Volume 37, Number 2 | Summer 2014

A collaboration of the Kansas Historical Foundation and the Department of History at Kansas State University

Kansas HistoryA Journal of the Central Plains

Volume 37, Number 2 | Summer 2014

A month after General Sterling Price launched his 1864 campaign to “rally the loyal men of Missouri,” fill his ranks with fresh recruits, and capture much needed supplies, he approached the Kansas border with a secondary objective in mind. If compelled to withdraw from the Show-Me State, Price was to make his “retreat through Kansas and the Indian Territory, sweeping that country of its mules, horses, cattle, and military supplies of all kinds.” Turned back at Westport, the Confederate general moved his troops and booty laden wagon train south down the state line and crossed into Kansas at Trading Post in Linn County. The campaign’s final, decisive battle came on October 25 at Mine Creek. Price's retreat had been slowed when his wagons became bogged down in the creek, and two of his division commanders were forced to make a stand and execute a rear guard action on the north side of Mine Creek. The Confederates numbered about 7,000 men and ten artillery pieces, but before they had fully prepared their position,

Colonels Frederick W. Benteen and John F. Phillips attacked on the Union left; Colonels Samuel J. Crawford and William F. Cloud in the center; and Colonel Charles W. Blair on the right. A brief but by all accounts fierce fight ensued, and the Confederate troops broke in panic, fleeing across Mine Creek “in utter and indescribable confusion,” according to Price’s official report. The artist, Samuel J. Reader, a private in the Second Regiment, Kansas State Militia, made this rendering of the victorious Union cavalry charge years later for his illustrated autobiography. Reader, who had been taken prisoner during the Battle of the Big Blue three days before, was well south of Mine Creek with the main body of the retreating Rebel army, so he did not personally witness the battle. Since the first reports that he received were those of his captors, Reader titled the watercolor, quote, “It Went Against Us.” The original as well as the complete autobiography can be found on Kansas Memory at http://www.kansasmemory.org/item/206900.

The Battle of Mine Creek, October 25, 1864

Kansas HistoryA Journal of the Central Plains

Volume 37, Number 2 | Summer 2014

James E. Sherow Managing Editor

Suzanne E. OrrAssistant Managing Editor

Virgil W. DeanConsulting Editor

Derek S. Hoff Book Review Editor

Daniel T. Gresham Editorial Assistant

Editorial Advisory BoardThomas Fox AverillDonald L. FixicoKenneth M. HamiltonDavid A. HauryM.H. HoeflichThomas D. Isern James N. LeikerBonnie Lynn-SherowPatricia A. MichaelisJay M. PricePamela Riney-KehrbergKim Carey Warren

Cover: “Price Raid,” watercolor by Samuel J. Reader, dated February 13, 1865. Back cover: “Free!” From the lithograph, “Journey of a Slave,” courtesy of the Library of Congress.

p. 66

p. 78

p. 100

Copyright ©2014Kansas State Historical Society, Inc.ISSN 0149-9114

Printed by Allen Press,Lawrence, Kansas.

Fleeing Missouri Bloodhounds: 66 Pappy Carr’s Escape to Free Kansas edited by Mark Chapin Scott

Price's Raid and the 78 Battle of Mine Creekby Edgar Langsdorf

“I was a prisoner of war.” 100 The Autobiography of SAMUEL J. READER edited by Virgil W. Dean

Reviews 122

Book Notes 127

66 Kansas History

Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 37 (Summer 2014): 66–77

Charles “Pappy” Carr in the yard of Luther Bailey’s Topeka home, ca. 1911. Courtesy of Mark Scott.

Fleeing Missouri Bloodhounds 67

Luther C. Bailey (1866–1947) wrote the following slave narrative of Charles Carr several years before the latter’s death in 1914. A Topeka insurance agent, real estate developer, and writer/historian, Bailey sold accident insurance on his many business trips throughout Kansas. He regularly met people from all walks of life, and “Pappy” Carr was among those he thought the most interesting. Although the “colored” Topeka janitor seemed otherwise “the least likely hero,” Bailey

strongly believed that the account of Carr’s harrowing escape from slavery should be recorded for posterity, even though Carr himself was “exceedingly reticent in telling his story.”1 Bailey was so impressed by the story that he even persuaded the reluctant Carr to be photographed.

Bailey’s own interests were not limited to his successful career in insurance and real estate. He was a popular after-dinner speaker, regularly addressed meetings of the Kansas Historical Society, and was a board member of the Topeka Public Library. Bailey also wrote poetry, an unpublished novel, and a variety of historical essays on American and Kansas history. He corresponded with Kansas author Margaret Hill McCarter, poet Edwin Markham, and Admiral George Dewey—the “Hero of Manila Bay.”2

Fleeing Missouri Bloodhounds: Pappy Carr’s Escape to Free Kansas

edited by Mark Chapin Scott

Mark Scott was born in Topeka in 1948, attended Topeka schools, and received multiple degrees from the University of Kansas. He has been a college professor, intelligence analyst, political appointee, historian, translator, and business consultant. His continued interest in the history of Kansas is reflected in his work published in past issues of Kansas History: “The Little Blue Books in the War on Bigotry and Bunk” (Autumn 1978) and “Langston Hughes of Kansas” (Spring 1980). The Langston Hughes story was subsequently published in abbreviated form in the Journal of Negro History. It served as a major source for Arnold Rampersad’s two-volume biography of Hughes (1986), and Floyd Cooper later used the story as the basis for his children’s book Coming Home: From the Life of Langston Hughes (1994).

1. “The Dash for Liberty in Kansas by Charles Carr (Pappy Carr),” unpublished manuscript, personal collection of Mark Chapin Scott, Ojai, California.

2. See, for example, Margaret Hill McCarter to Luther Chapin Bailey, February 17, 1911; Bailey, “The Story of the Arickaree (or Beecher Island),” unpublished typescript; L. C. Bailey to William E. Connelley, Secretary of the Kansas State Historical Society, October 23, 1916; “Bailey May Enter Race,” unidentified newspaper clipping; and various poems and unpublished manuscripts in editor Mark Scott’s personal collection, Ojai, California.

68 Kansas History

As far as history was concerned, Bailey was most interested in stories celebrating the lone hero fighting against overwhelming odds. In 1902 he wrote an article on the fall of the Alamo for an

insurance periodical, and he was persistent in coaxing Charles Carr to recount his flight from slavery. But the story Bailey thought most compelling was the Battle of Beecher Island, which was fought in 1868 in northeastern Colorado, although the frontiersmen involved had been dispatched from forts in Kansas. The battle featured fifty-one army scouts defeating as many as one thousand Indians. Bailey not only meticulously investigated details of this battle, but personally interviewed survivors. He also wrote a moving tribute to Roman Nose, the Cheyenne chief killed at Beecher Island, whom Bailey considered “one of the greatest of all Indian chieftains.”3

In a letter to Bailey dated February 17, 1911, Margaret Hill McCarter wrote, “I understand that you have spent much time in collecting the stories of the heroic deeds of great men, and of the events of history marked by daring and courageous action. It is a laudable pursuit. . . . It may seem a small thing to you. To me the pleasure you have given to many of us . . . seems a thing the recording pen must write large in the Great Story Book. And I thank you sincerely for it.”4

Topeka professional men interested in discussing issues of the day regularly met at the Bailey home at 909 Garfield Street. Among the members of this group was Arthur Capper, journalist, publisher, Kansas governor, and United States senator.

At the time Bailey interviewed Charles Carr, Topeka was largely segregated along racial lines. Although the public library did not refuse black patrons, African Americans lived in segregated neighborhoods, ate in segregated restaurants, and attended segregated schools; this was the city that would later figure so prominently in the Supreme Court’s decision Brown v. Board of Education. Unlike his contemporary Theodore Roosevelt, Bailey never proclaimed the superiority of the “Anglo-Saxon Race.” But like many of his peers, Bailey believed that races and ethnic groups possessed unique characteristics; his belief that African Americans had a mild and gentle disposition mirrored the views of Mark Twain.5 Nevertheless, by the standards of his day, Bailey would have been considered radical in his attitude toward black Americans, even though his mother’s family had been Virginia slave owners. Family members never recalled him using a racial epithet of any kind. In fact, he once scandalized friends by stating that the ultimate

solution to the race problem was intermarriage. It may be noteworthy that other than Bailey, no other individual—white or black—was so determined to document the story of Charles Carr’s escape from slavery.

Bailey’s typed account of the Pappy Carr story lay forgotten for more than a century in a box of old documents until accidentally discovered in 2013 by his great-grandson Mark Chapin Scott, the editor of this article. Scott edited another

3. Bailey, “The Story of the Arickaree.”4. McCarter to Bailey, February 17, 1911.5. On segregation in Topeka and the landmark Brown case, see,

among many others, Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York:

Luther Bailey (right) wrote many historical essays, but the story he found most compelling was the 1868 Battle of Beecher Island. Although the battle was fought on the Arikara River in northeastern Colorado, the army officers in command were based at Fort Wallace in northwest Kansas, and their troops were fifty-one so-called Kansas scouts. Bailey meticulously researched the incident and personally interviewed survivors, among them Allison Pliley of Kansas City, pictured here with Bailey in 1911. Courtesy of Mark Scott.

Alfred A. Knopf, 1976); see Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Autobiography (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1924), 1:100–101; and for Roosevelt’s comments on race relations, see Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, vol. 1, The Spread of English-Speaking Peoples (New York: The Current Literature Publishing Company, 1905), 21, 29.


previously unpublished Bailey story (an eyewitness recollection of a February 1895 train robbery in western Kansas), which appeared in Kansas History as “Insured Against Train Robbers: A Kansas Christmas Tale” (Winter 2009–2010).6

A Dash for Liberty in Free Kansasby Luther Chapin Bailey

In the western suburbs of Topeka stands a small frame school house. And each morning one can see an interesting figure who, with bell in hand, calls the children to their daily tasks.7

He is very tall, and in his prime stood about six foot three inches, weighing more than two hundred pounds, with as fine a muscular development as was ever possessed by an athlete. He is now very old, having reached his ninetieth year, but goes about his daily tasks with the greatest kindness.8

His lineage can be traced to a strange mixture. He inherited from a great-grandfather the sturdy and determined integrity of a Scotchman; from a Cherokee Indian that stoical courage which, when aroused, makes its possessor a most formidable antagonist, while the negro [sic] blood which courses his veins gives him that mild and gentle disposition so peculiar to that race.

“I love God and little children” said the German Poet, and one might look long before finding a character so completely exemplifying Heine’s beautiful sentiment. A person cannot be bad or go far wrong who remains young at heart and finds great delight in the company of little children and animals.

He was christened Charles Carr, but in recent years has won the name of “Pappy Carr” from innocent hands. While this stalwart figure makes his daily rounds, one sees something quite remarkable. As his majestic figure stoops to grasp the hand of the talkative child in his path and “Pappy Tarr” punctuates the conversation, both

might mark him as the least likely hero. He has but one title, although like all courageous men he is exceedingly reticent to tell his story.

He is passionately fond of horses, as he was reared on a Kentucky horse farm, and nothing arouses his resentment as much as the slightest indifference or abuse of one of these creatures.9 For many years, “Nell,” a splendid bay carriage mare, has been consigned to his special care,

6. Mark Chapin Scott, ed., “Insured Against Train Robbers: A Kansas Christmas Tale,” Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 32 (Winter 2009–2010): 267–73, available online at http://www.kshs.org/publicat/history/2009winter_scott.pdf. Bailey died on May 1, 1947, and was buried with his head resting on his favorite book—English author Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia—in the family plot in Topeka Cemetery.

7. The 1910 federal census listed Carr’s occupation as “Janitor, School House.” U.S. Census, 1910, Kansas, Shawnee County.

8. Burial Records of Topeka Cemetery; Topeka Cemetery, "Death Records Database," access restricted, Topeka, Kansas. Carr was born on April 15, 1826, and died on April 9, 1914, so he was not ninety at the time of this interview. In Bailey’s unpublished outline for the story, he noted that Carr was eighty-five years old, which means that the interview took place in 1911.

9. Even before Carr’s birth, the breeding of horses had become increasingly profitable in Kentucky, and according to Dan White, “By 1840, there were more than half a million people in Kentucky and the horse population numbered 431,000. . . . The state had become an important supplier of top-quality horses, sending them in droves of fifteen to thirty

Luther Bailey was a popular after-dinner speaker who also wrote poetry, an unpublished novel, and a variety of historical essays on American and Kansas history. He corresponded with Kansas author Margaret Hill McCarter, poet Edwin Markham, and other notables. Bailey’s poem, “The Celestial Tryst,” was published in 1922, shortly after the death of his wife, Ida. Courtesy of Mark Scott.

70 Kansas History

But the time came when all things changed. The Dred Scott Decision annulled the Missouri Compromise, which had made the southern boundary of Missouri the northern limits of slave territory.12 The minister’s family who owned Mrs. Carr decided to migrate to Missouri, settling about four miles southeast of St. Joseph.

Charles Carr’s master, moved by the pathos of that separation, proposed to sell him to someone near the home of his wife, who accompanied her master.13

All this occurred but a few years before the Civil War, when Kansas had become free territory after a desperate struggle in which Lawrence was sacked and destroyed while other outrages of a heinous character were perpetrated upon this state by those who wished to impress upon its Constitution the stamp of slavery.14

As the growing abolition sentiment heralded the approach of the war, those who held slaves in the North wished to be rid of them, fearing that the separation which the Secessionists threatened would entail a heavy

and the companionship of horse and man is so touching that it might have furnished inspiration to the author of Black Beauty. It is not uncommon for this noble animal, in passing along the streets of Topeka, to call to him in her plaintive whinny, detecting his presence even sooner than the master detects her own.

He was born a slave in the blue grass country of Kentucky. His life was as happy as could fall to one of more than average intelligence, conscious of his lowly station. And yet he

speaks in the most kindly terms of the Fleming family in which he was reared, and emphasizes with great emotion that no master could have been kinder to him than the one with whom he grew up from childhood as playfellow as well as bedfellow in the old trundle bed.10

On a neighboring plantation lived a Methodist minister who had in his family a servant girl who became the wife of Charles Carr. Children were born to them, and the happiness which blessed their lives—with the assurance that the pangs of separation might not come to them with such masters—kept them far removed from the conditions which might ruthlessly banish father or mother to the cotton fields.11

U.S. Census, 1880, Kansas, Shawnee County; Burial Records of Topeka Cemetery.

12. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was initially abrogated by the popular sovereignty provision of the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854, which, unlike the Compromise, allowed slavery in Louisiana Purchase territories north of Missouri’s southern border. Three years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that, among other things, the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional and Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories. See, among many others, Nicole Etcheson, “The Great Principle of Self-Government: Popular Sovereignty and Bleeding Kansas,” Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 27 (Spring–Summer 2004): 14–29, available at http://kshs.org/publicat/history/2004spring_etcheson.pdf.

13. It was common at that time for Kentucky slave owners to relocate to Missouri. According to historian Diane Mutti Burke, “The forty-year period from 1821 to 1860 was one of extraordinary movement of settlers from Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia to Missouri.” Most likely the Carrs lived and worked on a farm, rather than a plantation, for as Mutti Burke also wrote, “Most Missouri counties boasted of a few large estates that usually were patterned after those found in Kentucky and Virginia, but more common were the thousands of modest farms that were scattered throughout the countryside.” An average slaveholder in Missouri owned only five slaves, and the men usually worked as general farmhands alongside their white owners. Unfortunately, there is not enough information available to determine precisely who the owners of the Carrs were. Connie McCoy, Northwest Missouri Genealogical Society, St. Joseph, Missouri, email message to the editor, May 18, 2013; Diane Mutti Burke, On Slavery’s Border: Missouri’s Small-Slaveholding Households, 1815–1865 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 24–25, 50, 98, 200.

14. Lawrence was “sacked” in May 1856, but the real destruction came during the Civil War with Quantrill’s raid on August 21, 1863; nearly two hundred men and boys were killed and 182 buildings were destroyed, with property damage estimated “as high as $2.5 million—in Civil War-era dollars.” Edward E. Leslie, The Devil Knows How to Ride: The True Story of William Clarke Quantrill and His Confederate Raiders (New York: Random House, 1996), 237; Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004).

to the southern states, especially South Carolina.” Kentucky also became a leader in the breeding of race horses. Perhaps Carr was fond of horses because he had once been a stable boy in Fleming County, Kentucky. Kent Hollingsworth, The Kentucky Thoroughbred (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009), 17; Dan White, Kentucky Bred: A Celebration of Thoroughbred Breeding (Dallas, Tex.: Taylor Publishing Company, 1986), 70.

10. The burial records of Topeka Cemetery clearly stated that Carr was born in Fleming County, Kentucky. In the narrative Carr seemed to be referring not to a location, but to an individual. “Fleming” may have been the only name Carr’s fading memory could recollect when pressed by Bailey for the slave owner’s identity. In Bailey’s typed draft of the story, the name of Carr’s owner was left blank, then later penciled in, suggesting that Carr himself had difficulty recalling his owner’s surname. Carr had evidently been both slave companion and servant of his young owner. The close association may help to explain why that owner, sympathetic to Carr’s desire not to be separated from his own family, was later willing to sell him to a slaveholder living very near the Missouri farm of Carr’s wife and daughters (see below).

11. According to cemetery records, Nancy Lewis Carr was born in “Kentucky” on November 9, 1827, but census takers recorded various years of birth—1831, 1829, 1830, 1827, and 1832. Carr said Nancy had been a “servant girl”—possibly a house slave rather than a field slave. The 1870 federal census indicated that Nancy could read, but could not write. All other Kansas and federal censuses, except 1880, reported that she could neither read nor write. All of those censuses stated that Charles could not read or write. The 1870 federal census listed three children living in the home who had been born in Kentucky—Mary (1851), Pheobe [sic] (1852), and Rebecca (1855). See Kansas State Census, 1865, Leavenworth County, Leavenworth; Kansas State Census, 1875, Shawnee County, Soldier Township; Kansas State Census, 1905, Shaw-nee County, Topeka; and U.S. Census, 1870, Kansas, Jackson County;


loss in such property. Large numbers were therefore sent to the South.

Some had been sent south from Charles Carr’s neighborhood, but he determined he would never go.

A slave buyer visited the home of his master one day in 1859 for the purpose of purchasing slaves. Charles was offered for sale, but the buyer reserved a few days to investigate the character of his purchase.

In the meantime, Charles had learned that if he were sold, his destination would be the cane fields of Louisiana. He already knew the story of Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom. No Simon Legree for him. Knowing that he would be separated from his family and forced into hard labor in the cane fields, he resolved to run away, and, if necessary, to fight for his life.15

Carr knew that he would be pursued and hunted like a wild beast, and because of the Fugitive Slave Law, could be apprehended and returned to the service of his master anywhere in the country. He also knew that many in the North were desperately opposed to that law, and so he resolved to die rather than submit to a fate that to a man of his character was worse than death.

Having learned of the possibility of being sold, he planned his escape. The next morning, he visited the Missouri River, which lay but a few miles west of his home. In so doing, he carefully investigated the feasibility of crossing over into Kansas, determined to proceed northward when once across the river.

He found a fisherman’s hut, and nearby—in a sequestered bend of the stream sheltered by a clump of willows—the fisherman’s boat. This at once defined his course. Marking the spot, he returned quietly to

await the coming of darkness.Early that evening, he visited his wife and children

at the minister’s home, and said goodbye. He briefly whispered to her why he had come, and told her of his plans. The parting was especially painful because it was so hurried, with no time for any kind of emotional farewell. Having assured her that if he survived he would return to claim them when the danger had passed, he said his final farewell. His wife and children were safe, for her

15. Slaves in the Upper South feared being “sold down the river” for many reasons. Sales would permanently separate them from their family and friends. While Missouri slave men were usually employed as

farmhands, slaves on the cotton and sugar plantations were brutalized in labor gangs working long hours in a harsh and often unhealthy climate. Transportation of slaves from the Upper to Lower South could be extremely cruel. Missouri slave Marilda Pethy recalled, “Why, I seen people handcuffed together and driv [sic] ʼlong de Williamsburg road like cattle. Dey was bought to be took south.” Missouri slave William Wells Brown watched “a slave woman who leaped to her death from a steamboat rather than be taken south, and another young slave man, en route to the Deep South, jumped overboard and was killed when struck by the boat’s paddle wheel.” Mutti Burke, On Slavery’s Border, 124, 184.

