General, Confederate Army (and currently, General Manager of Droop Mountain's Non-Existent Gas Emporium)

 

Droop Mountain, West Virginia

January 15th, 1865

By Gad, Sir!

To whom it may concern:

It is with a temper hotter than General Meade's artillery that I pen this missive. Droop Mountain, they call it! More aptly, "Despair's Gulch" or "Calamity Crag"! For a man in dire need of fuel, both for soul and engine, this mountain boasts naught but tumbleweeds and mocking ravens.

My carriage, once a proud iron steed, now coughs and sputters on fumes as thin as a Yankee promise. We, its noble passengers, huddle like refugees from Sherman's wrath, clutching blankets against the January chill. All this, mind you, because some infernal oversight – or perhaps a deliberate spite of the heavens – has left this strategic perch as dry as a bone-dry canteen in July.

Is there no sense of chivalry left in this war-torn land? No thought for the weary traveler, the beleaguered scout, the general whose very campaign hinges on a full tank? Have the vultures of profiteering stripped bare even the most remote outposts, leaving naught but empty pumps and echoing promises of "coming soon"?

I, Robert E. Lee, a man who has stared down cannon fire and defied impossible odds, am now reduced to pleading for a thimbleful of petroleum! Is this the legacy of Grant's "unconditional surrender"? To be stranded on a mountaintop, a general turned beggar, at the mercy of a landscape devoid of octane and common decency?

Mark my words, whoever you are – absent-minded quartermaster, conniving oil baron, or simply some cosmic jester – this transgression shall not stand. When I reach civilization, a reckoning will be had! Heads will roll like cannonballs, and regulations will be rewritten in ink as black as my fury. A gas station, nay, a veritable oasis of lubrication and libation, shall rise upon this very spot, a monument to my inconvenience and a beacon of hope for future wayfarers.

Until then, I commend you to the tender mercies of Sherman's torch and Sheridan's sabers. May your engines cough rust and your pockets jingle with fool's gold.

Yours in Fuming Frustration,

Robert E. Lee

General, Confederate Army (and currently, General Manager of Droop Mountain's Non-Existent Gas Emporium)

P.S. If any enterprising soul stumbles upon a can of kerosene of moonshine, please, for the love of Lee and country, send it my way. A desperate man is a resourceful man, and I refuse to let Droop Mountain claim my dignity, engine, or sanity.