Pilot Knob; The Thermopylae of the West (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1914. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... PILOT KNOB THE PRICE RAID To the State of Missouri the great raid of the Confederate General Price, in the autumn of 1864, was something of what Benedict Arnold's descent upon the coasts of Connecticut, in 1781, was to that State; what the French occupation, in 1805, was to Spain; and what Sheridan's visitation was to the valley of Virginia. It was like a cyclone, sweeping a narrow but well-defined path of destruction and desolation through the heart of a beautiful and fertile land. It was worse than anything which had preceded it; and it stands out, monstrous and gloomy, in the receding vista of the past, towering like a forbidding mountain above every public catastrophe that has followed it. Nor was it in the restricted path of Price's army alone that Missouri suffered. To everyone at all familiar with the history of that campaign the mere mention of it calls to mind a period of wild confusion and alarm in which the whole State was involved, --a period of bitter partisan warfare, of guerrilla outrage, and of bushwhacker atrocity. It recalls a time when the midnight sky was lighted by the glare of flaming dwellings, and murder lurked in every bush and fence-corner; when cities and towns and villages were crowded with destitute country people, who fled, panic-stricken, from the pleasant farming regions where the monster of fratricidal strife, --that instigator of man's most brutal passions, stalked abroad in all its hideous ferocity; when every day brought its news, not alone of battle and skirmish, but of wholesale arson and pillage, and when no man knew when he arose in the morning but that before night he might be either the victim of an assassin's bullet or a fugitive, fleeing from the ruins of his smouldering home. Such were, to a greater or less degree, the ...