This text is part of:
[195]
time he was in the Army and the commandant of the St. Louis District in Missouri.
Lane came to St. Louis and had a talk with the writer, freely admitting his dread of Ewing and asking for the Missouri Democrat's support.
Having a considerable admiration for Lane as well as a liking for the man, I promised him such assistance as I could reasonably give.
It happened to be at the time when General Sterling Price, in making his last raid into Missouri, was threatening St. Louis with an army of nearly twenty thousand men, and there was no adequate opposing force at hand.
Ewing, with barely a tenth as many troops, went to the front and heroically engaged the enemy.
With no protection but the walls of a little mud fort he succeeded in repelling the attack of his powerful adversary.
That timely action probably saved St. Louis.
At this particular time it was arranged that there should be a meeting of the Republicans of St. Louis --it was in the midst of an exciting presidential campaign-at which Lane was to be the principal speaker.
The meeting was held and Lane was addressing a large audience with great acceptance when the news of Ewing's achievement was received.
It was then customary, when war intelligence arrived in the course of any political gathering, and sometimes of religious gatherings, to suspend all other proceedings until it had been announced and the audience had time enough to manifest its feeling on the subject.
Lane was in the midst of an eloquent passage when he was interrupted by the arrival of the news referred to. He stepped back, and the news-bearer,
G. P. Putnam's Son, 1905.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.