George Washington Carver Was So Awesome WHY WAS EVERYONE SO MEAN TO HIM?!?!?!?!

George Washington Carver: A Life by Christina Vella
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

ME, worriedly, every so often: "Please don't tell anyone how much I hate Booker T. Washington so they don't think I'm racist."

ALL FAMILY MEMBERS: "Okay, but you're the most likely person to tell someone that."

And fine, it's true, so here we go:

I hate Booker T. Washington. I think he did a really terrible job running the Tuskegee Institute (he did a really great job founding it--he just did a really terrible job running it!), I think a lot of what he said and did was wrongheaded, I think he should have been open to other leaders' ideas of how best to lift up their people instead of just stubbornly following his own personal brand of black-and-white thinking, I think he got distracted by showmanship too often.

But most of all, I hate him because he was really, really, REALLY mean to George Washington Carver for literally no reason. Washington acted like his whole purpose in life was to serve his people, and then turned around and stole away probably the greatest genius of that time and hid him away and made him work like a dog without any of the resources he could have so easily provided and then when Carver created miracles anyway, Washington acted like those miracles were garbage and just continued trying to stomp Carver down.

And for some reason beyond all comprehension, or really just because that's the kind of guy he was, George Washington Carver LOVED Booker T. Washington, loved him and admired him and had so much affection for him, and in return, Washington's every action toward Carver (after, of course, he'd gone to all the trouble to woo Carver into taking that job at Tuskegee) was filled with just palpable contempt. In George Washington Carver: A Life, author Christina Vella writes that every Christmas, Carver made these beautiful hand-painted Christmas cards for all his favorite people. They were masterpieces. Washington always got one, and barely even acknowledged them. But the next year, Carver would go right ahead and paint him another beautiful masterpiece, and Washington would again be all like, "Meh." But after Washington died (yay!) and another guy took over as head of Tuskegee, Carver went to all the trouble to make that guy his very own hand-painted Christmas card, too, because he was just that nice.

And that guy was so touched that he wrote Carver a genuine multi-paged THANK-YOU NOTE FOR THE CHRISTMAS CARD. THAT'S HOW MUCH HE LOVED IT.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by George Washington Carver NM (@gwcarvernps)

Ugh, Booker T. Washington!

Honestly next I should probably read a proper biography of Booker T. Washington, because right now he exists solely in my mind as a cartoon villain.

He really was VERY mean to Carver, though.

Which I feel like is a pattern that started when Carver was a newborn! Susan and Moses Carver, the people who raised him from the time of his mother’s abduction (at least the official story is an abduction--I’d tell you what I think happened, but I feel like I have already expressed an unhealthy amount of George Washington Carver-centric conspiracy theories in my life and I think I'm already not getting invited to parties about it) to the age of nine or ten, allowed that nine- or ten-year-old to leave home and figure out his own means of sustenance and support when little George, with a knack for learning, decided that an education was what he really, really, really wanted for himself. Vella writes somewhat bemusedly that George didn’t seem to remember much of his childhood and/or would often simply tell some amusing anecdote that he’d contradict in a later interview. She attributes it to absent-mindedness, in that his focus was always elsewhere, but honestly I don’t buy it. As an adult, this dude seemed VERY focused on interpersonal relationships. He treasured his friends, and was kind to fans and acquaintances. I feel like if he couldn’t remember his childhood enough to even give a consistent count for the number of siblings he had, there was a reason for it. And if it wasn’t a memory issue but instead that he didn’t want to talk about his childhood and fiction was easier, well, there was a reason for that, too.

Thank goodness little unhoused Carver met people along the way who did help and nurture and support him, although he clearly witnessed and experienced a lot of trauma, too. And he made his own way. He cleaned houses, he took in laundry, and Vella tells a story in which as a child he talked his way into a job as a personal chef and to cover the fact that he didn’t know how to cook he got the lady of the house to demonstrate how to make every single dish so that he could, as he told her, “make it the way you like it.” And after that, he did!

After making his own way in the world, traveling to wherever there was a school he could learn in, pausing his enrollment periodically as he ran out of money, he finally got enough education to be accepted to Highland College in Kansas. He used the rest of his money to get himself there, but when he showed up, the head of the college was all like, “Oh. Yeah, we don’t actually admit Negros,” and Carver had to simply walk away, broke and with his dreams dashed AGAIN.

I hate you, too, Highland College.

Carver was, if anything, even more poor when he was finally able to attend Simpson College, an art school, and then after that, thanks to a teacher who took him under her wing, Iowa State College. But I feel like Iowa State was where he was the happiest in his entire life. He still cleaned and took in laundry, but Vella notes that his teachers and schoolmates and neighbors would make sure he at least had tons of work, because that’s the only way they could get him to take their money. In 1893, four of his paintings won entry into the Chicago World’s Fair, and Carver was going to get to go see them there. But all his clothes were garbage. So one day, some of his classmates literally kidnapped him off the street, manhandled him into a department store, forced him to try on clothes, and then bought him a beautiful new suit, completely against his will.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Abigail DeVille (@victoriouspurple)

And you guys. I cry every time I tell this story, because it is literally so sweet and SO insane, because Carver basically NEVER TOOK THAT SUIT OFF AGAIN IN HIS ENTIRE LIFE. I mean, like, I’m sure he had pajamas, and he spent a lot of time in a lab coat, but if he was dressed up and out and about, he was wearing that suit. That twenty-year-old suit. That thirty-year-old suit. That FORTY-YEAR-OLD SUIT. It was always clean--Carver, after all, was a laundry man!--and it always had a fresh flower in its lapel, but people started to not be able to tell what color it was supposed to be. It was probably, like, dry rotting or something at some point. And sometimes, someone would be like, “Buddy, you want to get yourself a new suit or something?” And Carver, even after he finally had some money--although he never had money like he was supposed to, because Tuskegee never paid him a decent salary, much less the salary he deserved--would just be like, “But clearly I already have a suit I am literally wearing it right now?”

So here’s the thing: Vella makes very clear that Carver was super happy at Iowa State. Some people were for sure racist towards him but a lot of people were not, he had friends, he had mentors, he was learning and he loved it, he was blowing everyone away with how smart he was and how nice and how good he was at everything, and he already had an excellent job lined up right there as soon as he graduated, because these professors did NOT want to let him out of their sight, he was so awesome.

Enter Booker T. Washington.

And okay, to be fair to Washington, the people of Alabama, Black and white but especially Black, were just absolutely beyond destitute at this time. Anything that anyone could do to help them was a very good thing. But Washington had a very black and white, VERY limited idea of what was best for Black people as a whole, and he didn’t give a fuck that it wasn’t what many Black people wanted for themselves--he was going to do for them what HE wanted to do for them, and that’s it.

And what he wanted to do for them wasn’t so much to offer a proper school education, although to be fair Tuskegee did teach literacy and numeracy, but essentially to offer more sophisticated farming and industrial education. I think it was this weird wanting to serve his people but also hating intellectualism vibe that Vella describes that made him 1) work as hard as he did to woo Carver away from his perfect Iowa State prospects, but also 2) shit on everything Carver tried to do and act contemptuous of all his accomplishments and thwart all his efforts because Carver was clearly very intellectually gifted and treasured intellect, and that shone through as much as his kindness did.

So Washington refused to fund Carver’s teaching lab, causing Carver to resort to garbage picking and DIY to stock it. Carver scored a very prestigious federal grant to host an experiment station at the school, and Washington refused to assign him a consistent staff to work it. When Carver succeeded with the station anyway and published useful educational brochures, Washington refused to have them printed. It got so bad that when Washington learned that Carver had been teaching--for free! in his free time!--an extremely popular Bible study class for the past three years, he immediately shut it down. Tell me one reason why he’d do that that’s not from simple spite!

Tuskegee could have furnished his lab if they'd wanted to.

Also, I’m very open to the possibility that the author is biased against Booker T. Washington and has simply passed it onto me. Like I said, I need to read a proper bio about him!

But you know what? Carver took Washington’s contempt and Tuskegee’s garbage and with them, he performed wonders. He genuinely saved Alabama, and the South as a whole, with his research and outreach. Enslavers had used their access to free labor to monoculture cotton to such an extent that the land was completely devoid of nutrients, and so everyone who was still trying to live off the land had resorted to simply growing more and more of that same monoculture just to chase any kind of profit. People were malnourished because they’d converted their kitchen gardens to cotton. Same with their livestock yards. Part of Carver’s extensive research and outreach was finding nutritious, cheap crops and livestock that fed people, turned a profit, and also healed the land. Sweet potatoes. Hogs. PEANUTS!!! People were also longing for more elevated lifestyles but weren’t sure what that would consist of, so were spending their precious money on stupid stuff like fancy clocks and organs that represented culture to them (tangent, but I thought this detail was VERY interesting, because way north in De Smet, South Dakota, the Ingalls family was also spending their precious money on a stupid organ!). So Carver researched methods of making beautiful paints cheaply from the local soils, then taught everyone how to paint their homes and furnishings so they could have pretty things around them without wasting their money.

Another tangent: all throughout the book, Vella just keeps on referring to Carver’s “woman’s voice.” She genuinely goes out of her way to bring this up ALL THE TIME. Carver meets someone famous--they must be surprised to hear his woman’s voice! Carver gives a lecture--people probably thought it was strange hearing a woman’s voice! At one point, I swear she is absolutely giddy because Carver met a woman whom she says had an unusually deep voice, and she’s genuinely all, “OMG I BET IT SOUNDED SO WEIRD! BECAUSE HE SOUNDED LIKE A WOMAN AND SHE SOUNDED LIKE A MAN! AND WHEN THEY TALKED TO EACH OTHER IT WAS LIKE THE OTHER PERSON’S VOICE SHOULD BE COMING OUT OF EACH OF THEIR MOUTHS! HAHAHAHAHA!!!”

So anyway, I kept reading her taking these shots at Carver’s voice and being all, “Dude! Why is she obsessed with saying he sounds like a woman?” So I got on YouTube to see if there are any videos of Carver speaking.

There are. And fine, he sounds like a woman. Just… Vella acts weirdly excited about it, okay?

Anyway, *I* was very excited in the book when Booker T. Washington died, even though it caused Carver to go into genuine mourning for months and also donate half a year’s worth of his pitiful salary to a memorial for that asshole. I’m just so mad at how much of his life he gave up for that man.

There’s another whole weird part of the biography concerning how Carver apparently also gave up another huge chunk of his life to massaging people with peanut oil, because it got published in the newspapers as a miracle cure, causing people to show up from everywhere all the time asking him to, and he was too nice to say no. It’s super weird, though.

Another weird part: although everyone online seems to think that Carver was queer because he was life partners with the lab assistant he had late in his career, Austin W. Curtis, Jr., Vella does not think that this was true at all. Honestly, she low-key makes Curtis out to be a villain who made secret deals behind Carver’s back to profit off of their professional partnership and their friendship. Instead, she puts forth the VERY convincing case that Carver was queer because he was deeply in love with a much younger man whom he met through church stuff. He wrote him obsessive letters for years, letters in which you can literally feel the agonized longing, translated into Jesus-speak. This besottedness went mostly unreciprocated, poor dude. Honestly, I think Carver was probably aroace. His letters of religious fervor to that dude did sound pretty sexy, but I dunno, religion can be weird like that.

Eventually, Henry Ford befriended Carver and built him the fanciest of fancy labs. But you guys, you might as well go ahead and start crying with me again, because by then, Carver was too frail to get much use out of it. He just always worked so hard, and I feel like he never got exactly what he deserved out of life. I guess he’d be proud of his beautiful George Washington Carver Museum at Tuskegee, although I’m low-key mad about it, but his other memorial is literally at his enslavers’ house sooo…

So… I dunno, you guys. All I know about George Washington Carver I learned from his national park site and this biography and some really sketchy online content that I do not believe. People are such weirdos. So, did Vella do me dirty? Is Booker T. Washington actually awesome and now I hate him for no reason? Was Curtis really Carver’s lover and Vella simply won’t say?

Is it super weird that she kept saying he had a woman’s voice? I mean sure, it’s high-pitched--okay, it’s remarkably high-pitched--but she’s being weird about it, right?

P.S. View all my reviews

P.P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

In Which I Go On A Pilgrimage To George Washington Carver's Hometown

And I am really, really, really super chill about it!

Lol, you KNOW that's not true, if only because I have never ever been chill about a single thing in my entire life ever. Much less that it is objectively impossible to be chill about George Washington Carver, THE MOST PROFOUND GENIUS OF OUR TIME, WHO SPENT LITERALLY HIS ENTIRE LIFE BEING THWARTED AND DIMINISHED AND STIFLED, WHO WAS NEVER ALLOWED TO REACH HIS FULL POTENTIAL AND YET STILL CREATED WONDROUS THINGS, WHO LIVED SOLELY TO SERVE HIS PEOPLE AND LIFT THEM UP AND DID SO UNDER IMPOSSIBLE CONDITIONS THAT WOULD HAVE CRUSHED ANY OTHER PERSON, WHO LOVED HANDICRAFTS AS MUCH AS I DO BUT WAS QUITE A LOT BETTER AT THEM THAN I AM, AND WHO. WAS. QUEER!!!

Anyway, this warning sign on the front door of the visitor center of the George Washington Carver National Monument amused me:

I hadn't ever thought about it, but I guess you cannot conduct place-based, experiential learning at the monument for the guy made famous by peanuts if you've got a peanut allergy!

Bonus point: this was my fourth national park site that I visited over Juneteenth weekend (which was on a Friday this year), and yet this was the only Juneteenth programming that I encountered. And it was really good!

As part of the program, the park ranger gave a rundown of every national park site that honors a Black person or has an emphasis on the Black experience. It was very helpful!

In other news... Okay, I'm just going to come right out and tell you right away that I have mixed feelings about George Washington Carver's national park site being located at his birthplace. 

On the one hand, I do think that the site does all it can, considering its location, to carefully classify the relationship between George and his older brother, Jim, and their former slaveowners with whom they lived until George left them at about the age of 9 or 10. George himself, while writing a short biographical sketch in his old age, referred to them as "Mr. and Mrs. Carver," said that they were "very kind" to him, and thanked them for his "home training." In signage, the site mainly refers to them as the children's "guardians," which is objectively correct. The children were allowed to live in the former slaveowner's cabin with them, there are no accusations or even oblique suggestions in any primary source material that I can find that the children were ever mistreated, and although they were required to work, there also don't seem to be any accusations or suggestions that the children were worked like servants, and not like boys of that time period whose labor was assumed and required. 

However, I feel like placing George Washington Carver's memorial on the site of these former slaveowners' land, where he lived for only a decade at most but where they lived for most of their lives, centers them shamefully in a story that they have no business being more than a couple of paragraphs in. Sure, his childhood home is where he learned to love nature and handicrafts and first discovered his knack for music and art and learning, but that is nothing to the credit of these former slaveowners. They did not birth him. They did not nurture him as parents would. They trafficked and enslaved his mother, then enslaved her children. Moses Carver gave George his mother's spinning wheel and her bill of sale, but he did not give him her wages or any percentage of whatever profit her labor had allowed him. They didn't pay for his education or help him obtain it. George spent the latter half of his childhood unhoused in search of that education, paying for it himself, getting occasional help from total strangers but none from these former slaveowners.

George himself didn't center these people or seem to hold them close emotionally. This is a man who wrote weekly letters for his entire life to people he'd met once (and sometimes never!), who gave handmade Christmas cards and answered every letter he ever received, who wasted his affection on countless people who did not deserve it, but who did not write his former slaveowners, nor did he visit them more than a couple of times. He even lost track of Moses entirely later in the man's life. If he had an emotional attachment to Moses' farm, it must have been a complicated one, perhaps more centered on his brother and the mother he couldn't remember and the place itself than the people who started his life as his enslavers.

But having George's national monument on this land implicitly centers Moses and Susan Carver. It was THEIR land! The visitor center looks out into what was once their cropland that George's mother, Mary, and then George and Jim after her, were required to work for free:

I guess we're being super neutral in this signage, but George didn't have "to build his own lab equipment from scratch, working with what others saw as trash" because Tuskegee Institute itself was poor, which is what I think the signage implies; he did that because Booker T. Washington himself, the head of Tuskegee Institute, literally would not give him the money to buy a single thing. The Institute had the money to equip his lab--they just wouldn't do it.

The hiking trail passes, and you can walk around in, their house that was built after George left them (again, at 9 or 10 years old!) and so he never even lived in it:

The trail also passes the cemetery where several Carvers are buried with their headstones. There are likely at least two of George's siblings also in that cemetery, but their graves are unmarked and can't be pinpointed. Jim, George, and Mary are not buried here:

I don't like it.

Here's as good a place as any to also add my own personal conspiracy theory that I am VERY suspicious of how a childless couple who were not slaveowners made one, and only one ever, purchase of an enslaved person, and that one enslaved person that this childless couple thought it was important enough to purchase was a thirteen-year-old girl. That thirteen-year-old girl went on, while still a child, to have two children who lived past infancy, and each child had a different person named as their father, and each time, the person named as their father was someone who happened to have already died. 

Since George and Jim, as far as we know, were as childless as Moses and Susan, I guess there's no way to figure it out now, but again: I DO NOT LIKE IT.

Okay, that's all I'm going to say about these people. Also, I am trying to limit how crazy I sound on a daily basis, and this has definitely put me beyond my per day limit for today.

Instead, please look at the footprint of the cabin where George Washington Carver was born, and where he lived with his mother for a very, very short amount of time:

George Washington Carver had no memories of his mother, and never saw her again or knew what happened to her (nor do we!), but as an adult he kept her spinning wheel with him in his home, where friends said it was treasured.

Okay, just let me make this one last comparison: holding onto and treasuring a keepsake from a parent you never even knew vs. never visiting and even completely losing track of the person who supposedly raised you for the first ten years of your life. Moses and Susan Carver did not do right by those children.

Here's a sketch George made of the cabin in which he was born:

The museum at the visitor center states that this sketch was made "later in life," but interestingly, I recently read a biography that claimed the sketch must have been made when he was a child, since it's a bit rough and George quickly grew later in childhood to become an incredible artist. That biography also discussed how ill he was for several years at the end of his life, however, including how he lost strength and mobility in his limbs, so I reckon that the visitor center is probably correct. Even later in life he was still a wonderful artist who wielded his medium, and his tools, as well as he was physically able to wield them.

The national monument has turned much of its land into a peaceful, beautiful native meadow, and I think this, more than anything else on the site other than his mother's spinning wheel, is the perfect memorial to George Washington Carver:

I also loved walking through the woods he explored and played in as a child:

There's a sweet statue of a young George in a clearing in the woods, although by all accounts, including his own, he was very much a scrawny, sickly little fellow and so likely did not very much resemble this healthy, hale child. We'll just say it's a statue of young George's spirit of determination, then:



Although one day I want to go to the George Washington Carver Museum at the Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site, there are numerous examples of George's handicrafts and work projects here, as well:

He had a huge collection of specimens that he could have used for pedagogy, but Booker T. Washington never gave his department the space to display them, and the storage allocated for them was vulnerable to the elements and pests, so much of it was ruined.

Labels and annotations in his own hand!

I walked through a lab clearly set up so that the museum could conduct educational programming, and found what would probably have been George Washington Carver's favorite thing here:

He still gets to teach.

In other news, next year I am 100% figuring out how to grow my own peanut plant in the garden. Peanuts are SUPER nutritious, did you know? And super versatile--you can do SO many things with them, like peanut milk!

You should also keep pigs. They're very gentle, eat lots of scraps, and if you can bring yourself to have them slaughtered they're pound-for-pound very much worth the investment in their upkeep.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

There Is A Civil War Battlefield Wherever I Go

Even in Arkansas!

Actually, there are at least three proper Civil War battlefields in Arkansas. One of them, Prairie Grove (now a state park), is where one of my great-great-grandfathers fought... on the wrong side, sigh, because of course he did. 

Fun(?) Fact: Robert Shaver, the Commander of my great-great-grandfather's division, was, for a while, the most racist man in Arkansas. After the Civil War he became the supreme commander of the Arkansas division of the Ku Klux Klan (so great job there with that whole Reconstruction business, President Johnson!), and when authorities finally got around to charging him for some of the crimes he'd been committing he fled to British Honduras, where he lived for another four years. In 1872, one of his old lawyer buddies, Elisha Baxter, who was -ish on the Union side during the Civil War but not super fervently, was elected governor (I also just need to tell you that his political party was named the Minstrels, for god's sake, and he won thanks to committing a LOT of election fraud), and immediately got Shaver pardoned. So Shaver came back to Arkansas and was elected as county sheriff, because of course he was, and lived the rest of his life happily committing hate crimes. Baxter only lasted two years as governor, and Arkansas never wrenched free of the grip of racism and Lost Cause fantasies.

