Long had the great West toiled to feed the starving nations of the earth. Long had she poured from her overflowing storehouses countless millions of food into the waiting lap of the needy manufacturing countries. From her great wealth of food she had always been ready to feed the world. When the war-cry aroused her, she was just as strong and just as prompt to fight the world. The national honor was hers to reverence and avenge. The old flag—its emblem and its glory—who should spring to its rescue if not the West? Did not a chain of crystal lakes crown her at the north, clasped together by the eternal emeralds of Niagara? Was not the Mississippi, her great highway to the gulf, a mighty thoroughfare, which no force should wrest from her while she had power to hold its banks with serried walls of steel? Was this river, the pathway of her greatness, one source of her renown, to be blocked up while she could cleave her own mountains asunder, and force them to give forth iron for gunboats, or gather lead from her bosom to mould into bullets? Not while these people could turn their workshops into manufactories of war-missiles, and their prairie steeds into chargers, should an enemy—brother or stranger—take one right from the West by force. This was the stern resolve of our pioneer men when the war-trumpet rang over the prairies of the West, and quick to act as prompt to resolve, her people arose as one man. There was no cavil about trifles then. Her fertile fields were stripped of their wealth, and her prairies of their cattle to furnish food—not alone to furnish food for themselves, but for the armies of the East. Soon her rivers swarmed with iron-clad gunboats, and her railways became military roads—her cities tented fields, her palaces recruiting offices, her cabins free homes for soldiers when their faces turned toward the war. The West was impatient of nothing but delay—but she chafed wildly at any obstacle that impeded the progress of her armies. How well these men have fought, and with what heroism they have suffered, let the record we are about to make of Henry, Donelson, Pittsburgh Landing, and many another bravely contested point, answer. Let the noble hearts stilled in death, and countless graves upon which the tender grass is now springing, answer. With battle songs on their lips they marched away from their homes, with battle cries upon their lips many of them fell gloriously, never to see those homes again. If the West has been brave in war, so will she prove generous when Peace shall come. The nation they have helped to save, and those in revolt, when true brotherhood comes back, will yet give the West a monument worthy of its fame. MISSOURI.