable information about his family, and about Paul von König in particular, that has never been seen before by anyone outside the family. Dominik is the great-great-nephew of Paul von König. Dominik and his son Florian, who works at the United Nations in New York, have been consistently gracious and unfailingly helpful, and both went out of their way to help a stranger. I owe them both an enormous debt of gratitude. Without their assistance, the biographical sketch of Paul von König that makes up Appendix B of this book would not have been possible.
    I am likewise grateful to the good people at The History Press. This is the second book we’ve done together, and I enjoy working with them. I am particularly grateful to Will McKay, who shepherded this project to completion. I had some medical issues that delayed this book for a number of months, and for the first time in my writing career, I did not deliver a manuscript on or before my deadline. Thanks to Will, what might have been a thoroughly unpleasant situation was made easy.
    Finally, and as always, I owe the greatest debt of gratitude of all to my best