Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 9.djvu/419

Rh while Hooper attacked it by wading the river in its front, and its garrison succumbed, surrendering a large quantity of stores of every kind. Cold Camp was a German settlement and a militia headquarters, on a productive and highly cultivated plain. The people had good houses, fruitful orchards, prolific fields of grain and abundant supplies of cattle. They expected to be despoiled of their property and have their houses burned. But Shelby did not make war on non-combatants, nor take private property without paying for it. Court houses and buildings used as forts by the enemy were different. Those he destroyed as a matter of course. Florence was an abandoned town. Its inhabitants—men, women and children—had fled, leaving all their household property behind. The soldiers did nothing worse than take what they wanted to eat.

Tipton was an important point on the Pacific railroad, and its garrison made a pretense of defending it, but only a pretense. The exchange of a couple of volleys and an attack in flank by Gordon did the business, and the Federals fled for their lives. The railroad was hardly torn up and what supplies the men needed taken from the military stores left behind, when Col. Thomas T. Crittenden appeared on the prairie, with about a thousand men—the number Shelby had—and both commands were formed for battle. It would have been a great thing for Crittenden to have captured or defeated Shelby, and fate had been kind in giving him as good an opportunity as a brave man would ask. But when Shelby's command, with Shelby at its head, moved forward to the attack, Crittenden's heart failed him, and before a shot had been fired his command turned and fled, he leading the advance in its flight.

The march of two days to Booneville was continued without interruption, as far as the enemy were concerned. Shelby's objective point in starting bad been Jefferson City or Booneville. But at Tipton he learned that a heavy force of Federals had been massed at Jeffer-