in battle-face to the front. He had graduated from West Point in 1841,
the 11th in his class. That his intellectual abilities were of high
order is shown by his standing in that class, of which Zealous B. Tower,
an eminent engineer, and brevet Major-General, U. S. A., was the head,
and Horatio G. Wright, who commanded the Sixth Corps during the last and
greatest year of its history, was the second.

[Illustration: 010-General Lyon]

Gen. John F. Reynolds, the superb commander of the First Corps and of
the Right Wing of the Army of the Potomac, with which he brought on the
battle of Gettysburg, where he was killed, graduated 26th in the class,
and Gen. Don Carlos Buell, who organized and commanded the Army of the
Ohio, graduated 32d. Gen. Robert Garnett, the first Confederate General
officer to fall in the struggle,--killed July 13, 1861, at Carrick's
Ford,--was the 27th in the class. Julius P. Garesche, who graduated 16th
in the class, became Chief of Staff to Gen. Rosecrans, and was killed at
Stone River.

52

Besides being thoroughly versed in all that related to his profession
of arms, Capt. Lyon was well informed in history and general literature;
was a devoted student of the Bible and Shakspere, and wrote well and
forcibly. What was very rare among the officers of the old Army, he was
a radical Abolitionist, and believer in the National Sovereignty. He was
so outspoken in these views as to render his position quite unpleasant,
where nearly every one was so antagonistic. A weaker-willed man would
have been forced either out of the Army or into tacit acquiescence with
the prevailing sentiment.

Upon graduation he had been assigned to the 2d U. S., and sent to get
his first lessons in actual war fighting the Florida Indians. There his
superiors found occasion to remark that his zeal sometimes outran
his discretion--not an infrequent fault of earnest young men. He had
distinguished himself and received a brevet in the Mexican War for
gallantry at Contreras and Churubusco, and had then been sent to
California. With a slender force he was charged with the duty of keeping
a long frontier in order against turbulent Indians. He accomplished this
by making the Indians more afraid of him than the whites could possibly
be of them. No quick retreat, no impregnable fastness, could shelter
them from his inexorable pursuit. On one occasion he carried boats on
wagons over a mountain range to cross a river and strike an Indi