McCulloch, yielding to Price's importunities, ordered the army forward, and at dawn of Aug. 19 he and Mcintosh were sitting down to breakfast with Price and Snead, preparatory to leading their forces forward, when they were startled by their pickets being driven in. McCulloch, who had hated Rains from Old Army days, and despised him and his Missourians since the Dug Springs affair, remarked contemptuously, "O, it's only one of Rains's scares," and turned to his meal. 156 But the matter instantly became more pressing than breakfast. Gen. Lyon had returned to Springfield Monday, Aug. 5, to meet an intense disappointment. Not a thing had been sent to meet his desperate needs. Fremont had ordered one regiment from Kansas and from the Missouri River to go forward to him, but they could hardly reach him in less than a fortnight. There were at that time some 44 regiments in Missouri--regiments commanded by men whose names afterward shine in history--U. S. Grant, John Pope, S. A. Hurlbut, John M. Palmer, John B. Turchin, S. B. Curtis, Morgan L. Smith, O. E. Salomon, John McNeil, etc.,--but they were kept garrisoning posts, chasing guerrillas, and at almost everything else than hurrying forward toward him, as they should have been. Two of his regiments--the 3d and 4th Mo.--took their discharge and started for St. Louis. The 1st Iowa's time was out, but Lyon asked the men to stay with him a few days longer, and they did to a man. Aside from the military reasons for holding Springfield there were others which appealed to Lyon's mind with equal power. His heart had bled over the outrages committed by the Secessionists upon the Union people in that section of the State. The presence of his army was the only security that the loyal people had that their farms would not be robbed and themselves murdered. Hundreds of them had gone into Springfield to be under his protection. How they could be ever gotten back to a place of safety in retreat was the gravest of problems. Gen. Schofield, at that time his Adjutant-General, and who disapproved of fighting the battle of Wilson's Creek, thinks that this consideration had more weight with him than the military reasons, and induced him to fight where the judgment of the soldier was against it. 157 Four anxious days longer Lyon remained at Springfield. He called a council of his principal officers, and the unanimous decision was that the army should retreat. On Aug. 9 he sent the following letter to Gen. Fremont, the last he ever wrote: