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65 3 Sounding the Alarm The Road to Rolla Late Thursday, September 29, the engineer George Curry rolled his locomotive into Pacific west of St. Louis with unmistakable news from an unexpected direction. His trip had taken hours longer than it should have, with a particularly harrowing stop to restore the track where the Confederates had removed half a dozen rails. During these makeshift repairs, a lost second lieutenant separated from General Thomas Ewing’s force boarded the train. As they neared Sullivan, they passed an estimated four hundred mounted Confederates riding toward St. Louis through the nearby woods. Gambling that this was only the advance and that the track ahead remained intact, Curry had poured on the steam and cannonballed past them.1 Once at Pacific, the crew and passengers hurried to the telegraph office to wire Federal headquarters that Confederate general Sterling Price, indeed, brought an unexpectedly massive army in the state and that it seemed to be heading right for St. Louis. General Thomas Ewing and his little force had abandoned the safety of Fort Davidson before it became a death trap. They hoped that Price’s Confederates had better things to do than pursue them cross country toward the Federal base at Rolla. Nevertheless, both sides found themselves in a bizarre cat-and-mouse chase, stumbling through the dark over the rugged Ozark terrain. In the end, Ewing and the Unionist survivors found themselves again pinned down, this time at a little train station on the southwestern branch of the Pacific Railroad. The Flight The eruption of Fort Davidson’s magazine briefly illuminated Wednesday’s predawn skies before fading into an even more intense darkness. The Federals groped their way up the road toward Potosi in hopes of making a relatively short dash to join General Andrew J. Smith’s infantry at Mineral Point. None 66 The Beginning of the twenty men in Captain Hiram A. Rice’s advance knew the way, so Captain Patrick F. Lonergan sent forward a local man, James A. Shields of the Third MSM Cavalry, to pilot them.2 Captain Charles S. Hills of the Tenth Kansas, one of Ewing’s acting aides-de-camp, also rode near the head of the column. After a hard march through the night and into the early morning, they reached Caledonia, only twelve miles short of Potosi, itself only a few miles west of Mineral Point. There, Ewing’s advance encountered a Confederate patrol , killing one, wounding another and shooting the horse from under a third. Upon hearing the gunfire, Ewing galloped into town to find Hills’s men trying to question a taciturn prisoner. Iowa captain William Campbell saw they had no time to waste and it was, after all, Missouri, so he sent some enlisted men to get a rope and began tying the noose in it as he repeated the question. The prisoner immediately identified himself as one of several thousand of General Jo Shelby’s cavalrymen on their way south to rejoin Price for a concerted assault on Fort Davidson.3 The revelation chilled them more deeply than the wet autumn night. Between them and St. Louis stood not Smith’s Federal infantry but a Confederate cavalry division. “If you want to fight, there’s the road,” Campbell told Ewing pointing north.“If not we must take some other road, and that quickly.” Their only real option ran west toward Rolla and the hope that Price’s army would not be distracted by their escape.As more local civilians joined the column, one of them pointed out the way, and the ragged line slipped through Caledonia and up the side road toward the northwest.4 To the Confederate commanders, Ewing’s force seemed to have vanished into the fog of war. Shelby had told the wives of his prisoners from Potosi that they would parole the prisoners; however, his men subsequently took the unfed prisoners on a miserable twelve-mile forced march through the rain. They allowed some to retrieve partly eaten apples that had been stolen, tasted, and discarded by their guards. Shelby and his staff did not expect Ewing’s men to be coming north from Fort Davidson because they never seem to have heard the explosion of the magazine. For whatever reason, Shelby’s exhausted and wet troops formed a battle line up the road from Caledonia waiting from 10:30 to 2:30 for the main body of Price’s army to drive the Federals north...

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