Captain Hubbard's Rangers, as the company was always called, got on very well until they began looking around for someone to swear them into the service and order them to the front, and then the trouble began. They first applied to the commanding officer at New Orleans; but he declined to have anything to do with them unless they would give up their independent organization, and that was something the Rangers were determined they would not do to please anybody. They formed their company in the first place because they were led to believe that the Richmond government was in full sympathy with such organizations, which would be allowed full liberty of action when sworn into the service of the State; but such would by no means be the case if they permitted themselves to be sworn into the service of the Confederacy. As one of the Rangers expressed it: "If they were going to give their liberty up to a new government they might as well have stayed under the old."
Tom Randolph was delighted when he heard of this state of affairs, and the Rangers themselves were much depressed; but Rodney Gray was sure he saw a way out of the difficulty when he received a letter from his old schoolmate and chum, Dick Graham, who lived in Missouri. In that letter Dick said he belonged to an organization of partisans who were known as State Guards. Their immediate commander was General Price, but they were required to take oath to obey Governor Jackson and nobody else. In plain English this meant that while the State Guards were willing to look out for the secession movement in Missouri and keep all Yankee invaders off her soil, they did not intend to go into any other State unless they felt like it, or permit the Richmond authorities to control their movements in any way. That was exactly the kind of partisans that Captain Hubbard and his men wanted to be; and when Rodney Gray said that if the Governor of their own State would not accept them as a company, they had a perfect right to offer themselves to the Governor of another, and that it might be a good plan to ask General Price if he would take the Rangers just as they were, Captain Hubbard was glad to act upon the suggestion. So, without delay, a telegram was sent to Dick Graham's father in St. Louis, and in due time the answer came back: