When General Fremont took charge of the Mountain Department, he
proceeded to follow his notion derived from experience in the Western
frontier. He knew that the safety and efficiency of his army in a wild
wooded and rugged region, depended upon the accuracy with which he
received information of the plans and movements of the enemy.
He at once called around him a set of Western frontiersmen, who had
served all through the campaign in Missouri. Some had been in the
border wars of Kansas; some had served long years on the plains,
hunting the buffalo and the Indian; men accustomed to every form of
hardship, thoroughly skilled, not only in the use of the rifle, but
drilled in all cunning ways and devices to discover the intentions,
position, and strength of a foe. The best of these men were selected
and placed in a small organization called the Jessie Scouts.
Their name is taken from General Fremont’s wife, who remained with
her husband until his army reached New Creek, Virginia. During her
stay she frequently saw these men, and became very popular with them.
Hence their present attachment to her. They swear by her, and wear her
initials upon their coats, inserted in very modest but coarse style.
They are not made prominent or ostentatiously conspicuous. The men—and
I have talked with a number of them—seem equally devoted to Fremont
himself. Their number when full is twenty-four.
Three of them have recently been taken, and three have been detached
for service in Halleck’s Department. Hence they number for some days
only eighteen. They have, however, been recruiting up to the full
number. One of the recent recruits whom I have seen, is a bold,
dashing, fine-looking young man, a son of Brigadier General Kelly, who
has been in service in Virginia for more than a year. He, therefore,
has had frontier experience enough to qualify him for the undertaking.
He certainly possesses the pluck. Doubtless he inherited that. Their
Captain, by the way, a most remarkable character in this line of
business, is Charles Carpenter, of Kansas. Born in Ohio, he went, at
the age of 16, to the border of Missouri. Then (1854.) Kansas was
wild and comparatively unsettled. He at once, with the ardor of his
character, entered upon a wild, roving life. He has tried his hand
at everything—hunting, farming, roaming, fighting Indians, Missouri
border ruffians, and occasionally “Jay-hawking.” He was at one time
with Montgomery, at another with Jennison, and again with Cleveland.
He left the last named, because, as he terms it, “things began to get
too heavy even for him; he has yet some ‘bowels of compassion left.’”
At the opening of the war, he was employed by Fremont, and went with
him to Springfield, actively scouting during the whole of the “Hundred
days.” Before Fremont left St. Louis, he detected, in company with
another scout, two men, who had ingeniously connected a wire, over
1,100 feet long, with the regular wire over the North Missouri Road,
and took off regularly the despatches sent by Fremont to his officers
in North Missouri. Through these men Price obtained information of
Fremont’s order to Sturgis to advance to the assistance of Mulligan
at Lexington. These two men these scouts were compelled to kill ere
they could get possession of the wire. Their bodies were found in the
bottom of a neighboring river.
Once he entered Jeff. Thompson’s camp, when he threatened to take
Cape Girardeau, and cross the Mississippi River, upon a foray into
Illinois. The agreeable time he spent there was luxuriated in a
san-insane prison, amusing the men and officers by his curious antics
and monkey tricks. For two days he drove a team for Sterling Price,
leaving his lines to procure forage, taking care not to return. Taken
prisoner with his present Lieutenant, Robb, back of Paducah, they were
carried for some distance toward Union City.
At night, they escaped by killing three men of the guard and the
proprietor of the house, a violent Secessionist. Taking their horses,
and assuming the garb of Confederate soldiers, they passed by Forts
Henry and Donelson without the slightest interruption. Robb’s ability
to forge passes was of signal use to them in reaching Louisville.
Since he has been in the valley, he has sold a horse _suspected
of Secession proclivities_ to a man purchasing horses for Ashby’s
Cavalry, and then tolled him and his horses into Fremont’s camp.
The purchase money, (consisting of good Confederate notes,) and two
horses, were thus restored to the Union, and a candidate for promotion
to a permanent residence at Fort Delaware procured.
He is bronzed, so that his neck is black by exposure to the weather
and sun. The eye is light blue, and the hair dark, with an inclination
to curl. The face bears a youthful appearance, but looks like thirty
instead of twenty-five, the real age of Carpenter. He is not above
five feet six, and of high, sinewy mould. His weight is certainly
not over one hundred and thirty-five. The careless, frank, Western
style of manner and address belong to him. Heady for fight, fun or
frolic, he is said to have mingled with his dash and boldness a
remarkable prudence and caution. These qualities, united to his almost
slavish devotion to Fremont, make him and his band invaluable to that
commander.
His dress consists of a pair of pantaloons of a dark earthen hue,
darker than buckskin. The coat is made of the dark grey material of
which frontiersmen’s hunting shirts are mostly made; it is a loose
sack, trimmed in the cape and sleeves with fringe, gathered in the
back, immediately under the shoulders, in folds or plaits. This is
bound at the waist with his pistol belt. His only arm of defence,
besides the six-shooter, is a breech-loading rifle, weighing about
ten pounds, and good for eight hundred yards. Such is a short outline
of the career and appearance of one of the most marked and eccentric
characters now in this valley, waging war for the restoration of the
Union.—_Correspondence Philadelphia Inquirer._
_June 26th._ Judge Charles Mason, late United States commissioner of
patents, called to see me to-day. The Judge will endeavor to have me
paroled or exchanged, so he says. From our window we can daily see
Yankees looking through opera glasses or telescopes at us, as if we
were inhuman curiosities. To burlesque them, the boys hold bottles up
to their eyes as if gazing at them.
The following letter from Hon. Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts
negro-worshipper, shows the intimate relations, political and social,
existing between him and “Abe” Lincoln. “Birds of a feather flock
together.” They are two peas from the same pod:
_From The New York Tribune, June 26, 1862._