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By Root 1776 0

and relatives of the captured soldiers, anxious to see that their loved ones were all right; others had come to hail the Union triumph; most were probably just gawkers. Even Sherman, hearing that Frost had surrendered peacefully, now came to watch, holding young Willie by the hand. These spectators were amazed at the sight: militiamen in the splendid uniforms of Missouri’s most elite dragoon regiments; the flower of the old families—Longuemares, Ladues, Gareschés; the cream of St. Louis in “the beauty of youth, aristocratic breeding, clannish pride”—now captives, every one of them, stacking their arms in submission, trudging sullenly down Pine Street between the ranks of their drab “Dutch” captors. Two black women in the crowd, exultant, began laughing and yelling taunts at the humiliated militia. Soon other bystanders began hurling insults at the victorious Germans: “Damn Dutch!” “Hessians!” “Infidels!” One man cheered for Jeff Davis; another for Abe Lincoln. Lyon’s officers, trying to drown out the cacophony, ordered a brass band at the head of the column to start playing. Still the obscenities flew; women spat on the Union volunteers; others started scooping up rocks and dirt to throw at them. A few men brandished revolvers and knives.120

Afterward, no one could agree on how the shooting started. One teenager recalled seeing a boy his own age pitch a clod of dirt at a mounted officer. Other witnesses described an unarmed man stepping out of the row of onlookers and being savagely bayoneted by one of the “Dutchmen.” The most credible accounts corroborate what Sherman would remember. As he and Willie watched, a drunken man in the crowd tried to push his way through the ranks of Sigel’s troops to reach the other side. When a sergeant blocked him with his musket, shoving him roughly down a steep embankment, the drunkard staggered to his feet, pulled a small pistol from his pocket, and fired. An officer on horseback screamed as the bullet tore a gaping wound in his leg. (The captain, an exiled Polish nobleman named Constantin Blandowski, would die of his injury a few weeks later.) And so it was that the panicking soldiers turned their muskets on the crowd. Somewhere up at the head of the column, surreally, the German band kept playing.121

Sherman ran back toward the grove, pulling Willie into a ditch and covering the boy with his body as they heard bullets cutting through the leaves and branches overhead. Around them people stampeded in all directions, some of them wounded. A few bold civilians stood their ground and fired back at the soldiers. Captain Lyon, one of the few professional soldiers on hand and perhaps the only one capable of bringing his raw recruits under control, was still woozy from the kick he had received. By the time the shooting stopped, bodies lay everywhere: a middle-aged street vendor, a teenage girl, a young German laborer in his work clothes, and several soldiers from both Frost’s and Lyon’s commands. A wounded woman sat keening on the ground, clasping the body of her dead child in her arms. In all, more than two dozen people had been killed or mortally hurt.

Lyon, dazed, stood looking around him, murmuring in a strange, soft voice: “Poor creatures … poor creatures …”122

Others stared amazed at the sight of buildings pockmarked with bullet holes, like wounds torn in the city itself. Much commented on afterward was the remarkable power of the new Minié rifle balls, how such small lumps of lead could make such big craters in brickwork and stone.

A twelve-year-old boy, returning home with his father to Pine Street, saw something that would still haunt him more than six decades later:

Two bullets had struck our house, and just outside a German soldier was sitting on the side-walk with his back to the wall. Coming closer we could distinguish where the Minié bullet had penetrated his temple. He was dead. Close by a servant with a pail of water was washing a stream of blood off the side-walk where someone had been killed, and the sight to me was indescribably horrible. My father said this was civil