Shields; Dr. Daniel F. Shields, their son; Mr. L. E. Shields, of St. Paul, a nephew of General Shields, and other relatives.
Minnesota was represented at the ceremonies, in addition to Mr. L. E. Shields, by Mr. J. J. Reagan, President of the national organization of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and by the writer hereof, who had been specially commissioned by Governor A. O. Eberhart as the State's official delegate.
Accorded a leading place on the programme of addresses, Minnesota's envoy paid a brief tribute to the hero of the occasion, which embodied this personal reminiscence:
A striking incident of my early boyhood is linked across two generations with this event. One morning, when I was seven or eight years old, the tidings spread through the Illinois village which was my home that General Shields, returning wounded from the Mexican War, was a passenger in the stage from Quincy, which stopped for breakfast and to change horses at our little tavern. A crowd assembled and waited, with silent awe, the appearance of the hero. He came out, pale and feeble, supported by two attendants, was lifted into the coach, and it rolled on toward Springfield.
To the group of wide-eyed youth who gazed with undisguised wonder on the scene, it was a revelation and an inspiration. Many of them were destined, fifteen years later, to be soldiers and heroes in a vastly mightier conflict for an inexpressibly holier cause. But this was our first sight of a military uniform, our first view of a real general, our first realization of the pains and penalties of war. It was an object lesson in patriotism. As that coach rolled away toward Springfield, the dust from its wheels, lighted by the morning sunbeams, became a golden aureole through which we saw many things in new colors. The world was never quite the same again.
Thus General Shields vanished from our sight as in a cloud of splendor. Thus his restless spirit passed through life,—through a picturesque, versatile, and always honorable career. Thus he lives and will live in history, a faithful servant of the people, a fearless soldier of the republic, worthy to be hailed, with an innumerable company of his colleagues and comrades, as a priest in the temple of freedom, a prince in the kingdom of glory.