ANYWAY...

Although I do someday really want to visit Prairie Grove so that I can say, "WTF, Great-Great-Pappa?!?" in person, Prairie Grove doesn't give out national park passport stamps and Pea Ridge does.

So here we are!

To set the stage, you should remember that in the Civil War, Missouri was a border state, officially part of the Union (which is why none of their slaves got emancipated via the Emancipation Proclamation, ugh). Buuut this designation was highly contested, since Missouri did have slaveholders and tons of resources and infrastructure and rivers, etc., that the Confederacy really wanted. A militia formed in Missouri that was essentially a part of the Confederate army, and with support from Confederate forces from Arkansas and from Indian nations that also held slaves, they had the potential to do a lot of damage, possibly up to and including secession of the whole state.

So a Union Brigadier General, Samuel Curtis, was put in charge of driving the militia out of Missouri and down into Arkansas, where it would be safely out of the way of riling up Missouri.

And he did! Curtis pushed the Missouri State Guard out of Missouri and south into Arkansas just like he'd planned, and Curtis' forces chased them all the way, taking potshots and having little skirmishes and stretching out their Union supply line until finally Curtis needed to stop and take up a defensive position inside Confederate territory to give everyone time to catch up.

While the Union forces were essentially just hanging out in Northwest Arkansas, enjoying the scenery and the mountain air, a completely different Confederate commander, Major General Van Dorn, decided that this was an awesome chance to stage a counter-offensive strike. If he could actually knock out Curtis' Union army, then there would be nothing standing in the way of not just the Missouri State Guard, but the entire Confederate army from having free reign in southwest Missouri. He ran his troops up towards Curtis, making them travel so fast that he legendarily only permitted each soldier to carry one blanket, three days' rations, and a measly 40 rounds of ammunition. 

In the mountains. In March. I know Arkansas is a ball of burning hell-fire in the summer, but up in the Ozarks in early Spring it's still winter. Also, 40 rounds of ammunition is... not a lot.

Not that we care, because they were the baddies, but nevertheless!

And then, as if that wasn't reckless enough, Van Dorn decided that he wasn't even going to attack Curtis head-on, because it might give them the chance to retreat back to their reinforcements and eventually Missouri, but instead to sneak sneak around Curtis and come up on him from the rear. So the troops were half their strength, exhausted from three days of forced marching, out of food after eating their three days' worth of rations, and it was March in the Ozarks so of course it was sleeting.

Again, these are the bad guys, so it's fine.

The decision to try to come at Curtis from the north actually wasn't the worst idea, since Curtis genuinely wasn't expecting it--he was busy fortifying a position north of Sugar Creek, because he thought the Confederates would have to cross it to attack him from the south. But then his scouts and spies started coming to tell him that there was a Confederate army marching from the north, down Telegraph Road just a mile away:

United States War Department, 1895 {PD-US}} 

I tried to frame this Google Maps screenshot to cover approximately the same area as that battle illustration. The blue flag at the bottom indicates a spot where you can still see some of Curtis' original trenches on the north bank of Sugar Creek. The center blue flag is the visitor center for Pea Ridge National Battlefield. The top blue flag is Elkhorn Tavern. The road between the two is Telegraph Road (now National Park Drive), and you can follow it down to the highway, where it overlaps the highway as it runs southwest, then you can find it going south again just to the right of the Leetown label and follow it south to Sugar Creek.

Telegraph Road is actually really interesting, because once upon a time it had connected Forth Smith and St. Louis, two places that we'd actually been going back and forth between on this trip. I imagine it took them a lot longer than 4.5 hours to traverse that length in the 1800s, however! Telegraph Road was also a route for the Trail of Tears, bringing the forced migrants southwest from St. Louis. These fields that you can see from the visitor center window once hosted thousands of Cherokee who camped there, under military guard, along the way:

At this point, some of the Cherokee peoples turned due west, but others continued south to Fort Smith and then went west. 

Okay, so ANYWAY, Curtis found out that Confederates were approaching from the rear, which was a big deal because his own supply train and soldiers' campsites and all their comfy spaces, etc., were also to their rear, and he had to turn his entire army around to face the other way, WHICH IS NOT AS EASY AS IT SOUNDS! You can't just about-face! The guys who were told to be on the right still have to be on the right, but now it's the other right, and the guys who were told to be at the front still have to be at the front, but now the front is on the other side of a whole bunch of other guys, and there's cannons and shit that all have to be moved--it's a nightmare!

