On November 8, 1861, in a torrential rain, the Union advance guard rounded a bend on the West Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River and disappeared down a seven-foot-wide muddy path. Above them on Ivy Mountain, hidden behind rocks and bushes, 250 Confederate riflemen waited. The hillside exploded with smoke from double-barrel shotguns and old muskets. Four Union soldiers were dead in the first volley; thirteen more lay wounded. Brigadier General William Bull Nelson rode forward, drew his saber, climbed onto a conspicuous rock, and shouted that if the Confederates could not hit him they could not hit any of his men. He stayed up there until the 21st Ohio Infantry reached the top of the ridge and started rolling boulders down on the Confederates, who scattered.
In early September 1861, Kentucky's careful neutrality collapsed. Confederate Major General Leonidas Polk ordered troops to seize Hickman in the western corner of the state. The legislature - with the Confederate-leaning members absent - voted to invite federal soldiers in. Within days, Brigadier General Felix Zollicoffer pushed Confederate forces to Cumberland Ford with 3,200 men, and former U.S. Vice President John C. Breckinridge rode east to join the Confederate army. Colonel Humphrey Marshall took command of an Army of Eastern Kentucky at Piketon - present-day Pikeville. The threat was clear: if the Confederates held the Big Sandy Valley, they could push into central Kentucky and turn the rear of Union forces in western Virginia.
William Bull Nelson - a former Navy lieutenant turned army general, big and loud and prone to fistfights - made his headquarters at Camp Kenton near Washington, Kentucky and announced he would equip volunteers to end treason in Kentucky. He moved his staging area to Olympian Springs in Bath County, an old spa twenty miles east of Mount Sterling, and renamed it Camp Gill. Through September and October, regiments arrived: the 2nd Ohio under Leonard Harris, the 21st Ohio under Jesse Norton from Nicholasville, the 59th Ohio under James Perry Fyffe. By late October Nelson had about 5,500 men - 3,700 from Ohio and 1,800 Kentuckians - facing roughly a thousand Confederates of the 5th Kentucky Infantry, organized at Prestonsburg by Colonel John S. Williams. Williams's regiment was so ill-equipped that his own men nicknamed it the Ragamuffin Regiment.
On October 22 Nelson sent 1,600 men under Harris to take West Liberty 35 miles east. The next dawn Nelson himself faced about 200 Confederates at Hazel Green with 3,500 men and artillery. Thirty-eight surrendered after a brief fight. Up at West Liberty, Harris's column hit 500 to 700 Confederates - 21 killed, 40 wounded, 34 captured against Federal losses of just two wounded. Nelson consolidated his forces at Licking Station (now Salyersville) and waited for his wagon trains to catch up. By October 31 he was moving again. When the column reached Prestonsburg, the supposed Gibraltar of Eastern Kentucky stood abandoned - Williams had pulled back toward Pikeville.
Joshua W. Sill led the northern prong of the expedition up John's Creek on November 7, swinging south to cut off Pikeville. Nelson took the main column down the Old State Road. The Battle of Ivy Mountain on November 8 ended in a Union victory with six Federal killed and 24 wounded against Confederate losses of 10 dead, 15 wounded, and 40 missing. Williams retreated through Pikeville toward Pound Gap on the Virginia line. Sill's column secured Pikeville on the afternoon of November 9. The Cincinnati Commercial wrote that Nelson had shown how troops could be moved across unforgiving terrain without adequate transportation. But the Cincinnati Gazette judged that the campaign had no more permanent effect than the passage of a showman's caravan - and was nearly right. The Confederates returned. Brigadier General Don Carlos Buell replaced William T. Sherman in Louisville, Nelson was ordered to report there, and Colonel James A. Garfield - the future president - was sent into the Big Sandy in January 1862 to finish the work Bull Nelson had started.
The Battle of Ivy Mountain was fought at 37.60 N, 82.67 W in Floyd County, eastern Kentucky, about 15 miles west of Pikeville along what is now U.S. Route 460, beside the West Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River. Ivy Mountain itself is a hogback ridge rising about 1,000 feet above the river. The expedition route ran roughly east from Olympian Springs in Bath County through Hazel Green, Salyersville (Licking Station), and Prestonsburg to Pikeville. Nearest airports: Big Sandy Regional (K0I8) at Prestonsburg about 10 nm north; Pikeville-Pike County (KPBX) just east of the battlefield. Lexington's Blue Grass Airport (KLEX) is 120 nm west. Recommended viewing altitude 5,500 to 7,500 feet MSL to follow the valley structure.