for duty to Captain and Brevet-Colonel Braxton Bragg, commanding
(Light) Company C, Third Artillery. The other officers of the
company were First-Lieutenant James A. Hardie, and afterward
Haekaliah Brown. New horses had just been purchased for the
battery, and we were preparing for work, when the mail brought the
orders announcing the passage of the bill increasing the Commissary
Department by four captains, to which were promoted Captains
Shiras, Blair, Sherman, and Bowen. I was ordered to take post at
St. Louis, and to relieve Captain A. J. Smith, First Dragoons, who
had been acting in that capacity for some months. My commission
bore date September 27,1850. I proceeded forthwith to the city,
relieved Captain Smith, and entered on the discharge of the duties
of the office.

Colonel N. S. Clarke, Sixth Infantry, commanded the department;
Major D. C. Buell was adjutant-general, and Captain W. S. Hancock
was regimental quartermaster; Colonel Thomas Swords was the depot
quartermaster, and we had our offices in the same building, on the
corner of Washington Avenue and Second. Subsequently Major S. Van
Vliet relieved Colonel Swords. I remained at the Planters' House
until my family arrived, when we occupied a house on Chouteau
Avenue, near Twelfth.

During the spring and summer of 1851, Mr. Ewing and Mr. Henry
Stoddard, of Dayton, Ohio, a cousin of my father, were much in St.
Louis, on business connected with the estate of Major Amos
Stoddard, who was of the old army, as early as the beginning of
this century. He was stationed at the village of St. Louis at the
time of the Louisiana purchase, and when Lewis and Clarke made
their famous expedition across the continent to the Columbia River.