This engraving of a slave auction was published in The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book: Containing a Few Words about American Slave Children in 1859. Abolitionists countered proslavery propaganda that depicted enslaved people as happy by showing the harsh effects of slavery on the family. Carr fled from his master to avoid sale to Louisiana and separation from his wife and children. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

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master had promised to keep her while he lived, freeing her at his death.

A lonely and dreary walk of two miles brought him to his cabin. On the way back, he cursed the fate that had made him a black man, made him a slave. He repeatedly asked himself why any man should deprive him of his liberty and claim him as a thing to be bought and sold like a beast of the field. Why should any man have the right to destroy his home?

Reaching the hut, he carefully prepared a small pack of clothing, then sat on an old stool just outside the door awaiting the chance to escape. At the last moment, he decided to arouse two other slaves and give them the opportunity to join in his desperate undertaking.

And so there he sat waiting in front of his cabin on that balmy autumn night. Gazing at the friendly North Star,

which would soon become his only guide, he heard the strains of “My Old Kentucky Home”:

Weep no more, my lady, Then weep no more

today.I will sing one song of my

old Kentucky home Of my old Kentucky

home far away.

Oblivious to the impending danger, other negroes [sic] in an adjacent cabin were caroling the old Southern melody in such plaintive tones that he again saw the old home in the blue grass country, recalling how within the span of a few years he had become a refugee and an outcast, hunted with a price on his head. His fighting blood was aroused as he awaited the moment to flee when the curtains of his master’s house would be drawn for the night.

Through the maples encir-cling the house he could see lights that had been steadily gleaming throughout the eve-ning now being extinguished.

The house was in darkness, the family retired. Silence reigned except for the ticking of the old clock. Even the watch dog lay asleep in the barn. This was his chance.16

16. Carr’s escape was apparently not in 1859, but in 1860, on a night when there was a “balmy autumn breeze.” The 1870 federal census reported that in 1861 Nancy Carr gave birth in Missouri to a son, John. If Charles was the father of that child, it means that he was in the locale the previous year. Nancy bore no more children until 1866, when Eddy was born in Kansas. This suggests that the Carrs were reunited as early as 1865.

If local slave owners had feared expropriation of their slave property, the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 only intensified their concerns. From the perspective of many Missouri slave owners, Lincoln’s election simply made a bad situation even worse, because they already had numerous reasons to fear uncompensated loss of their chattel property. Missouri’s western border south of the great bend in the Missouri River had no natural barrier, making it especially difficult to prevent fugitive slaves from crossing into Kansas Territory, which was dominated by antislavery partisans after 1857. In 1859—the year

Congress passed a Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 that required people in free states to assist in the capture and return of escaped slaves. Carr knew that the Fugitive Slave Law meant that he could be apprehended and returned to the service of his master from anywhere in the country. Many Northerners resented this expansion of slavery’s power. This 1850 lithograph includes both a quotation from the Declaration of Independence and one from Deuteronomy: “Thou shalt not deliver unto the master his servant which has escaped from his master unto thee. He shall dwell with thee. Even among you in that place which he shall choose in one of thy gates where it liketh him best. Thou shalt not oppress him.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.


Carr rushed to the hut where his companions had gathered, telling them what would probably be their fate if they decided to remain. He urged them to join him in his determined effort to escape.

They quickly agreed. Then the three slaves, having packed their small kits of clothing, stealthily crept through neighboring bushes and tall grasses toward the Missouri River

(for they shunned the public highway). They reached the river where the fisherman had tied the boat. Quickly releasing it, they silently pulled it along the bank a sufficient distance up the river that the plash [sic] of the oars might not be heard by its owner, thereby revealing their movements.17

Reaching the opposite shore of the river, they quickly disembarked and stood for a brief moment on its banks. They were in Kansas, and Kansas—after the Border Ruffian War—was free territory. Yet under the Dred Scott Decision, they could be apprehended and dragged back to servitude.18 There would be no safety for them there.

They reached the western bank of the river shortly after midnight and quietly pushed northward through

before Carr’s escape—a slave patrol in Platte County, Missouri, pursued fugitive slaves into Kansas, where they caught them along with white abolitionist Dr. John Doy, who had helped them escape. Doy was convicted of violating the Fugitive Slave Law and was incarcerated in the Buchanan County jail—not far from the farm where Carr himself lived. Doy’s friends soon rescued him from the jail. Mutti Burke, On Slavery’s Border, 176–77; U.S. Census, 1870, Kansas, Jackson County.

17. “In the 1850s, the beacon of freedom shone brightest in Kansas, where many western Missouri slaves believed they would receive assistance from the antislavery settlers who were pouring into the territory,” wrote Mutti Burke. “Some northwest Missouri slaves, such as the man Doy was convicted of enticing to freedom, escaped into Kansas Territory by commandeering small boats or simply walking across the frozen Missouri River in wintertime.” Mutti Burke, On Slavery’s Border, 177.

18. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, not the Dred Scott decision, gave slaveholders the right to pursue their slaves wherever those fugitives fled and ordered all agencies of the federal government to aggressively provide assistance. The act empowered court-appointed commissioners to arrest and imprison escaped slaves such as Carr, and it authorized them to take depositions and grant certificates to claimants to retrieve their human property. It also empowered local officials to “employ so many persons as he may deem necessary . . . and to retain them in his service so long as circumstances may require.” Such a posse would in fact pursue fugitive slave Charles Carr. The reward system was weighted in favor of the claimant; if a commissioner ruled for a claimant, the commissioner received a fee of ten dollars (approximately two hundred and sixty dollars in 2010 dollars). If the commissioner determined that the claimant was not the legitimate owner, the commissioner’s fee was five dollars. The act further imposed a penalty of one thousand dollars (the rough equivalent of twenty-six thousand

This lithograph created in 1863, is part of a larger set of collectable cards showing the transformation of an enslaved man into a soldier in the Union army. Here, he strikes a white man who previously had whipped him. To make his escape, Carr used a hastily made club to fight off the attack of an armed posse and bloodhounds. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

dollars in current dollars) on any official who refused to assist in the capture of runaway slaves. Persons who helped slaves escape, gave them food, or provided shelter were subject to a one thousand dollar fine and a jail sentence of six months. Individuals who apprehended the fugitives collected a reward. Stanley W. Campbell, The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), 112, 185, 187; for the above quotation and the full text of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and the Kansas–Nebraska Act, see United States, The Constitution of the United States, with the Acts of Congress, Relating to Slavery, Embracing the Constitution, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, the Missouri Compromise Act of 1820, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, and the Nebraska and Kansas Bill, Carefully Compiled (1854; reprint, San Bernardino, Calif.: Ulan Press, 2012), 19–24.

