Jan/Feb 2010

Stonewall’s Grouse
by Bill Horn

hey marched silently up the steep mountainside, bypassing tangles of laurel and greenbrier with long guns in hand, achieving complete surprise when General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s Confederates fell on the Union troops on the other side. Massanutten was the mountain and a key part of Jackson’s famous 1862 Shenandoah Valley Campaign. One hundred forty-seven years later, hunters clutching their shotguns climb the same tangled ridges and briar filled ravines seeking to surprise ruffed grouse.

Mt. Massanutten bisects Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, dividing its famous river into the North Fork and South Fork. Rising to nearly 3,000 feet, the 40 miles of its steep ridges, ravines, cliff faces, twisting creeks and runs have grouse in all the right places.

Battle reports from 1862 referred to “the great bulwark of the Massanuttons.” Confederate General John Gordon described it as “rising to great height and so rugged and steep… that this mountain was an absolute barrier against any movement by an army.” Stonewall used the mountain to screen his gray-clad army’s movements from superior Northern forces during the three-month Valley Campaign.

My hunting notes from an early trip to this historic area described “the serpentine river far below,” “pale December sunlight glinting off the laurel,” and “punishing thickets.”
Those same notes from a trip to this historic area also read that we found “smart grouse that knew how to flush just out of range.” And the ruffs here are all brown phase birds – not a gray tail among them despite being in the heart of the old Confederacy.

History permeates these coverts. The surrounding towns are instantly recognized by Civil War buffs – Front Royal, Kernstown, Port Republic, Strasberg… places where Jackson earned a large part of his legend and many of our forebears perished fighting. Stonewall himself was a Valley man, leaving to attend West Point and returning after the Mexican War to teach artillery and math at the Virginia Military Institute. Old iron furnaces dot the mountain, furnaces that glowed many a night to forge iron for Confederate rifles and minie balls. Hunting or driving by the overgrown stone ruins is always a part of a Massanutten hunt. Back in the hollows are occasional cellar holes, remnants of old cabins, and piles of rocks testifying to how difficult it was to farm the hillsides. We once found an isolated headstone for a Mr. Haycock born in 1848 – did he serve with Stonewall as a drummer boy?

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