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144 Monday’s “heavy cannonading” from Hermann electrified those residents several miles west with Captain Charles D. Eitzen’s militia at the Gasconade River bridge. In quieter times, he had made a good living dealing in lumber and iron, though he had faced death at that bridge nine years before when it collapsed beneath the weight of a trainload of luminaries celebrating the opening of the line between St. Louis and Jefferson City. On October 3, Eitzen seemed to be facing death there again, as an overwhelming Confederate force was thought to be bearing down on his small band. Those with Eitzen had probably not enrolled to protect the assets of the Pacific Railroad at the expense of their homes and jobs in Hermann.1 Meanwhile, the thunderous noise of the fighting at Hermann rolled along the Missouri, startling the Franklin County EMM as far away as Augusta Depot. The plight of the un-uniformed and unadvised little militia outpost on the Gasconade typified the Federal handling of the invasion. Aside from the unplanned clashes associated with Pilot Knob and Leasburg and from the unavoidable use of a brigade of infantry to retake Pacific, General William S. Rosecrans and the Department of Missouri defended most of the state by clustering isolated garrisons of local militia in the path of an invading army with little or no support. This continued, even as General Sterling Price’s Army of Missouri bore down on the state capital at Jefferson City. Success, however, required the same Confederate army unwilling to leave the garrison at Fort Davidson in its rear to turn its back on the largest single Union army in the state. To the Gasconade River The course of Price’s army raised the possibility of pinning it with its back to an impassable river. Rosecrans and General Samuel R. Curtis in Kansas both 7 The Westward March From Boeuf Creek to the Osage River The Westward March 145 knew “Price is on the Union road from Union to Jefferson City,” their scouts reported.2 The Pacific Railroad reached the Gasconade some eighty-eight miles from St. Louis, and the Osage nearly thirty miles farther west with Jefferson City only seven or eight beyond. Both the Gasconade and the Osage Rivers flowed from southwest into south-central Missouri, and then swung north to the Missouri River, each forming a backward “L,” the one inside the other. Usually fordable in their upper reaches, both had risen somewhat with the recent rains, making the crossing much trickier and even problematic downstream nearer the Missouri. If Confederates nearer the Missouri River found the downstream crossing of the Gasconade or Osage impassable, a rigorous Federal pursuit from the east would isolate them. However, the Union policy of protecting without ever destroying railroad property would leave the bridges there intact and leave the Confederate army an escape from such a natural trap. Despite scouting and some good information, the Union high command seems to have remained essentially ignorant of Price’s movements. As one officer frankly told General Alfred Pleasonton, the Federal forces “don’t know at what point he [Price] will cross the Gasconade.” The Confederate army had the artillery and the numbers that required the use of one of the three major crossings of the Gasconade. The main State Road ran west from Union through a tiny crossroads called Cedar Fork, marked a generation later by little more than a grocery with a post office; from here, it continued to the Gasconade at Mount Sterling, a modest little former county seat of several hundred inhabitants .A more northerly road reached the Gasconade at the village of Fredericksburg . Still farther, almost at the Missouri River, was what the locals called the Gasconade Ferry, a third crossing near the bridge of the Pacific Railroad. The Gasconade with its steep bluffs, swift currents, and a deep bottom could be a particularly formidable river. General Andrew J. Smith thought the rainfall sufficient to make it “a very uncertain stream, rising very rapidly and very high.”3 A road south from Hermann connected all three of these routes east of where they crossed the river. Days before, when General John McNeil warned Rosecrans about the need to defend the lower Gasconade, Rosecrans took the troops from Brigadier General Egbert Benson Brown, who ran the Central District, headquartered at Warrensburg. Brown’s troops were spread very thin, across subdistricts organized out of Jefferson City, Lexington, and Kansas City, and garrisons at California , Harrisonville...

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