eighteen months ago urged expressly the sending of the whole apparatus to move those guns. I alluded to it again last December, for fear it would be neglected; lo and behold it was. I also recommended that vessels should be chartered to come around Cape Horn to the Columbia River. The way they come it costs as much to get the guns from San Francisco to this river as it would from New York. Now. General Ramsay, writes saying one-half the guns promised by General Ripley on the 22nd of December, 1862, will be sent. General Ripley promised those guns in December, 1862, after a full conference with General Totten and the War Department and the Senators form the State, with my various letters before them. The programme ought not to be thus lightly abandoned.

Very respectfully, your obedient servant,

BENJ. ALVORD,

Brigadier-General, U. S. Volunteers, Commanding District.

HEADQUARTERS DISTRICT OF UTAH,
Camp Douglas, Utah, near Great Salt Lake City, July 2, 1864.

[Lieutenant Colonel R. C. DRUM.:]

COLONEL: I have the honor to inform the department commander that I have recently become cognizant of a persistent effort on the part of a few merchants and traders doing business in Great Salt Lake City to institute a forced change in the currency of the Territory, viz, from national Treasury notes to gold coin. Without knowing whether the movement had its origin in a desire to depreciate the national currency, and to this extent weaken the arm of Goverment, or in the selfish greed for gain, or, as is most probable, both combined, my first impulse was to arrest the originators on the first overt act to that end, and crush out at once and forever so unpatriotic and suicidal a policy. I have, however, on reflection, deemed it proper to submit the facts to the department commander, and ask for specific instructions on the subject should the attempt be actually made. Your are respectfully informed that up to this time the only currency of the Territory has been established by the government-legal-tender notes-and notwithstanding the product of northern mines, in dust, there is not sufficient gold and sliver coin in the Territory to suffice for one day's need in commerce, trade, and barter.

The only effect of the forcible measures threatened to be inaugurated by the mechants would therefore be to depreciate to an enormous extent the current value of the national currency, and disseminate among a suspicious people the opinion that the Government was fast going to peces, and its pledged securities little better than blank paper. The efforts of bad men among them to sneer at the impotence of the Government and depreciate it in any manner would be furthered, and our great nation become a byword and reproach among a deluded community, already deeply inoculated with enmity and disloyalty toward it. In almost every other community the inevitable laws of trade would check and prevent the inauguration of so suicidal a policy as that indicated under the circumstances existing in this Territory, but it is greatly to be feard that unless some stringent measures are authorized, a very few disloyal and greedy merchants, owing and neither feeling any allegiance tonor regard for the nation, may consummate a most disastrous stroke in the forcible change of the currency. The whole