At 8 a.m. on April 16, a Confederate soldier rode into town and sounded the alarm. As the Federals approached, women and children were sent across the river, and Tyler, hobbling on his crutches, gathered convalescents and local militia to oppose the Northern advance. The general had 113 men to defend the town. Only six of these were regular soldiers; the remainder, according to one trooper, were ‘old men and boy volunteers.’ Furthermore, these makeshift infantrymen were armed with smoothbore muskets. Outnumbered significantly by LaGrange’s Federal brigade, Tyler hustled the sick and elderly defenders into Fort Tyler, a small earthen fort on the west side of town that had recently been renamed in his honor.

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McFarland, who volunteered to serve as Tyler’s adjutant, later described the works: ‘I found the fort to be of simple construction, square dirt embankments, with a ditch at the outside entrance on the west, open and protected only by a stockade in the rear of the entrance. There were three old pieces of artillery — a thirty-two pounder on the southeast corner and a brass twelve-pounder each on the northwest and southwest corners. There were no head logs nor other parapet protection.’

Despite the fort’s simplicity, the Federals would soon learn its capacity for staving off attacks. One Union officer described Fort Tyler ‘as a remarkably strong bastioned earth-work, thirty-five yards square, surrounded by a ditch twelve feet wide and ten feet deep, situated on a commanding eminence, protected by an imperfect abates, and mounting two 32-pounders and two field guns.’ One Southerner simply stated, ‘Under more favorable conditions [the fort] would have proved a veritable Gibraltar.’Initially, the fort did not impress Tyler or the other officers who saw it. One Confederate who inspected the fort told Tyler, ‘Why, General, this is a slaughter pen.”I know it,’ Tyler responded, ‘but we must man and try to hold it.’

As his troops filed into the fort shouldering their muskets, McFarland suggested to Tyler that they burn several homes just to the west, less than one hundred yards from the fort. Tyler refused to put them to the torch. He knew the owners and did not think they could stand the loss. This would prove a fatal mistake.

After deploying most of his garrison in the earthworks, Tyler sent McFarland and twenty volunteers out to the Montgomery road to act as skirmishers, hoping they could slow the Federal advance. At 10 a.m., Federal sharpshooters from the 2nd Indiana Cavalry approached the skirmishers and the fight began. While the skirmishers traded shots with the Yankee marksmen, Union artillerymen placed a battery on Ward’s Hill, half a mile from the fort. Once they’d set up, they immediately began shelling the redoubt. As shells screamed over the skirmishers’ heads, McFarland’s men retreated to the fort.

Directing the skirmishers’ retreat, McFarland sensed a bullet passing a few inches from his head and heard it hammer against a nearby apple tree. With the bravery and bravado that only a veteran of many battles could convey, McFarland took off his hat and bowed to the enemy sharpshooter before running back to the fort. Since those men had been on the north side of the fort and the entrance was on the west, they scrambled over the parapet to enter. While they hoisted themselves into Fort Tyler, Union sharpshooters continued to fire, their bullets cracking logs and pattering into the earthen embankment.

By 1:30 that afternoon, detachments of the 1st Wisconsin, 2nd Indiana, and 7th Kentucky Cavalries invested the fort. McFarland reported that ‘the enemy had surrounded the fort on all sides, their sharpshooters taking advantageous position beyond and on the roofs of houses and in trees; and for some time it was a battle of marksmanship between our sharpshooters and theirs, the targets of each being the heads only of the others.’ When LaGrange’s right wing began to encircle the works, however, the Confederates fired a shot from one of the brass 12-pounders at LaGrange and his staff that killed the general’s horse and two pack animals.

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