Three Cousins Who Became Missourians.

Descendants of Colonel Nathaniel Gist, the Revolutionary patriot, were mighty in the Civil war period of Missouri. Three of them were Francis P. Blair, B. Gratz Brown and Joseph O. Shelby. In their boyhood days these three cousins were sheltered by the same hospitable roof in Lexington, Kentucky. Colonel Gist moved from Virginia to Kentucky. He had four daughters two of whom married Jesse Bledsoe and Francis Preston Blair, Sr. A daughter of Judge Bledsoe married Mason Brown. Their only son was B. Gratz Brown named for an uncle. One of the daughters of Thomas Boswell married Orville Shelby and their son was Joseph O. Shelby. Benjamin Gratz lost his wife and married her niece, Mrs. Orville Shelby, whose husband had died when Joseph O. Shelby was a child. Gratz was a hemp manufacturer and very hospitable. Blair was at the Gratz home on long visits. Brown was there as a student. Shelby was some years younger. There were ties of kinship other than that through the Gists. The elder Francis P. Blair and Mason Brown who married two of the Gist girls were direct descendents of John Preston of Virginia. Here came in a connection with Thomas H. Benton whose wife was a granddaughter of John Preston.

The younger Blair came to Missouri on the suggestion of Senator Benton. B. Gratz Brown followed his cousin some time later. Shelby came in 1852 and settled in Lafayette County where he took up the vocation learned at the Gratz home-the manufacture of hemp. When the Civil war began Blair telegraphed Shelby to come to St. Louis. Shelby went and refused a commission. in the Union army. He returned to Lafayette County and recruited a company of cavalry to join the Confederacy.

How Blair Drew Indictments for Treason.

Frank P. Blair came well by his loyalty and devotion to the Union. Not one of his biographers makes mention that he drew the only indictments for treason against the United States upon which convictions were had and sentences of death were pronounced. Yet that interesting fact was discovered in New Mexican archives by Ralph E. Twichell, the vice president of the bar association of the territory. The fact is interesting for its personal bearing. It is interesting historically, for in all of the cases of treason against the United States, these New Mexican indictments are the only ones which were followed by conviction and the death sentence.

Blair, in 1845, went to the Rocky Mountains for his health. He was there when Kearny and the Missourians captured New Mexico. He joined Bent's command as a private and remained for some time after the authority of the United States was established over the territory. In 1847 some hot-headed Spaniards attempted to stir the native population to revolt against the United States. They assassinated Governor Bent and several other Americans at Taos, but the rebellion never got beyond the place where it started. Antonio Maria. Trujillo and several fellow-conspirators were arrested. Frank P. Blair drew the indictments, which were in this form:

"The grand jurors for the District of New Mexico, on the part of the United States of America, on their oaths, present that Antonio Maria Trujillo, of the County of Taos, in the

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Territory of New Mexico, being a citizen of the United States, but disregarding the duty of his allegiance to the government of the United States, aforesaid, and wholly withdrawing the allegiance, duty and obedience which every true and faithful citizen of the said government should and of right ought to bear toward the said government of the United States, on the 20th day of January, in the year 1847, and on divers other days, as well before as after, with force and arms, at the county aforesaid and Territory aforesaid, together with divers other false traitors to the jurors aforesaid unknown, did then and there maliciously, wickedly and traitorously levy war against the government of the United States of America, and did then and there maliciously and traitorously endeavor and attempt to subvert the laws and Constitution of the government of the United States aforesaid, in contempt of the laws of said government, to the evil example of all others in like case offending, and against the peace and dignity of the government of the United States. "F. P. BLAIR,

"United States District Attorney."

The indictment was returned, the trial followed, and Trujillo was found guilty. Sentence of death, the only one in the history of this country for that crime, was pronounced upon him by Judge Houghton.

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"Antonio Maria Trujillo,' said the court, ‘a jury of twelve citizens, after a patient and careful investigation, pending which all of the safeguards of the law, managed by able and indefatigable counsel, have been afforded you, have found you guilty of the high crime of treason. What have you to say why the sentence of death should not be pronounced against you?

"Your age and gray hairs have excited the sympathy of both the court and the jury. Yet while each and all were not only willing, but anxious, that you should have every advantage placed at your disposal that their highly responsible duty under the law to their country would permit, yet have you been found guilty of the crime alleged to your charge. It would appear that old age has not brought you wisdom nor purity nor honesty of heart. While holding out the hand of friendship to those whom circumstances have brought to rule over you, you have nourished bitterness and hatred in your heart. You have been found seconding the acts of a band of the most traitorous murderers that ever blackened with the recital of their deeds the annals of history.

"Not content with the peace and security in which you have lived under the present government, secure in all your personal rights as a citizen, in property, in form, and in your religion, you gave your name and influence to measures intended to effect universal murder and pillage, the overthrow of the government and one widespread scene of bloodshed in the land. For such foul crimes an enlightened and liberal jury have been compelled, from the evidence brought before them, and by a sense of their stern but unmistakable duty, to find you guilty of treason against the government under which you are a citizen. And there only now remains to the court the painful duty of passing upon you the sentence of the law, which is that you be taken from hence to prison, there to remain until Friday, the 16th day of April next, and that at 2 o'clock in the afternoon of that day you be taken thence to the place of execution, and there be hanged by the neck till you are dead! dead! dead! and may the Almighty God have mercy on your soul.'"

Trujillo was not hanged. A reprieve and a subsequent commutation of sentence averted the execution for treason.

George G. Vest, Editor, Hunter, Lawyer, Statesman.

The father of the late Senator Vest was a carpenter. So determined was he that his son should have schooling that on one occasion when he did not have the money for the tuition fee, he took out his watch and left it with the schoolmaster as a pledge. The boy never forgot this. He spoke of it in later years but at the time the incident occurred it stimulated him to make every

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possible effort to perfect himself in his studies. Young Vest had to leave college and teach a country school for expenses. Then for a time he was Frankfort correspondent of the Louisville Courier-Journal. He worked in the marshal's office to get money to pay for law lectures, finally getting through the law department of Transylvania University when he was twenty-one.

Justice Henry Lamm of the Missouri Supreme Court gave from close personal observation this account of Vest's career:

"With his sheepskin in his pocket, he seems to have coquetted somewhat with literature as a makeshift and started a newspaper at Owensboro, Kentucky, presumably of Whig tendencies, as his father was a Whig and he leaned that way in his youth. Selling out his newspaper and enamored of California, then the Mecca of many adventurous and aspiring spirits, in 1853 he determined to cross the plains aiming at Independence, Missouri, to join one of the freighting caravans outfitting there, and to establish himself on the Pacific coast as a lawyer. Coming up the Missouri River to Independence, tradition has it that he and two traveling companions, friends from Kentucky, fell into financial reverses by some misadventure and Vest was constrained to return home by coach, the water falling below navigation in the river. The coach overturned eighty miles east of Independence in the northern limits of Pettis County, and it is more than likely to this incident is due the casting of his lot with Missouri; for he was certainly on his way to his old Kentucky home at the time, the purpose of his trip abandoned, and there were tender and strong ties of love to draw him homeward. In his college days at Danville he had wooed and won Miss Sallie Sneed of that place, whom he afterwards married. Crippled in the shoulder by the overturning of the coach, he was entertained on the plantation of Joseph C. Higgins and possibly attended by Dr. Fox of Georgetown. Recovering and meeting Kentucky settlers who had known his father and who were drawn to him by admiration and the ties of kindred tastes, among them John S. Jones, an old time plains freighter, he was taken on a hunting trip in the edge of Saline County, to the Saline Springs, now known as McAllister Springs. First the buffalo and then the elk had drifted west to escape the rifle of the pioneer frontiersman, but the deer and wild turkey yet lingered in this hunter's paradise. There is no man alive who can now, even in faint outline, draw a recognizable picture of the land young Vest was in, on the western edge of 'the Boone's Lick Country'-a country the fame of whose buffalo, elk, wild honey and wild turkeys, rich grasses, rich soils and genial climate broke through the trackless wilderness on the tongue of rumor thirty or forty years before Vest came, and lured the sons of Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee and the Carolinas, first as stray hunters, then in groups of daring settlers and finally in streams of immigrants. to its borders. Vest was captivated by what he saw on this trip and Missouri won his heart; for he was a born hunter, loving the open air and scenes close to the heart of nature, the sound of running water and the cadences of hounds in chase, active of foot and a dead shot.

