Page:General James Shields, Soldier, Orator, Statesman.djvu/17

 kind, generous disposition. Her influence will improve his appearance and soften his manners."

This manuscript correspondence with Sibley shows that during the entire period of his residence in Minnesota, Shields manifested a lively interest in public affairs generally as affecting the new State, and especially the region occupied by his Irish-American colonists. On June 7, 1859, after he had ceased to be Senator, we find him writing to Sibley, then Governor of Minnesota, from Faribault, that a meeting in that town at which he presided, had selected directors to choose a site for the State deaf and dumb asylum, including four from Faribault, William Sprigg Hall of St. Paul, and N. M. Donaldson of Owatonna.

The memory of Gen. Judson W. Bishop supplies the narrative of an episode which we do not find of record, but which shows General Shields' dominating military spirit, and which came near giving him the title of a Soldier in four wars. When the Indian massacre at Spirit Lake, Iowa, occurred in 1857, General Shields, then residing at Faribault, promptly rallied a company of his colonists and other citizens, had them armed and mounted and started for the scene of hostilities, about 150 miles distant. Other bands of settlers, living nearer, arrived first, and the Indians had disappeared. General Bishop, heading a surveying party, met Shields' detachment on their return, and vividly describes their zeal and ardor. Thus the former brigade commander in Mexico, the future division commander in Virginia, was equally ready to lead a hundred undisciplined men in what might have been a very hazardous campaign.

After retiring from office as Senator from Minnesota, General Shields was led by business considerations to settle in California. In San Francisco, in 1861, he was married to Miss Mary Carr, who was a daughter of Jerome and Sarah Carr and was born August 15, 1835, in County Armagh, Ireland. Her father, a linen merchant, with the proverbial Irish large-heartedness, had endorsed a note for a friend and thereby lost his fortune, the accumulation of years of industry and frugality. Looking, as so many others had done, for a place to recover