Also, although I mentioned it before, the temperature is below freezing.

Basically, this entire day preceding the official battle is taken up by a series of oopses and blunders as everyone rustles around and tries to get themselves settled--first Van Dorn blunders into a Union cavalry patrol, then a different Union force gets attacked by a different Confederate force that takes a bunch of them prisoner, but then yet another Union force accidentally bumps into that same Confederate force and rescues a bunch of the prisoners, meanwhile a completely different Confederate force got lost and wandered too far north and had to waste time marching all the way back, in the process just barely happening to miss blundering into yet another Union force, while that Union force had a different Confederate force bump into them, etc. The details aren't really important--just imagine a sped-up film of Confederate and Union soldiers running back and forth and bumping into each other and chasing each other while Yakety Sax plays.

It's all just so stupid, lol, although it would be a lot funnier if they weren't killing each other over one side's sick obsession with enslaving other humans.

So everybody wakes up on March 7, 1862, feeling frustrated and stupid. Curtis knows Van Dorn is coming, Van Dorn knows Curtis knows he's coming, and each of them sort of independently decides that the best place to make their stand is poor, innocent Elkhorn Tavern, local pub and stagecoach stop right on Telegraph Road. Because god forbid you have a battle that doesn't involve actively ruining the lives of civilians. 

And now all they have to do is get there!

I love a light-up map! This depicts part of the morning of March 7, with some of Curtis' troops moving up Telegraph Road to Elkhorn Tavern, some troops to the west where they're about to snipe some Confederates in Oberson's field, and those about-to-be-sniped Confederates moving south from Ford Road, distracted from their own goal of marching east to Elkhorn Tavern because they saw some Union soldiers they wanted to chase.

Van Dorn had split his troops up, the better to sneak around Curtis. Half the troops, headed by General Price, had made it to the spot along Telegraph Road north of Elkhorn Tavern where they'd planned to meet, but the other half, headed by General McCullough, was still way too far west. So Van Dorn told him to take a right at Twelve Corners Church (which is still there today!) and follow Ford Road southeast. Ford Road doesn't seem to still be there, but you can see it on the above map and on the below map you can kind of imagine a line between Twelve Corners Baptist Church southeast to kind of that Hwy 72 marker, then east to where it meets Telegraph Road just south of Elkhorn Tavern:

McCullough and all his half of the troops were busily doing that when they were spotted by Union troops. I mean, half an entire Confederate army is walking down a road--how could they NOT be spotted?!? They were walking east down Ford Road towards Elkhorn Tavern, approximately due north of that Leetown Battlefield flag, when three Union cannons started attacking them from the south. But there were SO many more Confederates--half of Van Dorn's army!--than soldiers in this spot, so the Confederates turned on them and overwhelmed them. 

artifacts from the museum in the visitor center

In the confusion, apparently nobody noticed that either the Confederate Cherokee troops (which is what most historians say) or the Texas troops (which is what some historians say) were actually murdering the fallen Union soldiers and scalping them. The scalping was proven, but the murders are assumed because the number of Union dead in that spot exceeded the number of Union wounded, which is the opposite of what you'd expect. Another issue is that some of the Confederates were also wearing blue (?!?), and so some historians also theorize there were some issues with friendly fire.

Also, some of the Confederates were actually wearing white, because they hadn't had time to get their uniforms dyed, so they stuck out like albino deer in a field.

It was POURING during our driving tour (which is kind of funny, because it was sleeting during our first long-ago trip to Pea Ridge), so we did not even so much as get out of the car to check out the site of the Ford Road attack. I can easily visualize Union cannons and Confederates scalping people from the comfy, dry car!

Regardless, there were a bunch of scalping, blue- and white-wearing Confederates chasing Union soldiers and doing war crimes on them, but at least that chaos gave a different Union leader, Colonel Osterhaus, time to carefully position his own troops in the woods south of Oberson's Field (good thing it was only March so Oberson didn't lose a whole field of corn!). Eventually, McCullough and his troops ended up in the woods north of that same field. McCullough knew the Union troops were on the other side of the field and had a whole attack planned, but just to help him finalize it, he got on his horse and just poked his head out into Oberson's field to see if he could see the Union line from there.

poor Oberson's field!

east side of Oberson's field, with Union cannons

He could, and the Union line could also see him, because he was immediately sniped off his horse and fell down dead.

