George Dallas Mosgrove was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1844, and enlisted in the Fourth Kentucky Cavalry Regiment as a private on September 10, 1862. Through service as a clerk and orderly in both regimental and brigade headquarters, he became familiar with the environment of officers and command. His eyewitness account illuminates the western theater of the Civil War in Kentucky, east Tennessee, and southwest Virginia.

 

Mosgrove admits to a romanticism influenced by Sir Walter Scott in his description of the superiority of the officers and "some of the boys" in his regiment. At the same time, his narrative includes unadorned passages that depict with stark honesty the sordidness of war and man's inhumanity. Mosgrove provides firsthand information about military actions at Blue Springs, Saltville, and elsewhere, and relates details of his participation in John Hunt Morgan's Last Kentucky Raid and the skirmish where Morgan was killed. Mosgrove's highly entertaining account is a perceptive and informative retelling of the truth as he saw it.