Battle of Wilson’s Creek

Sigel watched as the troops approached. Outside of the regulation blue uniforms worn by the Regulars, there was little to distinguish the Union men from their enemies, and to him these soldiers looked like Lyon’s Iowans. Private Charles Todt was within a stone’s throw of the approaching line when McCulloch called out for him to identify his unit. ‘Sigel’s regiment,’ he called. The young private apparently realized his predicament just as a Rebel bullet cut him down.

Turning to a Louisiana officer, McCulloch ordered, ‘Captain, take your company up and give them hell.’ With a shout McCulloch’s men charged uphill toward Sigel’s soft center. The sudden attack paralyzed and terrified many of the green Germans, who thought their own men were firing on them. Southern cannons from heights to the east and from now-quiet Bloody Hill dropped iron into their midst. When scores of Missouri and Arkansas troops crashed into Sigel’s distracted left flank, the rout was on. Forgetting their devotion to their leader, the panicked Germans ignored Sigel’s curses and ran for their lives. Within minutes Sigel’s entire force was out of the battle, racing for any roads that led back to Springfield. The beleaguered general — hiding his uniform with a blanket and yellow hat — escaped capture only after Rebel horsemen chased him for six miles.

As Sigel’s wing disintegrated, Price prepared for another lunge at the Federals with reinforcements dispatched by McCulloch and Pearce. After shifting Foster’s regiment to his right, he sent the troopers of Colonel Elkanah Greer’s 2nd Kansas Battalion and Colonel Dandridge McRae’s 2nd Arkansas Battalion to his left. Colonel Thomas Churchill’s 500 dismounted Arkansas cavalrymen and another 100 Louisianans arrived to solidify the middle of Price’s bristling line. The silver-haired general was determined to punch through Lyon’s center.

The Union commander had fewer resources on which to draw, but he moved Steele’s Regulars up to support Totten’s gunners and shifted his lines where necessary. At about 9 a.m. Price’s onslaught began. For an hour heavy firing continued, with one participant reporting,’some of the best blood in the land was being spilled as recklessly as if it were ditch water.’ Impenetrable smoke drifted over the rough terrain, making the confused fighting even more perilous. To the left of the Union center, the 1st Kansas launched a stunning bayonet charge. But the Kansans soon recoiled under heavy pressure and were saved only by the sudden arrival of the charging 1st Iowa, which Lyon hurried into the fray from its position on the far left.

Around this time the sullen and stunned Union commander — on foot after his horse was killed — made his way to the rear of his lines, where concerned officers and aides quickly surrounded him. Blood dripped from gashes in his head and leg. The general remained ignorant of Sigel’s fate, and his spirit, which had been wavering since Boonville, was again flagging. ‘Major, I am afraid the day is lost,’ he mumbled to Schofield. But his aide quickly rallied him. ‘No, General; let us try it again.’

Minutes later, as a remounted Lyon rode along the Union center, he spotted a pair of Confederate officers off to the left. Certain that one was Price, Lyon wheeled and directed his escort to ‘draw pistols and follow.’ An aide talked him out of such a rash action, but when Lyon heard Iowa troops calling for him to lead them, the reenergized general did not hesitate. ‘I am but doing my duty,’ he told worried staff officers. Sending Captain Sweeny to lead the 1st Iowa, Lyon joined Colonel Robert Mitchell at the head of his 2nd Kansas, which he had called over from the right center. Waving his hat, Lyon yelled, ‘Come on, my brave boys, I will lead you forward!’ As the cheering Kansans started forth, fire and smoke exploded in the general’s front. Lyon, his heart punctured by a bullet, fell from his horse into the arms of his aide, Private Thomas Lehmann. ‘Lehmann,’ the general choked, ‘I am going.’ He was dead a moment later.

Savage fighting erupted all around the Federal left center as Price’s grim Missourians toted their weapons uphill. The 2nd Kansas rushed forward, and alongside the Iowans doggedly held their ground. After 20 minutes of back-and-forth probing, the Southerners fell back. Meanwhile, Greer’s Texas horsemen launched a poorly coordinated attack on the Federal right flank, which Totten’s gunners ended in quick fashion.

As Price regrouped for another assault, Federal command passed to Major Sturgis, who would have little time to choose the army’s next move. Although Lyon’s stubborn Army of the West continued to hold its ground, time was against it. The Federal troops were exhausted, thirsty and short on ammunition. The enemy, Sturgis believed, had thousands of untapped reserves, and even now Sigel’s fate remained unknown. Retreat seemed the logical move, but disengaging from an army just yards away would take timing and skill. Sturgis did his best to quickly firm up his lines, moving Andrews’ 1st Missouri (led in the wounded Andrews’ absence by Captain Theodore Yates) and Osterhaus’ battalion to his left flank, and shifting four companies of the 1st Kansas to the right.