His second-in-command, McIntosh, seamlessly jumped right into command... for an entire fifteen minutes, until he, too, was sniped and fell down dead.

And that's basically a feature wrap on that whole set of Confederate troops! If there was a third in command, he didn't seem to know it, because the whole lot of them just sat around in the woods for the rest of the day. Osterhaus, expecting and expecting and expecting that surge of Confederates from the north and never getting it, was eventually like, "Okay.....", and moved off east to attack some different Confederates. 

Got my north and south confused here. I was trying to photograph the spots where McCullough and McIntosh got sniped, but instead I photographed where they got sniped from, I guess. My excuse is that although this battlefield is very well preserved, in my opinion it is NOT very well marked. At Gettysburg, anytime a person stood somewhere for more than two minutes somebody put a marker up about it!

Meanwhile, Price had made it down to Elkhorn Tavern--

--where the Union forces had managed to turn around and actually outnumbered the Confederates. Nevertheless, after a full day of fighting, including hours of cannon-fire from both sides--

--and a final infantry run, the Confederates did take Elkhorn Tavern from the Union, but not before the Union was able to rescue their supply train and move all their stuff south, so the Union soldiers got to have a proper dinner and lie-down and rest up for the next day. The Confederate soldiers, however, basically had to just drop in their tracks like dogs and cover up with their single blanket--they had no food, no extra gear, no ammunition or anything other than what they could loot from the dead. Also, although some of McCullough's abandoned troops eventually wandered up and joined with Price, a whole bunch of them... just left! The Confederate supply train had also retreated, so the Confederates literally had nothing.

Good!

First thing in the morning of March 8, one of the Union commanders, General Sigel, had soldiers place cannons in good spots across the center and top of that big field in the photo below:

That grey line that goes across the big field diagonally to the northwest from just about the Pea Ridge Federal Battlefield Line flag is all cannons. There are a few more cannons on the northeast side of that field next to Telegraph Road.

He then proceeded to shoot the absolute shit out of the Confederate soldiers, literally sniping individual targets with entire cannons. And when the Confederates started retreating, some of them ran up towards that top blue flag in the above picture, which is actually an interesting geologic formation of a bluff with a bunch of rocky bits sticking up from it, perfect for hiding behind... unless you're hiding from Sigel, that is! Because he then instructed the cannons to start shooting the shit out of the top of that bluff, as well, causing rocky bits and boulders and tree limbs and cannonballs to fall down inside the crevices where people were hiding, injuring and killing them more than if they'd just all been standing together in a field.

I'm standing directly on top of that spot, but you can't really see down into the crevices. I'm assuming you could hike there from the battlefield, but there's not an obvious path. A challenge for another time!

After a couple of hours of basically putting the entire Confederate army there through a meat tenderizer, Curtis finally ordered his Union infantry troops forward. Half the Confederate army, including both Van Dorn and Price, retreated, leaving the other half of the army just standing there without a commander. The ones with sense retreated north up Telegraph Road, and they at least managed to organize themselves a rear guard at Elkhorn Tavern to cover their escape. 

This view from the bluff is directly over the place where hiding Confederates were slaughtered via rockfall and shrapnel. Out of sight to the left is Elkhorn Tavern, and the Union cannons were in the field on the right.

And that was it! Afterward, a lot of Van Dorn's soldiers deserted, and the rest were reassigned to Tennessee. Curtis continued to fight his way across Arkansas, pillaging as he went in a manner that accurately presaged Sherman's later march to the sea. The battle at Pea Ridge was middlingly famous for a bit, both because people liked to Monday morning quarterback Van Dorn's many boneheaded maneuvers, and because word of those scalpings got out. Newspapers back then LOVED themselves a good scalping story!

As for us, we got back in the car wet to the skin and stayed wet to the skin for for our hour-long trip to the site I was MOST excited to see.

We were going to George Washington Carver's house! And if you haven't heard me monologuing about George Washington Carver and how awesome he is and all the amazing things he did, then, well... get ready, I guess! Because it's coming!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!