ois and the Seventh Iowa into a brigade under Colonel H. Dougherty,
of the Twenty-second Illinois. The entire force numbered 3,114 men.
General Grant, in his report, states the number at 2,850. As five
companies were kept at the landing when the force disembarked, the
number given by General Grant represents the number taken into action.
Two gunboats, under the command of Captain Walke of the navy, convoyed
the expedition. A feint was made of landing nine miles below Cairo, on
the Kentucky side, and the expedition lay there till daybreak. Badeau
says that General Grant received intelligence, at two o'clock in the
morning of the 7th, that General Polk was crossing troops from Columbus
to Belmont, with a view of cutting off Oglesby, and that he thereupon
determined to convert what had been intended as a mere demonstration
against Belmont into a real attack.

Belmont was the lofty name of a settlement of three houses squatted upon
the low river-flat opposite Columbus, and under easy range of its guns.
A regiment and a battery were encamped in a cleared field of seven
hundred acres on the river-bank, and the camp was surrounded on its
landward side by an abattis of felled timber. At six o'clock in the
morning the fleet moved down, and the troops debarked at half-past eight
on the Missouri shore, three miles above Columbus, and protected from
view by an intervening wooded point. About the same time General Polk
sent General Pillow across the river to Belmont with four regiments,
making the force there five regiments and a battery. Pillow estimated
the number of men at about twenty-five hundred.

General Grant marched his command through the timber and some cleared
fields, and formed in two lines facing the river--McClernand in front,
Dougherty in rear. A depression parallel to the river, making a
connected series of ponds or sloughs, had to be crossed in the advance
in line. These depressions were for the most part dry, but the
Twenty-seventh Illinois, the right of the front line, in passing around
a portion that was yet filled with water, made such distance to the
right that Colonel Dougherty's brigade moved forward, filled the
interval, and the attack was made in a single line.

The opposing skirmishers encountered in the timber. Pillow's line of
battle was in the open, facing the timber. The engagement was in the
simplest form: two forces equal in number encountered in parallel lines.
Most of the men on both sides were