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the broken and uneven country of northeastern Kansas, thickly studded by dwarfed timber and underbrush.

At about daybreak, they came to a clearing and took

refuge for the day in a large brush heap. They remained there until about five o’clock in the evening, when they heard the baying of hounds. They did not worry about this at first. But suddenly a clear note rang out from the leader, which made them instantly apprehensive, for they recognized the deep bellowing howl of a bloodhound. They were being pursued, with a price of five hundred dollars on the head of Charles Carr.19

Having learned of their escape, a posse had immediately been formed the next morning. It consisted of a leader with four companions well-mounted and armed. They were accompanied by two bloodhounds. Assisted by the dogs, they took up the trail and followed it westward to the river. However, it was very difficult for the horses to cross at that location—the river there was deep and turbid. They were forced to take a circuitous route two miles south. Having crossed the river at that point and reaching the Kansas side, they followed it up to the place where the slaves had crossed. The dogs took the trail, eagerly pursuing the fugitives, finally overtaking them in a clearing.Hearing the baying of the hounds, Carr immediately emerged from his hiding place and called to his companions, telling them to come out quickly, as they would soon be forced to fight for their lives. He exhorted them to stand up to the fight and under no circumstances surrender. He assured them that if they did not, they would not escape the cane or cotton fields.

Suddenly seizing an ax, Carr cut a small hickory sapling, careful to grub out a portion of the root with

The Emancipation Proclamation, issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, declared free all enslaved people in states in rebellion against the Union. Carr always held that the Emancipation Proclamation was of comparably little importance to him personally, because he had won his freedom in that brutal battle with his hickory club. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

19. In offering a reward of five hundred dollars, Carr’s owner obviously considered him valuable property; five hundred dollars in 1860 would be the approximate equivalent of twelve thousand dollars in 2010 dollars.


the club. He quickly trimmed off its branches, and, when finished, made it a weapon capable of inflicting terrible punishment on an enemy. It was about four feet long, and the root on the end made a bludgeon like one loaded with lead.

Carr quickly helped his companions in the preparation of similar weapons. They had scarcely finished the task when the baying of the hounds warned them that the fight was on.

Quickly leaping in front of his companions, Carr took the initiative. As the hounds emerged from the woods and caught sight of their quarry, they rushed at them with the fury so characteristic of the breed. The lead dog sprang at Carr, who with the agility of an Indian stepped to one side. Before the dog could reach him, the hickory club circled his head, striking it squarely behind the ears, and crushing its skull. With a terrific howl, the vicious brute rolled on its back, whined piteously, jerked its legs, and died.

Carr scarcely recovered before the second bloodhound attacked him more viciously than the first, its instinct for revenge thoroughly aroused. But with the same agility, Carr again leaped aside and agilely brained the second dog with a blow of the club. He kicked both dogs into a ravine, where the second one lay piteously moaning.

Carr had scarcely dispatched the dogs when the slave posse emerged from the woods into the clearing. With pistols in both hands, they spurred their horses on, charging the negroes [sic], shooting as rapidly as possible, determined to cower the fugitives into surrender.

Carr’s courage was superb. Again brandishing his club, he sprang to the shock of battle. He struck out boldly within the circle of riders, rushing wildly at horse and man, repeatedly striking the horses with such terrific fury that the animals could not be urged forward.

In the meantime, the posse was trying to kill him with their withering gunfire. The fight quickly developed with Carr alone against the field. At the onset of the battle, his companions had fallen on the ground like craven cowards, begging for mercy.

This was Carr’s salvation, for when the four members of the posse leaped from their horses to bind his companions, Carr—like a deer—fled several hundred yards into a thicket. He was about to plunge into a cornfield when the leader of the posse mounted a fine gray horse, halted directly in his pathway, and with two guns drawn and frightful oaths, commanded Carr to surrender.

Carr now realized that this was a battle of one against many, that the odds were all against him, with death staring him in the face. For as he stood on that lonely path,

he looked into the muzzles of two deadly guns in the hands of a brutal man. Quickly pretending to surrender, he began parleying with his enemy for terms, all the while advancing slowly, or rather edging closer to the man as he leaned upon his club. He was calculating precisely how many strides lay between him and the slaver, and the chances of striking him with his club before the man could shoot.

Approaching his enemy as closely as he thought possible, he sprang at him with such terrific rage that for an instant the slaver could not fire. Carr’s club descended with such terrible

force that it barely missed the slaver’s head, striking instead his horse—directly between the ears. The blow so thoroughly crazed the animal that it whirled in a circle, utterly oblivious to the furious spurs of its master.

Carr again swung his club. As the horse wheeled around, the slaver threw himself prostrate on the animal’s neck, piteously begging, “For God’s sake, don’t kill me!”

The entreaty fell upon deaf ears. The fugitive, driven to desperation, knew that someone must die. As the hickory club whirred and fell, it struck the rider squarely on the back of the head, fracturing his skull. He fell to the ground like a log. The poor horse dashed through the woods, glad to escape the hellish combat.

Carr plunged without hesitation into the nearby cornfield. The rows ran north and south, and he selected one. A good distance in from the edge, he ran rapidly to its northern edge. He fled under the cover of night, which by now was rapidly approaching. He rushed into an open meadow, up an ascending hill, and lay down in tall grass so completely exhausted that for more than an hour he did not move. Meanwhile, he could hear men on horses riding frantically around the field while uttering the vilest curses against him.

When he had regained his strength, he continued his journey northward, but his pursuers were still patrolling the cornfield, confident they would capture him in daylight.

Morning dawned. Having searched the fields so thoroughly, the slavers were chagrined to discover that their quarry had flown, chagrined especially because their leader had been fatally wounded. They returned to Missouri for all their pains with only the dying man and two cowardly negroes [sic].

Meanwhile, Charles Carr plodded steadily onward to liberty, guided throughout that night by the North Star.20

20. Carr did not linger in “free” Kansas. Section 28 of the Kansas–

76 Kansas History

After his desperate battle, it seemed to Charles good indeed to be on the broad, wide prairies of Nebraska, a free man, for such he was. He has always held that the Emancipation Proclamation was of comparably little importance to him personally, since he had won his freedom in that brutal battle with his hickory club.

Nebraska Act specifically stated that the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act were to “be in full force within the limits of” Kansas Territory. “Runaway Missouri slaves were just as likely to be captured in bordering free states and territories, especially after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law,” wrote Mutti Burke. “Not only did owners hunt their runaways—or employ others to do so—but many citizens of Illinois, Iowa, and Kansas happily collected payment for their efforts.” United States, The Constitution of the United States, 40; Mutti Burke, On Slavery’s Border, 180.

Charles “Pappy” Carr was employed as a yardman at Bailey’s Topeka home, located at 909 Garfield Street. This circa 1915 photograph is courtesy of Mark Scott.

At about 10:00 a.m. the next day—Sunday—he approached a farm house near Plattsmouth, Nebraska.21 He was starving by then, having eaten nothing for nearly forty-eight hours. He begged a farmer for some food. The sympathetic soul, perhaps divining that he was a fugitive slave, took him into the house and gave him a

21. Carr did not indicate precisely where he and his two companions reached the Kansas side of the river; he probably did not know, particularly since their crossing occurred at night. The location was most likely somewhere between Atchison in Atchison County and White Cloud in Doniphan County, near the Kansas-Nebraska border. Setting out for Plattsmouth at any point between these two towns would have involved traveling a considerable distance within a short time. In 2013 the distance from Atchison to Plattsmouth was 107.7 miles, from White Cloud to Plattsmouth 77.8 miles.


loaf of bread and jar of milk (his wife had gone to church). Charles ravenously devoured the food, then pushed on to Omaha.

In Omaha, he found employment with a party of freighters who made the six-week trip across the plains between Omaha and Denver. He did this for several years, becoming thoroughly acquainted with the perils of Indians and massive herds of buffalo that roamed the plains.

Later, he lived among the Potawatomi Indians on the Platte River near Fort Phil Kearny, and when the war was over, returned to find his wife and children in Leavenworth, where they were happily reunited.22

Pappy Carr brought his family to Topeka, and no man has lived a more exemplary life, always attending strictly to his own affairs, intensely industrious, and in all a splendid citizen.23

22. Either Carr or Bailey was slightly mistaken regarding the location. Whoever reported this undoubtedly meant that Carr lived near Fort Kearny on the Platte River in Nebraska, not Fort Phil Kearny, which was in northeastern Wyoming. There was also confusion regarding exactly when Carr lived “among Potawatomi Indians on the Platte River near Fort Kearny.” When the federal government initiated its Indian removal program in the early nineteenth century, it relocated the Potawatomis to present-day Kansas, not Nebraska. Carr actually lived “among” the Potawatomis shortly after he left Nebraska, and by 1870 he owned a farm in Douglas Township, Jackson County, Kansas. That farm would have been very near the eastern boundary of the Kansas Potawatomi reservation. When the census was enumerated, Charles and Nancy Carr had six children living with them: Mary (age nineteen), Pheobe [sic] (eighteen), Rebecca (fifteen), John (nine), Eddy (four), and James (one). By March 1, 1875, the Carrs had moved just south to a farm in Soldier Township, Shawnee County, but soon Carr gave up farming and moved to Topeka, where he worked as a laborer. The family lived in several different locations in Topeka during the late nineteenth century, but during the 1910s the Carrs purchased a home at 1030 Grand Avenue (now SW Plass Avenue, which lies between Woodward and MacVicar Avenues), and Charles worked as a “janitor” at the African-American Douglass School, which was located in west Topeka at Brooks (now Jewell) and Munson Avenues. In the last years of his life, Carr worked several jobs. In 1910 he was employed as a “y[ar]dman” at Bailey’s 909 Garfield Street home. The following year, Bailey interviewed Carr and arranged to have him photographed standing next to the Bailey

home. In 1912 the city directory again listed Carr as “janitor.” Howard R. Lamar, ed., The New Encyclopedia of the American West (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 905; Noble L. Prentis, A History of Kansas (Winfield, Kans.: E. P. Greer, 1899), 34; U.S. Census, 1870, Kansas, Douglas County; Kansas State Census, 1875, Shawnee County, Kansas; Radges’ Topeka Directory, 1878–1879 (Topeka, Kans.: Commonwealth Book and Job Printing House, 1878), 50; U.S. Census, 1880, Kansas, Shawnee County; Donna Rae Pearson, Local History Librarian, Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library, email message to the editor, August 15, 2013; Shari Schawo, Genealogy Librarian, Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library, email message to the editor, May 14, 2013; Radges’ Topeka City Directory, 1910 (Topeka, Kans.: Polk-Radges Directory Company, 1910), 165; Radges’ Topeka City Directory, 1912, 161.

23. According to the burial records of Topeka Cemetery, Nancy died of “complications” on April 26, 1909. The following year, Charles was living with daughter Phoebe Atkinson, a widow, at the same Grand Avenue address. In 1912 only one African American named Carr was listed in the city directory: “Charles M Carr (c), janitor, r 1030 Grand av.” His burial records stated that he died of “complications” two years later—on April 9, 1914—and was buried next to his wife. His funeral expenses were paid by his sixty-five-year-old daughter, Mary Elizabeth Carr Smith, who had been born a slave in 1851 on a Kentucky plantation, been a slave in Missouri, and had found freedom in Kansas. U.S. Census, 1910, Kansas, Shawnee County; Radges’ Topeka City Directory, 1912; Burial Records of Topeka Cemetery.

78 Kansas History


Confederate General Sterling Price (1809–1867) of Chariton County, Missouri.

Price's Raid and the Battle of Mine Creek 79

“W ilson’s Creek was the first great battle of the war west of the Mississippi, and Mine Creek the last,” concluded historian Albert Castel in his 1968 biography of Confederate General Sterling Price. “Between these events is the story of a lost cause. After Mine Creek came limbo.” With this fascinating conclusion in mind, it seemed wrong to

allow the Kansas battle’s 150th anniversary year to pass without recognition. Thus, “Price’s Raid and the Battle of Mine Creek,” which was first published in the autumn 1964 issue of the Kansas Historical Quarterly to mark the centennial of that seminal event in Kansas Civil War history, is republished here in its entirety to commemorate the raid’s sesquicentennial. After fifty years Edgar Langsdorf’s fine study remains an important and interesting contribution to the history of the only Civil War battle between regular Union and Confederate troops fought on Kansas soil. It has been edited for style only, so that it might more closely reflect our twenty-first-century usage, and the editors have added a few clarifying comments and additional secondary source citations to the footnotes to reflect more recent additions to the scholarship.

In the spring and summer of 1864, when the Civil War was entering its fourth year, the situation of the Union armies was grim. In the east, they had suffered terrible losses in the battles of the Wilderness (May 5 and 6), Spotsylvania (May 12), and Cold Harbor (June 3), while west of the Mississippi campaigns in Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas had ended disastrously, allowing the Southern forces to assume the offensive. Major General Sterling Price, who had been placed in command of the Confederate District of Arkansas in March, had been urging Major General Edmund Kirby Smith to authorize an all-out invasion of Missouri, and by June, when Union troops had been repulsed in the Red River campaign in Louisiana, Smith was ready to consider the idea favorably.

