The Union people, taking heart from the advance of Fremont with his great army, had returned to their homes and attempted to re-establish themselves upon their farms and in their business. All these hopes were suddenly dashed to the ground by the retirement of the army, and they had to flee again in haste before the immediate advance of Price to occupy the abandoned region. It was not his army which was so terrible, but the horde of guerrilla bands, which rushed out like venomous serpents after a warm rain, intent upon rapine, outrage and murder. It was the "Poor White Trash" let loose under such leaders as Quantrill, the Young-ers, Jameses, Haywards, Freemans, and a thousand others of bandit infamy. Aside from these calamities, the retreat, added to Price's victory at Lexington, was a most stifling moral depression of the Union sentiment in Missouri. While the condition of things in the greater central and southwestern parts of Missouri had been grievously unsatisfactory for many weeks, and seemed to be growing steadily more so, it was otherwise in the southeastern section. 242 The so-called Ozark Mountains, which are really a series of rough, picturesque highlands, separating the watersheds of the Missouri and the Arkansas Rivers, begin on the Mississippi at the mouth of the Meramec River, 20 miles below St. Louis, and extend along the Mississippi, rising frequently into cliffs of limestone 350 feet high, to Gape Girardeau, 44 miles above Cairo, Ill. This range, less than 100 miles wide, one of the richest in the world in minerals, sinks away on the north and west to the valleys of the Osage and the Missouri and the prairies which stretch across Kansas and the Indian Territory to the Rocky Mountains. To the southeast it falls into the lowlands and swamps along the Mississippi, making there a separate and distinct section--about the size of Connecticut--and of entirely different character from the rest of the State. Over 3,000 square miles of this--or nearly three times the size of Rhode Island--are swamps thickly wooded with towering cypresses, and covered with jungles impenetrable to man. The principal town In the region was New Madrid, a fever-smitten little village on the banks of the Mississippi, 44 miles below Cairo. It had once much promise, but the terrible earthquakes of 1811-12 had seamed the surrounding country with great crevices and gulches, adding hopelessly to its forbidding character, and giving a mortal blow to New Madrid's expectations. The region was drained--as far as it was drained--by the St. Francis River, a considerable stream, navigable nearly to the Missouri line, and emptying into the Mississippi nine miles above Helena, Ark. Besides the Mississippi River there were then two routes of access from St. Louis to this region. One was by the Iron Mountain Railroad, which ran through the Ozarks to Pilot Knob, 84 miles from the city, and the other by common road through Fredericktown, 105 miles from St. Louis.