The Road to Gardiner's Store On New Year's Day, 1862, Col. George Crook led six companies of his 36th Ohio Infantry out of Summersville, Virginia - now West Virginia - and raced north into what one local paper, The Marietta Home News, called "the very heart of Africa." They were in a hurry because, according to reports that eventually proved erroneous, Confederate guerrillas had recaptured and burned the town of Sutton, the seat of neighboring Braxton County. Finding the situation there largely in order but secessionist "bushwhackers" still in the field, Crook took two companies and beat a hasty retreat back to Summersville. Four companies remained in Sutton temporarily, however, and their mission was clear: As one captain wrote, "Colonel Crook's orders were that everything along the road was to be burned." And so it was. One soldier, John Booth of Company G, wrote in his diary that "we simply burned everything of worth, burnable. The destruction was complete. That destruction included two small hamlets: Gardiner's Store and Chapman's Store - the latter occupied, according to a disgusted Capt. William H. Dunham by no one but an orphaned girl. At Gardiner's Store the Ohioans, enraged that a comrade had been wounded nearby by a guerrilla, drove residents from their homes, in one case by throwing hot coals into a woman's occupied bed, and then burned the town. As they neared their camp at Summersville, a handful of men intentionally lagged behind with a prisoner they had taken along the way. When they column was out of sight, they told the man to run for his life, and then shot him dead. "They left him unburied," Captain Dunham recorded in horror. My God: has it come to this? Dunham's letter and similar missives upset parents and friends back home, which led other soldiers in turn to defend what had happened. One asked his mother in February, "if we ant out here to kill Bushwhackers what are we for?" Civil War historians have usually presented the burning of homes and towns, as well as a hardening attitude toward prisoners and civilians, as something peculiar to the last half of the war. According to that familiar trope, a gentleman's war slowly gave was to something uglier, symbolized by William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea and Philip Sheridan's burning of the Shenandoah Valley, both events occurring late in 1864. But in the vast mountainous region that William Goodell Frost would late name Appalachia, such incidents were already becoming common by early 1862. The path taken by the 36th Ohio to Gardinier's Store illustrates how the transition to hard war happened so quickly in the mountains. Organized five months earlier from men in and around Marietta, along Ohio's border with Virginia, the raw 36th Ohio Volunteer Infantry had crossed the Ohio River at the end of August 1861, moving south so hastily that it still did not have a colonel or full complement of officers, much less uniforms or adequate training. Four companies stopped immediately to garrison the town of Parkersburg, but six kept moving into the interior under the command of a staff officer. Along the way, starting on their very first day in Virginia, hidden Confederate guerrillas harassed them constantly even as reports of rebel atrocities circulated. Skirmishing continued all along the line of march. By mid-September, when the companies reached Summersville, they were exhausted, jumpy, demoralized and angry. There they met their new colonel, George Crook. A 32-year-old West Pointer and veteran of two Indian wars in the Pacific Northwest, Crook had pulled strings to get command of a regiment of his own. He encountered a command that he described as "almost in a state of mutiny," but he worked hard to win them over. He secured desperately needed uniforms, shoes and overcoats, the last item greatly necessary in a climate that already had brought snow. He met with his officers regularly, teaching them the rudiments of command so that they could in turn drill their men. Discovering a sawmill nearby, he had his men construct a "drill house" where they could train by day and learn by night. What endeared the 36th Ohio most about Crook, however, was their sense that he would allow them to take their revenge on the bushwhackers who continued to torment them. The crucial element was his record as an Indian fighter. Men like John Booth had quickly drawn a comparison between Indian warriors and local bushwhackers, both a lesser, ostensibly primitive "other" who refused to fight conventionally. They ached to respond in kind. "Colonel Crook is a regular Old Indian fighter," John A. Palmer of Company G wrote, "I reckon he will "Bushwhack" some of the Bushwhacking cusses in regular Bushwhacking stile if they venture across his war path." As it turned out, Crook planned to do exactly that. As the historian Mark Grimsley has written, most high-ranking federal officers in 1861 advocated "soft war" policies designed to win back the hearts and minds of fellow countrymen. Crook was not one of them. "Being fresh from the Indian country," he later wrote in his memoir, "where I had more or less experience with that kind of warfare, I set to work organizing for the task." As the Army had done against the Rogue River and Yakima people, Crook organized strike teams that reconnoitered the area, seized property from suspected partisans and their families, and skirmished with bushwhacking bands in what another generation would call "search-and-destroy missions" and another, even later, would term "kill teams." John Booth's Company G, commanded by John Palmer's brother Jewett, became especially adept at what the men euphemistically called "scouting." As early as October 1861, the Ohioans also began sporadically shooting prisoners in the field rather than bringing them in, convinced that Union authorities were treating too many with kid gloves. William Dunham lamented that "our fellows shoot them down whenever they find them with arms in their hands. ... It is the most disgraceful mode of warfare imaginable." Crook disagreed. Indeed, in his memoir he boasted that "when an officer returned from a scout he would report that they had caught so-and-so, but in bringing him in he slipped off a log while crossing a stream and broke his neck, or that he was killed by an accidental discharge of one of them men's guns, and many like reports. But they never brought back any more prisoners. As the winter deepened, other regiments followed suit, scouting, seizing supplies, taking hostages and burning homes, barns and small towns. All that men like Crook now lacked was official sanction from the high command. That would come soon, when in March 1862 John C. Frémont replaced William S. Rosecrans as the region's overall commander. Unlike Rosecrans, who had attempted to rein in his troops, Frémont pursued a hard line. Fresh from his attempt to subdue Missouri's guerrillas, he launched what might be called a "surge," massing columns against guerrilla strongholds throughout southern West Virginia in an attempt to annihilate the bushwhacker bands once and for all. Sometimes dressed as Confederates, and sanctioned to offer no quarter, they nearly succeeded. The 36th Ohio remained at the heart of it, driving into the heart of bushwhacker territory, rugged Webster County, and burning much if not all of the county seat of Addison. The guerrillas reeled; many gave up and headed home or fled to regular Confederate units. But when Stonewall Jackson's Valley Campaign diverted Frémont's troops and attention, the bushwhackers quickly regained their footing. The road to Gardinier's Store would remain a potent symbol, and a warning, long after Frémont's failed surge was forgotten. Sources: "Diary of Sergeant John Thomas Booth," Dr. John Booth Papers, Ohio Historical Society; William A. Dunham Letters, United States Army Military History Institute, Carlisle, Pennsylvania; Martin E. Schmitt, ed., "General George Crook: His Autobiography; Albert George Letters, Ohio Historical Society; John A. Palmer Diary, in Lester L. Kempfer, "The Salem Light Guard: Company G, 36th Regiment, Ohio Volunteer Infantry, Marietta, Ohio, 1861-1865"; Kenneth W. Noe, ""Exterminating Savages": The Union Army and Mountain Guerrillas in Southern West Virginia, 1861-1862," In Kenneth W. Noe and Shannon H. Wilson, eds., "The Civil War in Appalachia: Collected Essays." Kenneth W. Noe, a professor of Southern history at Auburn University, is the author, most recently, of "Reluctant Rebels: The Confederates Who Joined the Army After 1861."