It was not his army which was so terrible, but the horde of guerrilla bands, which rushed out like venomous serpents after a warm rain, intent upon rapine, outrage and murder. It was the "Poor White Trash" let loose under such leaders as Quantrill, the Young-ers, Jameses, Haywards, Freemans, and a thousand others of bandit infamy.
Aside from these calamities, the retreat, added to Price's victory at Lexington, was a most stifling moral depression of the Union sentiment in Missouri.
While the condition of things in the greater central and southwestern parts of Missouri had been grievously unsatisfactory for many weeks, and seemed to be growing steadily more so, it was otherwise in the southeastern section.
The so-called Ozark Mountains, which are really a series of rough, picturesque highlands, separating the watersheds of the Missouri and the Arkansas Rivers, begin on the Mississippi at the mouth of the Meramec River, 20 miles below St. Louis, and extend along the Mississippi, rising frequently into cliffs of limestone 350 feet high, to Gape Girardeau, 44 miles above Cairo, Ill.
This range, less than 100 miles wide, one of the richest in the world in minerals, sinks away on the north and west to the valleys of the Osage and the Missouri and the prairies which stretch across Kansas and the Indian Territory to the Rocky Mountains. To the southeast it falls into the lowlands and swamps along the Mississippi, making there a separate and distinct section—about the size of Connecticut—and of entirely different character from the rest of the State. Over 3,000 square miles of this—or nearly three times the size of Rhode Island—are swamps thickly wooded with towering cypresses, and covered with jungles impenetrable to man. The principal town In the region was New Madrid, a fever-smitten little village on the banks of the Mississippi, 44 miles below Cairo. It had once much promise, but the terrible earthquakes of 1811-12 had seamed the surrounding country with great crevices and gulches, adding hopelessly to its forbidding character, and giving a mortal blow to New Madrid's expectations.
The region was drained—as far as it was drained—by the St. Francis River, a considerable stream, navigable nearly to the Missouri line, and emptying into the Mississippi nine miles above Helena, Ark.
Besides the Mississippi River there were then two routes of access from St. Louis to this region. One was by the Iron Mountain Railroad, which ran through the Ozarks to Pilot Knob, 84 miles from the city, and the other by common road through Fredericktown, 105 miles from St. Louis.
Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston—regarded by Jefferson Davis as a great military genius, and appointed to command the entire Confederate army in the West—had some idea of moving an army up through the swamps to these roads, flanking the Union position at Cairo and taking St. Louis. The St. Francis River would aid in supplying the army. His immediate subordinate, Maj. Gen. Polk, was still more in favor of the plan, and it went in this proportion down through Gen. Gideon Pillow, with his "Army of Liberation," to the most enthusiastic advocate, of the scheme, our poetical acquaintance, Gen. M. Jeff Thompson, file "Swamp Fox of Missouri." The idea was to move in concert with Price coming up from the southeast.