In like manner, whenever unauthorized seizure or stealing of animals, food, or forage occurs, let double the value be charged to the company in which it occurs as a punishment for the offence. The quartermaster can, by proper exercise of his authority, buy whatever ought to be taken, and no one else has any right to meddle in the matter.

Please see this rule carried out so thoroughly that this sort of demoralizing pillage may be thoroughly stopped.

Very respectfully, your obedient servant,

J. D. COX,

Brigadier-General, Commanding.

WASHINGTON, April 23, 1862.

Honorable E. M. STANTON,

Secretary of War:

Report of Frederick Winter, captain Company I, Seventy-fifth Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers, upon the late casualty on the Shenandoah River, in which a large number of the members of Companies I and K were drowned.

On Friday, 11th instant, I was commanded to proceed with the pioneers of the Third Brigade to the Shenandoah River to erect a bridge over it, to have it finished by about 8 o'clock on the next morning. Arriving at the place I found, what I knew before, that this river was from 400 to 500 feet wide, and so deep and rapid that the building of a bridge was a matter of impossibility.

After consulting the engineers of the staff of General Blenker, namely, Captain Schulz and Lieutenant Sprandel, we came to the conclusion to build rafts, as the only way to transport the troops over the river. On Sunday evening we were able to convey over our first raft a portion of the Fifty-eighth Regiment New York State Volunteers, and on Monday, another raft being finished, we passed over the balance of the Fifty-eighth, together with the Seventy-fourth Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers, and nearly a company of cavalry.

The working of the rafts was done by three ropes, of which one was tied on a tree above the landing place and the others were managed on both shores by the men on the principle of a floating bridge. The best idea I can give is the diagram of our position.