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In other words, if Jackson would not supply his militia, their motley bands of Germans would step in to fill the gap. Cameron passed this request along to General Scott, who approved the order with a shrug, scribbling, “It is revolutionary times, and therefore I do not object to the irregularity of this,” before Lincoln signed off as well. Thus, Lyon, still officially a mere company captain, now found himself briefly commanding the entire Department of the West—in other words, almost everything between the Mississippi and the far side of the Rockies. April 1861 was a time when such things could happen.108

Within days, four regiments of loyal Home Guards were mustered into federal service: Sigel’s Lyons Fahnenwacht, plus one regiment under Blair, one under the versatile Boernstein (who dusted off the skills he had acquired in the Imperial Austrian Army), and one under Nicholas Schuettner, another local Forty-Eighter and leader of an anti-secessionist street gang. Of these forty-two hundred troops, all but one hundred were Germans. Several more regiments started forming as reserves. Lyon, without any official promotion, began styling himself “General.” Forests of white tents sprouted on the Arsenal grounds, as thousands of muddy boots dealt their coup de grâce to Major Hagner’s beloved lawn. Bands played; companies marched; some of the soldiers, according to a reporter, even tried “running and leaping in the Zouave practice.” At dusk the light of cooking fires flickered among the encampments, while “all nooks and crannies sounded with German war songs and soldiers’ choirs,” Boernstein recalled after the war. Ever upbeat, he claimed that even those officers with the most refined European palates pronounced the camp food excellent. “The general happiness, the humorous mood, the awareness of doing a good deed and the physical exertions served as seasoning to stimulate the appetite,” he wrote. “I cannot recall days so cheerful, exciting or invigorating as those first few days at the arsenal when we were forming our volunteer regiments.” The main thing, one recruit wrote, was that each man was “eager to teach the German-haters a never-to-be-forgotten lesson.”109

Less visible maneuvers were also taking place at the Arsenal. Having issued his troops all the weapons and ammunition they would need, Lyon determined to send much of what remained out of harm’s way, to the Union troops mustering in Illinois. As a handpicked crew of men worked secretly to pack up the weaponry, Lyon had spread a rumor, via local barrooms, that a shipment of weapons from the Arsenal would be sent across the city in streetcars that night. Sure enough, at 9:00 p.m., a trolley convoy loaded with wooden crates rolled slowly up Fifth Street. Minute Men instantly rushed out of ambush, halted the trolleys, pried open the containers, and pulled out the guns: a few rusty old flintlocks from the Arsenal’s junk room. Meanwhile, down on the river, the steamboat City of Alton, her lamps doused and paddlewheels barely turning, slipped quietly from the Arsenal quay and up the Mississippi with 25,000 well-oiled muskets and carbines aboard.110

Over the next couple of weeks, the opposing forces in St. Louis performed an uncanny pantomime. Across the city from the Arsenal, secessionists set up an armed camp of their own in an area called Lindell’s Grove, formerly a park and picnic ground. They dubbed it Camp Jackson in honor of the governor, laid out rows of tents grandiosely dubbed Beauregard Street and Davis Street, and before long, more than a thousand state troops had arrived, under Missouri’s militia commander, General Daniel Frost. These soldiers, William T. Sherman later recalled, included many “young men from the first and best families of St. Louis.” Ostensibly, Jackson and Frost had assembled them for a regular militia encampment, just as might be done in peacetime. As at a typical antebellum militia gathering, a festive, even indolent atmosphere prevailed;