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!

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It Was Not a Noose Day at the Fort Smith National Historic Site

I'm pretty bummed that the Fort Smith National Historic Site no longer hangs a noose on the gallows on the anniversary of an execution. It was always kind of fun to be driving by with friends and say, "Hey, is it a noose day? Let's go see!"

In case you ever wondered what it was like to grow up me, lol!

I just like anniversaries and recreations and "on this day in history"-type stuff, but I do see how the practice was probably objectively morbid, and how the park rangers probably got a wearisome amount of inappropriately looky-loo questions and comments on every anniversary. We can't ever seem to have nice things, sigh.

Ah, well. The day we went wasn't an execution anniversary, anyway, and at least the reproduction gallows itself remains!

It was a beautiful day to not have an execution anniversary, and the sun blazed such that my poor, pale family was fraught with sweats and gasps and complaints as we browsed the local farmer's market and then the grounds of what used to be a fort and town on the border between the United States and Indian Territory.

As for me, I was growing increasingly certain that one of the underwires in my bra had broken free of its channel and was digging into my armpit, and I was not looking forward to the ordeal later of recombobulating myself in a public restroom--putting on a sweaty bra while one is also sweaty is almost as tough as putting on a wet swimsuit while one is also wet!--but did I complain?

No, because if you grow up in Arkansas, you grow up weird, poorly socialized to the wider world, and a bit uneducated in some shocking ways, but you also grow up tough!

Anyway, the history of Fort Smith is a little confusing, because it went through a few distinct phases. The first phase is after the government started throwing native nations off of their ancestral homelands and forcing them to emigrate away to encroach upon the established homelands of other nations. So the Cherokee had to encroach upon the Osage here, and this caused enough discord that the government, having bought the whole place off the French so it felt like everything that happened there, up to and including wars between nations (that, to be fair, they also did cause), was their business to stick their nose in.

So, boom! Fort!

Or rather, the footprint of a fort, I guess. This first one was abandoned in 1824.

But what a view it once had!

One of the many very special things about my youth that I did not realize were very special was growing up next to this river:

These days, there's a trail that allows you to walk or bike the entire riverfront as it borders the city, but back when I was a lonely young weirdo with a part-time minimum wage salary, a driver's license and my Pappa's old 1980 Lincoln Town Car (god, I miss that monstrosity!) to use it on, and most of the summer at my disposal, there were really only a couple of proper places in town to access the river, and this was one of them... provided that you bushwhacked your way through a ton of chigger-filled brush, crossed an active railroad track, and then bushwhacked a little more.

Tangent, but later on this day we'd be eating lunch with my high school best friend, when my older kid would mention brushing through some tall grass and weeds that morning (she's a full-grown adult and yet forever my feral wildling!). My buddy gasped and was immediately all, "Did you wash off your legs?!? You're gonna get chiggers!!!" The kid cracked up, because I had reacted the EXACT same way when it happened, and she did not understand what the big deal was.

So then for her crimes she got to sit there eating her pho and listen to my buddy and I relaying our Top Ten Worst Chigger Encounters. Mine is when I sat with my back against a tree once when I was around nine or ten and then spent the next two weeks in an agony of itching from a thousand chigger bites, only 900 of which I could reach, all down my back from neck to butt.

ANYWAY, these days you only have to battle chiggers on your way to the river if you're a feral wildling and wander deliberately off into the weeds. 

Here's my favorite spot on the river:

It's just at the confluence of the Arkansas and Poteau rivers, and this rocky shelf lets you sit and sun yourself as comfortably as if you were on a lakeshore. One benefit to the bushwhacking was that this spot was quite secluded when I was young, a fact that I made ample use of to the tune of LOTS of interpersonal mischief, but I do also like to see it so lovingly tended and clearly well enjoyed:

Anyway, a decade or so after that first fort was abandoned, this area got another fort thanks to the Indian Removal Act of 1830:

This one's also mostly a footprint. But a bigger one!

