"In the spring of 1861 Capt. Hiram Bledsoe came to Jefferson City looking for a carriage on which to mount a gun he had in Lexington. I showed him the only one in store, which was the self-same carriage not considered worthy a place in the battery of the Southwest Expedition. Bledsoe looked at it, thought it would answer his purposes and took it with him. On that carriage was mounted the famous “Old Sacramento”, a name which became as a household word in the Missouri State Guard. This gun was originally a long nine-pounder, cast from church-bells by Mexicans, and, with other guns, was captured by Doniphan’s regiment in Chihuahua and brought home by them. Bledsoe had the gun bored out to a twelve-pounder caliber at a machine shop in Lexington, and mounted as stated, it went through the campaigns of the State Guard, firing its last round at Elkhorn. The gun was afterwards condemned and recast at Selma, Ala. I saw it there in the early part of 1863."
James E. McGhee, Service with the Missouri State Guard: The Memoir of Brigadier General James Harding (Springfield, MO: Oak Hills Publishing, 2000): 6.