"Won to Missouri by the game, the fish, the wilderness of the prairie flowers. and the congenial society of the many Kentuckians here, in 1853 he swung out his shingle and opened a law office at Georgetown and modestly commenced a career which made him 'Senator of two Republics.' In 1853 he was, say, five

feet six inches in height, weighing about 110 pounds, with fiery red hair, a face fair in which boyish freckles still showed, a short neck with an uncommonly large head set unusually well down on his shoulders. His eyes were blue with a tinge of gray which latter color afterwards may have become somewhat accentuated with age and his eyebrows and eyelashes dark and pronounced. He had a form of the singular make-up of being almost as tall when sitting as standing, and the breadth of shoulder and reach of arm of a larger man and indicative of power.

"Mr. Vest had a mobile countenance, a wise and kindling eye, and a voice in perfect command. It had a resonant tremor, far-reaching and effective, with powers of imitation and personification such as you hear in great actors. These parts, coupled with his abounding wit and excellent fancy, made him a raconteur and conversationalist of high order. Wherever he was, whether in a side room at the courthouse relating reminiscences of early practice and incidents in causes he had been in, to other lawyers, or by a roaring campfire on a fishing trip making the night seem short with story of adventure or recitals of the incidents of the day, or in the cloakroom of the Senate discussing architecture with Morrill, or Shakespeare or international law with Cushman K. Davis, or books and fishing with Quay, or on the hustings tingling the blood of Missouri Democrats, or on the floor of the Senate discussing tariff and finance, or before a jury in a box twisting the life out of the other side, or at a banquet table scintillating with humor and repartee, or entertaining at his own fireside, he was the same many-sided, remarkable man. And those of us who had a chance hung about him as the beasts did about Orpheus' lyre or the bees did about the lips of Plato and Sophocles.

"In 1854 he went to Kentucky and married, bringing his wife to Georgetown. It is said that Vest had nettled his landlord a little by intimating it was unsafe to eat his pies without first pounding on the upper crust with a knife handle to scare the cockroaches out. Be that as it may, the said landlord, Captain Kidd, felt no occasion to be otherwise than frank, and, when Vest brought his bride to his house, took him to her for an introduction and proudly asked him what he thought of her, Kidd replied: 'By gum, George, you must have cotched her in a pinch for a husband.'

"Mrs. Vest was less pleased with her husband's surroundings than he. She knew him well and knew he could rise or fall to any environment and needed the spur of inspiration to rise. The situation may be summed up in the language of Vest himself when urged to move: 'Why move? I can shoot enough meat for my family and can always beat (the leading attorney at the Georgetown bar) in his cases.' Mrs. Vest felt the character of the small business in the small town and sparsely settled county gave her husband too much time for fishing and hunting; and her neighbors' hunting horns of a Sunday grated sorely on her Presbyterian ears. After a short stay of two years she, aided by the fact that the cholera had almost depopulated Georgetown and by the solicitation of her father and of certain gentlemen of prominence who had heard a speech by Vest in a preliminary hearing in a criminal case at Boonville, succeeded in 1856 in getting him to locate there, where there was a strong bar, a bar dominated by such attorneys as Adams, Hayden, Draffen, Stephens and Muir. At Boonville, Vest went into partnership with J. W. Draffen and then