Interestingly-ish, then future president Zachary Taylor was in charge of the fort for a while in the 1840s. The commissary from that time is still standing, and is the oldest building in the city of Fort Smith:

Imagine stopping here to supply your wagon train at the commissary, because you're on your way to California--there's gold in them there hills!

Like most self-respecting American forts, this one also played a small part in the Civil War, when it was captured by the Union in 1863. I have randomly spent so much time in the Civil War this summer!

I'm personally most interested in the fort's early history, but the next part of its history is objectively the most famous: for a very specific amount of time, Fort Smith operated at the border of established colonizer settlement, and was subject to a Wild West-amount of crime and cowboy-style crime enforcement. Hence this guy:

And this guy!

Just between us, Judge Isaac Parker definitely had some autism. He was a black-and-white thinker who personally hated the death penalty but was firmly committed to executing the law of the land precisely as written, and therefore, thanks to how profoundly crime-ridden this area was, got himself the nickname "The Hanging Judge."

But first he had to get the criminals out of Indian Territory and into his courtroom. That's where this guy came in!

There are several famous U.S. Marshals of history and pop culture, depending on how interested you are in Westerns. As a kid, I watched a lot of Westerns with my Pappa, and I went through my own Zane Grey phase as a teenager (fun fact: the Fort Smith Public Library had an entire section for Westerns, they were so popular, but the books themselves were kind of notorious because they ALWAYS came back to the library absolutely reeking of cigarette smoke). Basically, the marshals tracked down suspected criminals exactly the way it's depicted in the Westerns (both versions of True Grit are partly set in Fort Smith, although sadly neither were filmed there--Pappa would have LOVED to have met John Wayne!!!)

Fort Smith has a whole entire other museum just for the marshals, so this site focuses more on the criminals, the jail, and the court:

old jail, located underneath Judge Parker's Courtroom so the smell would waft up and also make the courtroom noxious

"new" old jail, which stacked prison cells like cordwood but at least met minimum hygiene standards

Judge Parker's courtroom, destination of many, many, many public school field trips

Fun tangent: We were watching the orientation film in the visitor center--because you've ALWAYS got to watch the orientation film!--and I kept thinking, "Who is this narrator? He sounds so familiar!" So obviously I stayed to watch the credits so I could see, and of course! It was Bur Edson, newscaster for Channel 5 News for my entire childhood! Mamma and Pappa were devout local news buffs, and we watched the news at 5:00pm and 10:00pm--we did not watch the morning news, because that was when Mamma and Pappa sat at the kitchen table reading the newspaper, drinking coffee, and chain smoking. 

Visiting your childhood hometown is so weird.

Also, please listen to the dulcet voice of Bur Edson, former local celebrity:

This "new" old jail exhibit wasn't around yet during my five billion grade school field trips here, so it's always exciting to see displays that I haven't yet memorized:

This is a VERY noose-forward historic site!

Spotted our old friend, the clay pipe, in an exhibit of archeological finds at the fort!

Okay, so this entire brief trip actually had a purpose beyond sightseeing and visiting with old friends and mooching around my former childhood haunts. The reason for the whole trip was this:

My favorite stage director is Rachel Chavkin, and she has also, not coincidentally, directed my two favorite Broadway musicals, Hadestown and Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812.

So obviously when I found out that she was workshopping a musical only a nine-hour drive away, and only an hour from my childhood hometown, I grabbed anybody who couldn't hang onto the furniture hard enough, threw them into the car, and off we went. A nine-hour road trip is NOTHING if you live in the Midwest! Heck, it takes twenty minutes just to get into town!

And that's how we found ourselves having a little cocktail or two--

--then finding our seats and checking out the set--

--and then watching Eugene Onegin, a Bluegrass musical based on a Pushkin novel in verse and set in my home state of Arkansas in the 1940s:

It was wonderful.

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