The situation on the other side was uglier than Sturgis might have guessed. The Southerners were suffering as much as the Federals were. What Price and McCulloch did have, however, was more men (though not the 20,000 Sturgis believed), and they rushed to round up as many as possible for one last charge. Pearce delivered the 3rd Arkansas, which Price sent to anchor his left, and seven companies of the 5th Arkansas, who took their place a step to the right. Price also ordered the four guns of the Fort Smith Battery into line alongside Guibor’s Battery (the Missouri Light Artillery, now led by Lieutenant William Barlow).

At approximately 10:30 a.m., the strengthened Southern battle line — 1,000 yards long and up to three ranks deep — stepped forward. On the left, Colonel John Gratiot’s 3rd Arkansas men strode firmly uphill through entangling brush and weeds — into hot lead and canister fired by Kansas infantrymen and a section of Totten’s Battery under Lieutenant George Sokalski. Off to the right of the incline Price’s militia tangled with their Missouri brethren. A shortage of projectiles hampered the Southern artillery here, allowing DuBois’ four Union guns to rake approaching troops. And in the center, where ‘the incessant roll of musketry was deafening, and the balls fell thick as hailstones,’ Price’s Missourians fought desperately to get at Totten’s four remaining guns, closing to within 20 feet at times. But Steele’s battalion of Regulars, troops from the 1st Iowa and 1st Kansas, and Totten’s gunners held them off. For a solid hour Missourians and Arkansans plugged away at the thinner Union line, but it never wavered.

The Union troops, in fact, seemed to be doing their best fighting of the day. But when the 2nd Kansas reported a near total lack of ammunition, reality set in again. At about 11:45, as Price’s troops again retreated back down Bloody Hill’s southern slope, Sturgis began his withdrawal. The 2nd Kansas pulled out first, followed closely by DuBois’ gunners and the 2nd Missouri from the left. A body of Confederates rushed toward the gap left by the Kansans, but Sturgis sent Steele’s Regulars tramping over to the right to plug the hole. Totten’s tired artillerymen, the 1st Iowa, the 1st Kansas and Missouri’s Home Guards fell back next. Another column of Southern infantry appeared on the left but quickly fled when a patchwork force led by veteran Captain Gordon Granger ambushed them. DuBois’ gunners halted north of the hill to protect the infantry as it passed them, then they joined the long Union column on its march back to Springfield, and then on to Rolla. Somewhere along the dusty road a small band of Sigel’s refugees rode up with news of their defeat hours before.

Wilson’s Creek had witnessed one ‘mighty mean-fowt fight,’ in the words of a Rebel officer. Reflecting on the battle years later, Bart Pearce wrote, ‘it is difficult to measure the vast results had Lyon lived and the battle gone against us.’ The Western Army left 277 men on the field; another 945 had been wounded. Union casualties amounted to 258 killed and 873 wounded. The South held the field, but Lyon’s army had fought well enough to ensure its safe retreat. It almost didn’t matter who had won: Lyon had long since secured the state’s vital waterways and railways for the Union, and Missouri had by now seated a pro-Union legislature. Still, after occupying abandoned Springfield in August, Price marched north without the skeptical McCulloch, seeking to ignite anti-Union sentiment. He even captured an isolated Federal garrison at Lexington. But his army of Missourians — lacking transportation, supplies and the numbers to face a larger Union army finally assembled by the awakened Frémont — rapidly melted away.

Left with just a toehold on Missouri, the secessionists lost even that in early March 1862 after the Union victory at Pea Ridge, Ark. There a sharpshooter’s bullet killed McCulloch, who had been serving along with Price as a wing commander under Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn. In December, Claiborne Jackson, the now-deposed governor of Missouri, died of cancer. It fell to Price to try to win the state for the Confederacy. In 1864 he led a massive force of cavalry across the state — only to be driven back to Arkansas once again. Roughly 40,000 young Missourians would fight for the Confederacy, and four years of guerrilla fighting would ravage the state’s countryside. But Missouri remained in the Union.

The first Union general to die in combat, Nathaniel Lyon was hailed across the North as the ‘Savior of Missouri.’ Yet he would soon be forgotten, eclipsed by heroes with longer résumés. (His body, in fact, was forgotten on the battlefield and nearly lost.) His coarse, opinionated manner had made him nearly impossible to like, and his uncompromising stance in St. Louis had alienated many. But until the rise of tough Union commanders like Grant and Sherman a couple of years later, his hard-driving style would be sorely missed in an army filled with too many Sigels and Frémonts. And few could have argued with Samuel Sturgis, who after Lyon’s death remembered him to have been ‘as brave a soldier as ever drew a sword, a man whose honesty of purpose was proverbial, a noble patriot, and one who held his life as nothing when his country demanded it of him.’

This article was written by Eric Ethier and originally published in the December 2005 issue of Civil War Times Magazine.

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