Price’s Raid and the Battle of Mine Creek

by Edgar Langsdorf

Edgar Langsdorf was a native of Lawrence, Kansas, a veteran of the Second World War, and a longtime member of the Kansas Historical Society’s staff. He commenced his society work with the Historical Records Survey of Kansas, a Works Progress Administration program, and left as executive director emeritus in 1977. Langsdorf contributed several articles to the Kansas Historical Quarterly and perhaps most significantly published “The First Hundred Years of the Kansas State Historical Society,” a comprehensive history of the society from its founding, as the autumn 1975 issue of the Quarterly.

80 Kansas History

Three cavalry raids into Missouri had been made by the Confederates in 1863. In January Major General John S. Marmaduke led a partially suc-cessful attack on Springfield and destroyed sev-

eral small forts in southwest Missouri. In April and May his raid into southeastern Missouri, intended to relieve Federal pressure against Vicksburg and Little Rock, was a failure. The third raid, in September–October, command-ed by Colonel Joseph O. Shelby, was planned to obstruct or prevent Federal reinforcement of Major General Wil-liam S. Rosecrans at Chattanooga, to recruit, and to keep the Confederacy alive in Missouri. It was well planned and effectively executed, resulting in the capture or de-struction of large quantities of Federal military supplies, and it won Shelby a promotion to brigadier general.1

The fourth raid, led by Price, was authorized by Smith in an order dated August 4, 1864, at Shreveport, Louisi-ana, the headquarters of the Confederate Trans-Missis-sippi department. Instructing Price to make immediate arrangements for the invasion, the order included the fol-lowing specific statements of purpose:

Rally the loyal men of Missouri, and remember that our great want is men. . . . Make St. Louis the objective point of your movement, which, if rapidly made, will put you in possession of that place, its supplies, and military stores, and which will do more toward rallying Missouri to your standard than the possession of any other point. Should you be compelled to withdraw from the State, make your retreat through Kansas and the Indian Territory, sweeping that country of its mules, horses, cattle, and military supplies of all kinds.

Price was directed to utilize the entire cavalry force of his district, to which were added the divisions of Major Generals James F. Fagan and Marmaduke and Shelby’s brigade. These were largely skeleton organizations which were to be filled out by the large number of expected Missouri recruits. Price was further ordered to “avoid all wanton acts of destruction and devastation, restrain your

1. Stephen B. Oates, Confederate Cavalry West of the River (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1961), 114–40. See also Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., The Civil War in the American West (New York: Knopf, 1991). Langsdorf’s article was first published as “Price’s Raid and the Battle of Mine Creek,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 30 (Autumn 1964): 281–306, and can be accessed at http://www.kshs.org/p/kansas-historical-quarterly-autumn-1964/17466. The introductory quotation is in Albert Castel, General Sterling Price and the Civil War in the West (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 255. The editors' comments and new citations are in italics throughout.

General Sterling Price’s campaign map from the atlas accompanying the Official Reports.


men, and impress upon them that their aim should be to secure success in a just and holy cause and not to gratify personal feeling and revenge.”2

Sterling Price was the ranking Missourian in the Con-federate army, a former governor, member of Congress and officer in the Mexican War. He had had no experience with cavalry, although he was a veteran infantry com-mander. However, his stature in civil as well as military life made him an obvious choice to lead this expedition, which had in addition to its military objectives the aim of overthrowing the loyal government of the state and the installation of a pro-Southern administration to be headed by Thomas C. Reynolds. Marmaduke and Shelby were also Missourians, as were many of the officers and men of the command. The state, although it had remained in the Union, numbered thousands of secessionist sym-pathizers in its population who were active in stirring up disorder. These sympathizers were counted upon to assist in a Confederate occupation of the state by giving Price information as to the location and movements of Federal troops, pointing out property of Unionists which could be looted or destroyed, and in helping to line up recruits for his army. In addition, Price as a practical poli-tician was undoubtedly hopeful that his occupation of the state would have a considerable effect on the forthcoming presidential election, in which the South ardently desired the defeat of Abraham Lincoln by George B. McClellan.3

Price did not leave Camden, in southern Arkansas, until August 28, because of a delay in receiving the necessary ordnance stores from Shreveport. Maramaduke’s and Fagan’s divisions were at

Princeton when he arrived there on the twenty-ninth. On September 7 they forded the Arkansas River at Dardanelle and moved on northeast, reaching Pocahontas on September 14. Here they were joined by Shelby’s brigade and the expedition was organized into three divisions. From Pocahontas the march north was in three columns,

Fagan’s division in the center, Marmaduke on the right, and Shelby on the left. As they entered Missouri on September 19, Price reported his strength at nearly 8,000 armed and 4,000 unarmed men, and fourteen pieces of artillery. Fagan’s division, he said, was much the largest, with Marmaduke’s next, and Shelby’s consisting of only two brigades.4

2. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1893), 728, 729.

3. William Forse Scott, The Story of a Cavalry Regiment: The Career of the Fourth Iowa Veteran Volunteers; From Kansas to Georgia, 1861–1865 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1893), 304–6; U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1 (1893), 192, 318, 375; Oates, Confederate Cavalry, 142. See also Robert E. Shallope, Sterling Price: Portrait of a Southerner (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971); Castel, General Sterling Price and the Civil War in the West; Christopher Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of Southern Identity in the Border West (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000).

Major General William S. Rosecrans (1819–1898), an 1842 graduate of West Point, commanded the Department of the Missouri with headquarters at St. Louis, during the late summer and fall of 1864. He first learned on September 3, 1864, that General Price planned to invade Missouri soon and wired Major General Henry W. Halleck, Lieutenant General U. S. Grant’s chief of staff, on September 6 requesting that Major General Andrew J. Smith and his infantry division, then passing Cairo, Illinois, on its way to reinforce General William T. Sherman, be halted near St. Louis to wait until Price’s intentions were clarified. Rosecrans’s departmental troops at this time did not exceed 10,000 men, most of them scattered in small detachments over the state, while Price’s strength was estimated at about 15,000 to 20,000. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

4. Wiley Britton, The Civil War on the Border, Volume II (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1899), 389, 390; U.S. War Department, The War of

82 Kansas History

Rumors had been circulating for months in Kansas and Missouri that Price was planning a large-scale invasion. Major General William S. Rosecrans, commanding the Department of the Missouri with headquarters at St. Louis, had been occupied most of the summer in uncovering a pro-Southern conspiracy instigated by an organization called the Order of American Knights. He had learned that Price counted on the cooperation of this group and other Southern sympathizers when he should enter the state. On September 3 Rosecrans received his

first information of the beginning of the raid and on the sixth wired Major General Henry W. Halleck, Lieutenant General U. S. Grant’s chief of staff, requesting that Major General Andrew J. Smith and his infantry division, then passing Cairo on the way to reinforce General William T. Sherman, be halted near St. Louis to wait until Price’s intentions were clarified. Rosecrans’s departmental troops at this time did not exceed 10,000 men, most of them scattered in small detachments over the state, while Price’s strength was estimated at about 20,000. Smith received orders from Halleck on September 9 to operate against Price, and thereupon moved to a point near St. Louis from which he would be able to shift quickly by rail or river transportation. The leisurely pace of Price’s northward march, during which he traveled often in a carriage rather than in the saddle and made “eloquent speeches along the way,” allowed reports of his progress to filter up to Union headquarters.5

