He was captain of the home guards in Hawkeye, and he never left home except upon one occasion, when on the strength of a rumor, he executed a flank movement and fortified Stone's Landing, a place which no one unacquainted with the country would be likely to find.
"Gad," said the Colonel afterwards, "the Landing is the key to upper Missouri, and it is the only place the enemy never captured.

If other places had been defended as well as that was, the result would have been different, sir." The Colonel had his own theories about war as he had in other things.
If everybody had stayed at home as he did, he said, the South never would have been conquered.

For what would there have been to conquer?
Mr.
Jeff Davis was constantly writing him to take command of a corps in the confederate army, but Col.

Sellers said, no, his duty was at home.

And he was by no means idle.