Torbert's cavalry turns on its pursuers and chases Rosser's men twenty miles up the pike

For weeks, Confederate cavalry under Thomas Rosser and Lunsford Lomax had dogged Philip Sheridan's retreating Federals as they burned barns and mills down the Shenandoah Valley. On October 9, 1864, near Tom's Brook in Shenandoah County, Union cavalry commander Alfred Torbert had enough and turned his horsemen around. The Confederate divisions broke and ran along the Valley Pike and Back Road, discarding wagons and guns as they fled. Soldiers soon mocked the rout as the "Woodstock Races."…