Bates immediately wrote his will. It was expressive of deep feeling. There was every indication of a premonition of his forthcoming end. He had always led a simple life, and in death he desired to avoid display. In that moment he recalled the discussions in the French Legislative Councils during the Directory, on the disposal of the dead by burning. “Henry Baldwin, my very dear friend, my sole executor, ... is to burn my body, or at least bury it without any direction,” he wrote; then he provided for the education of his brother James, which was to be completed by his studying law. In case the estate proved insufficient for the purpose, his brother Frederick was to provide the deficiency. Any residue, he declared, “is to go to my adored mother.” The encounter took place the next day in a ravine in Oakland, in what is at present the Fourth Ward of the city of Pittsburgh. The ravine through which a rivulet coursed, called “Three-Mile Run,” long since sewered over, opened on the Monongahela River, at a point now occupied by the lower end of the Jones & Laughlin Steel Company’s ore-yard, and by the office of the Eliza Furnace. To-day there are laid out through the ravine several unpaved hillside streets with narrow board sidewalks, one of which is the lower portion of Halket Street. On the upper edge of the easterly border of the ravine is Bates Street, named for Tarleton Bates. The duel was fought near the Monongahela River; the distance was ten paces; the weapons were pistols. Both principals displayed undaunted courage. Bates fell at the second fire, shot in the breast, and expired in an hour.[241] On the day that Bates lay dead in the ravine which ever since has been haunted with his memory, Pentland made another slanderous charge in his newspaper: “I shall not engross the columns of this paper with remarks on the private character of Mr. Bates, because that already appears to the public in colors as dark as the skin of his mistress.”[242]