Re: 12th Ala Cav
Well, by terse I mean that things were moving fast and they really didn't have time to write a lot down. Plus the state of Alabama destroyed many of its records at the end of the war because they were worried that their soldiers might be tried for treason. If you haven't looked at the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, it's online. Just google search it. You will come to a site that allows you to enter terms in a search engine that takes you to however many hits you get. Then you read the reports, but be warned. . .when officers on both sides wrote their reports they usually exaggerated their own successes and played down their losses. Wheeler was under orders not to risk himself in combat, but he always led from the front. So he never mentions his own close calls in his reports. He dashes off very terse accounts in some cases, and rarely gives you the details you are looking for. He also has a bad habit of getting dates wrong, but the editors of these books put corrections in brackets whenever they thought they saw errors.