On April 6, Sheridan’s men were to strike at Deatonville to disrupt the enemy wagon trains as Lee’s army marched to Farmville and promised rations. Any scouts not’serving’ with the Confederates accompanied the incessant raids all up and down the extent of the retreat. As fate would have it, scouts captured General Barringer’s replacement, Colonel C.H. Cheek.

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April 7 was another day of prolonged marching by both armies. To keep good communications between Sheridan and Grant, at least a third of Young’s scouts were detailed as couriers between the two generals.

In the dark hours before dawn on April 8, while some of the scouts rode with Major Young to seek out the Army of Northern Virginia’s flank, Sergeants McCabe and White led a small detachment to Appomattox Station in advance of the main cavalry column. Within a few miles of the station, the alert scouts learned that at least two trains were already stopped in the station, getting ready for the commissary wagons to take their rations to Lee’s army coming in from the east, and that another train was slowly coming up the tracks from Lynchburg.

White took a group of men along the tracks until they saw two engines, one pulling its cars and the other pushing them. He persuaded the engineer to head on into the station, for no time was to be lost unloading their supplies for the nearing army. White then rode back to meet the advancing Federals and tell them of their ruse. Custer’s division was sent to capture the trains.

The leading regiment in Custer’s division was the 2nd New York Cavalry, led by Colonel Alanson Randall, who recalled, ‘As we neared the station the whistles became more and more distinct, and a scout reported the trains rapidly unloading, and that the advance of the Rebel army was passing through Appomattox Courthouse.’ Four and a half hours of fighting led to the capture of the trains, more than 1,000 prisoners, at least 200 wagons and 28 artillery pieces. Grant received the message and was convinced the next day’s push would end things once and for all.

‘The Scouts was over in the Rebel lines, staid until after midnight,’ remembered McCabe years later, ‘and when we came out we Brote some of thair Pickets with us. Then the Scouts rested until daylight and…went into the Rebel Lines and got all the information we could.’ One daring scout, Private Abram Adkins, had even spent a day very near General Lee’s headquarters.

The next day, Palm Sunday, April 9, the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered at Appomattox. General Joseph Johnston’s Army of Tennessee, however, had not done so. On the night of April 26, the scouts performed their last wartime duty by helping to erect a bridge over the Staunton River. Johnston surrendered before any fighting between his men and any Army of the Potomac units occurred.

In Sheridan’s two final campaign reports, he expressed gratitude for the ‘invaluable information’ Major Young’s scouts brought in and requested that Young be given a brevet to lieutenant colonel. Most of the scouts returned to their original units and marched to Washington to participate in the Grand Review of the Army of the Potomac on May 23-24. For them the war was over. Such was not the case, however, with Sheridan, due to the touchy situation in Mexico, where hundreds of disgruntled ex-Confederates were involved in the fighting between Mexican nationalists and men under the foreign influence of France and its puppet ruler, Archduke Maximilian of Austria.

Young and several of his men accompanied their general to New Orleans, from where he commanded the U.S. forces along the border. By summer’s end most of the scouts had gone home. Young was mustered out of the Army but stayed in the Southwest. In the winter of 1866-67, his luck ran out while leading his own contingent of scouts fighting against Maximilian’s puppet regime. He was killed under mysterious circumstances along the Rio Grande.

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