There was an election in our territory in 1856 or 1857, I forget which, for delegate to Congress. Henry M. Rice had received the nomination of the regular Democratic convention for the position, and General Gorman (then territorial governor), Henry H. Sibley and many other leading Democrats had deliberately bolted the judgment of the convention, and nominated David Olmsted for delegate. The fight was on hot. I, of course, was for Rice, the regular nominee. I then lived well up in the Minnesota valley, at Traverse des Sioux, and we were becoming a power in the territory in a political sense, and I looked forward to the arrival of such a prominent Democrat as General Shields in our midst as an event of major political importance. He soon landed at Hastings, on the Mississippi, with a complete outfit for a permanent settlement. A good story is told of his advent at Hastings. In those days of steamboating, all the belongings of an immigrant would be landed on the levee and his freight bill would be presented to him by what we called the mud clerk, and he would take an account of his stock and pay the freight. Legend reports that the general had five barrels of whisky among his paraphernalia, and when the first one was rolled ashore he seated himself upon it to watch the debarkation, and when the bill was presented he refused to pay it because he could see only four barrels, and demanded the fifth. The clerks got on to the joke, and pretended to search for the missing barrel until the last whistle blew, when they suggested to the general that he was occupying the disturbing element. Whether the contents of the barrel ever caused any other misunderstandings history fails to record. As soon as the general was comfortably settled on the blood-bought farm I dispatched a courier across the country to him, informing him of the political situation, and imploring him to come out for the regular Democratic ticket; but he replied in a very diplomatic way that he was too new a comer to take any active part in the election, and declined. Tom Cowan, George Magruder and I, a trio which composed the leadership of the Democracy of the Minnesota valley, decided that the general should never go to the senate if we could prevent it, and it so happened that when the first legislature of the state assembled Tom Cowan was in the senate, but all our efforts to beat him failed, and Henry M. Rice and the general were elected to the United States Senate. It was hard to beat a man in those days who was a Democrat, an Irishman and a wounded soldier. The only unlucky thing that the general ever encountered was the fact that he drew the short term when the lots were cast for the positions the new senators were to assume.