nt of the West would
march away from it without striking a blow or making a manuver to reduce
its capacity for harmfulness.

Certainly some shreds of Lyon's mantle must have fallen on that proud
array of new-made Generals, and they would insist on striking a quick,
sharp blow, as a return for Lexington, for the honor of the Union
army, and to curb Price's rising conviction that he was an irresistible
conqueror.

But the next day after receiving his assignment to command, Gen. Hunter
made a reconnoissance in force to the battlefield of Wilson's Greek,
where Fremont had persisted in believing that Price was waiting to give
him battle. He found no enemy on the scene of the terrible battle of two
months before. Instead, all his information was to the effect that Price
was among the rugged fastnesses about Pineville, 50 miles away, with
McCulloch still farther off in the Boston Mountains.

241

Hunter therefore ordered his columns to countermarch and proceeded to
carry out the President's instructions promptly and exactly.

This backward movement, without a blow at Price, abandoned the whole of
the Union loving country of southwestern Missouri to the Secessionists,
and was a measureless calamity.

The Union people, taking heart from the advance of Fremont with his
great army, had returned to their homes and attempted to re-establish
themselves upon their farms and in their business. All these hopes were
suddenly dashed to the ground by the retirement of the army, and they
had to flee again in haste before the immediate advance of Price to
occupy the abandoned region.

It was not his army which was so terrible, but the horde of guerrilla
bands, which rushed out like venomous serpents after a warm rain, intent
upon rapine, outrage and murder. It was the "Poor White Trash" let
loose under such leaders as Quantrill, the Young-ers, Jameses, Haywards,
Freemans, and a thousand others of bandit infamy.

Aside from these calamities, the retreat, added to Price's victory at
Lexington, was a most stifling moral depression of the Union sentiment
in Missouri.

While the condition of things in the greater central and southwestern
parts of Missouri had been grievously unsatisfactory for many weeks,
and seemed to be growing steadily more so, it was otherwise in the
southeastern section.

242

The so-called Ozark Mountains, which are really a series of rough,
picturesque highlands, separating the watersheds of the Missouri