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112 Saturday dawned on a body of armed uniformed Confederates back in St. Louis County for the first time in over three years. Most were almost certainly young Arkansans, hungry and tired after a hard night of rapid marches and short fights. An officer had sent them to destroy track or picket the road toward the city. Although they must have been cautious initially about their assignment , they became more comfortable with their duties after finding no Union defenders in view. The bloodless victors impressed those who remembered the well-dressed, well-financed secessionists who had gone to war three years before. Saturday, October 1, brought two significant clashes, with related maneuvers and skirmishing. The first decisively severed St. Louis from Jefferson City and marked something of a Confederate high-water mark in the entire TransMississippi war. The other helped force a final decision on the Confederates, as they reached the area of the Missouri River and had to commit to an attack on St. Louis or to turn west. In the course of both, the liberating pretenses of Price’s army unraveled, even for many of its leading participants. Pacific Shortly after General Thomas Ewing had left St. Louis for Pilot Knob, General Andrew J. Smith’s infantry had concentrated south of St. Louis. Initially based at DeSoto, Smith worried that the large Confederate force to his south might get behind him and threaten the city. Deciding that DeSoto was actually “of no importance,” he withdrew to a new line of defense along the Meramec River with Colonel L. J. Rankin’s Eightieth EMM behind him. As of 3 p.m. Friday , September 30, he reported “all safe at DeSoto” and even sent “a guarded 5 At the Gates of the Metropolis Pacific and Union At the Gates of the Metropolis 113 train” that direction from Pevely, carrying mounted scouts, apparently from Colonel Edward Catherwood’s Thirteenth Missouri Cavalry. These reported the destruction of three bridges and two or three water tanks, adding that “the rebels infest the entire country south of DeSoto, plundering every body they meet. They have lists of all union men of the country through which they pass, whom it is said they will butcher on sight. They conscript all sympathizers and old men and boys of 15.” That Friday night, though, the superintendent of bridges flagged a scout train just above DeSoto, after a night in a cornfield.1 The railroader explained that earlier that evening three hundred Arkansans arrived at DeSoto with orders “to destroy the depot at that place, which was effected.” The Confederate report implied some resistance in that “the militia who had gathered there in some numbers at the same time scattered.” However , the local EMM was then in a brigade in St. Louis, so the Confederates were again blurring the distinctions among soldiers, militia, and civilians. The Arkansans “destroyed some property, and then left without further damage.”2 Price’s army had hit a town only forty-two miles from the city. As something of an afterthought, scouts also began probing to the west of the city. Colonel Lewis Merrill’s veteranized Second Missouri Cavalry relocated to Kirkwood and found nothing nearby, but J. F. H. Ruby telegraphed General William S. Rosecrans from the garrison at Pacific that a large rebel force had passed through Richwoods only eighteen miles to the south. Accurately estimating 3,000 Confederates in that area, they sent Lieutenant Jesse Corum, a Potosi officer in the Third MSM Cavalry, with eighty mounted men to cover the roads and rumors that direction. Corum’s men rode back into Pacific with the news that the Confederates had sent half of the force at Richwoods to Potosi for more lead, but were asking civilians about directions to—and Federal strength at—Pacific.3 A likely participant in Corum’s scouting was his Irish-born townsman,Thomas Hanlon Macklind. Educated as a civil engineer, he had come to Missouri in 1856, where he worked on railroad construction until gaining admission to the bar at Potosi just before the war. He had served in various militia units before joining the hated Third MSM Cavalry, serving with other Potosians, Corum and Captain William T. Hunter, the post commander at Pacific. During these tense hours, Macklind likely worried over the fate of the Mineral Point telegraph operator Lousia Volker, to whom he may have already been engaged.4 Macklind likely knew that some of his townsmen remained in Confederate hands near where...

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