That does not seem to depend upon intellectual superiority, upon greater courage or devotion, or even upon clearer insight. A man leads his fellows--many of whom are his superiors in most namable qualities--simply because of something unnamable in him that makes him assume the leadership, and they accept it. There was hardly a prominent man in Missouri who was not Price's superior in some quality usually regarded as essential. For example, he was a pleasing and popular speaker, but Missouri abounded in men much more attractive to public assemblages. He was a fair politician, but rarely got more than the second prize. He had distinguished himself in the Mexican War, but Claiborne Jackson made more capital out of his few weeks of inconsequential service in the Black Hawk War than Price did out of the conquest of New Mexico and the capture of Chihuahua. He served one term in Congress, but had failed to secure a renomination. He had been elected Governor of Missouri while his Mexican laurels were yet green, but when he tried to enter the Senate, he was easily defeated by that able politician and orator, James S. Green. Though he belonged to the dominant Anti-Benton faction of the Missouri Democracy and the Stephen A. Douglas wing, he never was admitted to the select inner council, nor secured any of its higher rewards, except one term as Governor. At the outbreak of the war he was holding the comparatively unimportant place of Bank Commissioner. For all that, he was to become and remain throughout the struggle the central figure of Secession in the trans-Mississippi country. 92 Officers of high rank and brilliant reputation like Ben McCulloch, Earl Van Dorn, Richard Taylor and E. Kirby Smith were to be put over him, yet his fame and influence outshone them all. Unquestionably able soldiers such as Marmaduke, Shelby, Bowen, Jeff Thompson, Parsons, M. L. Clark and Little, were to serve him with unfaltering loyalty as subordinates. The Secessionist leaders of Missouri, headed by Gov. Reynolds, were to denounce him for drunkenness, crass incapacity, gross blundering, and a most shocking lack of discipline and organization. Very few commanding officers ever had so many defeats or so few successes. He was continually embarking upon enterprises of the greatest promise and almost as continually having them come to naught; generally through defeats inflicted by Union commanders of no special reputation. Yet from first to last his was a name to conjure with. No other than his in the South had the spell in it for Missourians and the people west of the Mississippi. They flocked to his standard wherever it was raised, and after three years of failures they followed him with as much eager hope in his last disastrous campaign as in the first, and when he died in St. Louis, two years after the war, his death was regretted as a calamity to the State, and he had the largest funeral of any man in the history of Missouri. 93