Major General Samuel R. Curtis, commanding the Department of Kansas, had spread his 4,000 man force over a vast area in an attempt to protect the frontier settlements and the Santa Fe and California Trails from Indian attacks. At the beginning of September Curtis himself was near Fort Kearny, Nebraska, with a force of volunteers and civilians, and Major General James G. Blunt, who had recently assumed command of the District of the Upper Arkansas, was in western Kansas. Curtis returned to his headquarters at Fort Leavenworth on September 17, leaving Blunt to continue the Indian campaign. On the same day he sent telegrams to Governor Thomas Carney of Kansas and to Generals Halleck and Rosecrans, informing them that Price had crossed the Arkansas River with 15,000 men. He also sent a message to Blunt ordering him to return to Council Grove with all possible speed.6 On September 20 Brigadier General Thomas Ewing, Jr., commanding the District of St. Louis, received reports that Price was at Pocahontas. However, the officer in charge of the patrol which obtained this information from a wounded Confederate soldier indicated that he had no confidence in its accuracy. Other reports were received, but it was not until September 23 that Rosecrans was finally satisfied that Price had crossed the Arkansas River. Apparently he had not put much

5. Richard J. Hinton, Rebel Invasion of Missouri and Kansas and the Campaign of the Army of the Border Against General Sterling Price (Chicago: Church & Goodman, 1865), 7, 8; U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1 (1893), 307.

6. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1 (1893), 464, 465; Britton, The Civil War on the Border, 433.

An 1831 West Point graduate, Major General Samuel R. Curtis (1805–1866) eventually settled in Keokuk, Iowa, where he pursued careers in engineering, law, and politics. Curtis, a veteran of the Mexican War, won a seat in the U.S. Congress in 1856 and was reelected in 1858 and 1860. Soon after the outbreak of the Civil War, Congressman Curtis accepted appointment as colonel of the Second Regiment, Iowa Volunteer Infantry, and resigned his seat in Congress. Promoted to major general in the spring of 1862, Curtis commanded the Union army that defeated Price at Pea Ridge, Arkansas. When Price invaded Missouri in September 1864, Curtis was in command of the Department of Kansas, which included Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma).

the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1 (1893), 622, 623, 626, 627. For a recent in depth study of the early portion of Price’s campaign, see Mark A. Lause, Price’s Lost Campaign: The 1864 Invasion of Missouri (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011).


stock in the report sent in by Curtis a week earlier. Further word reached him that Shelby was south of Pilot Knob, Missouri, with 5,000 men, moving toward Farmington, but still he did not know the direction of Price’s main attack. As late as September 24 Rosecrans telegraphed Curtis that he placed no reliance in reports from Major General Frederick Steele that Price was at Pocahontas.7

As Rosecrans analyzed the situation, there were three possible invasion routes open to Price: into southeastern Missouri via Pocahontas, north toward Jefferson City by West Plains and Rolla, and north to the Missouri River either through Springfield and Sedalia or by way of the Kansas border. He believed Price’s main force would probably head north toward Jefferson City while secondary columns would move through southeastern Missouri, and he therefore alerted the militia garrisons in that part of the state and began concentrating regular units at St. Louis.8

Upon learning that Smith’s infantry was reinforcing Rosecrans at St. Louis, Price realized that he could not risk an attack there and so shifted his line of march toward Pilot Knob, eighty miles south of St. Louis. Reconnoitering parties sent out by General Ewing met his advance on September 26, and on the twenty-seventh the Battle of Pilot Knob took place. Ewing had barely 1,000 men, but they held off Marmaduke’s and Fagan’s divisions through the entire day in a defense that has been described as “one of the most brilliant deeds of the war.”9 Ewing’s losses were about 200 men killed, wounded, and missing, as compared to 1,500 Confederate casualties, and the punishment he inflicted on the Southern divisions was so severe, it is said, that they never entirely recovered their morale during the rest of the campaign.10

At this point Price decided to move against Jefferson City. Rosecrans had been concen-trating troops at various locations in hopes of intercepting Price. When he learned that

the invaders were definitely on the march toward the state capital he sent brigades under Brigadier Generals John McNeil and John B. Sanborn from Rolla, ordering

them to parallel Price’s line of march and reinforce Brigadier General E. B. Brown, commander of the District of Central Missouri, whose headquarters were at Jefferson City. Rosecrans also sent 4,500 men of the Third Division, Sixteenth Corps, and about the same number of men of Brigadier General Edward C. Pike’s division of enrolled militia, all under General Smith, to follow Price. On October 7 Price reached Jefferson City, which by that time was defended by about 7,000 men. From reports reaching him he concluded that the defending forces numbered 12,000, and this overestimate, coupled with his knowledge that Smith was coming up, made him

7. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1 (1893), 307; Hinton, Rebel Invasion, 15, 16; Britton, The Civil War on the Border, 392, 393.

8. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1 (1893), 307, 308; Scott, The Story of a Cavalry Regiment, 317.

9. Scott, The Story of a Cavalry Regiment, 315.10. Britton, The Civil War on the Border, 412; U.S. War Department, The

War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1 (1893), 308, 445–52, 628–30.

James Fleming Fagan (1828–1893) of Arkansas was assigned his first military command during the Mexican War. When his state seceded from the Union in 1861, he enthusiastically supported the Confederacy and distinguished himself at Shiloh, Tennessee, in 1862. Thereafter, he served in the Trans-Mississippi Department. He commanded a division of Price’s Confederates during the 1864 raid. Like Price, Fagan was reluctant to abandon the cause. He did not finally surrender until June 1865, two months after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House.

84 Kansas History

decide not to risk a battle but instead to push on toward Kansas.11

On October 8, Major General Alfred Pleasonton arrived in Jefferson City with orders from Rosecrans to assume command of all Union forces there. Four thousand were cavalry, and these troops, augmented by Colonel Edward F. Winslow’s cavalry brigade of the Seventeenth Army Corps and eight pieces of artillery, he formed into the Provisional Cavalry division which he commanded in the subsequent pursuit of Price and the battles which followed along the Kansas-Missouri border. This division consisted of four brigades under Generals McNeil, Sanborn, and Brown, and Colonel Winslow.

On the same date Governor Carney issued a procla-mation, requested by General Curtis, calling out the state militia for service along the border:

The State is in peril! Price and his rebel hosts threaten it with invasion. Kansas must be ready to hurl them back at any cost.

The necessity is urgent. . . .Men of Kansas, rally! One blow, one earnest,

united blow, will foil the invader and save you. Who will falter? Who is not ready to meet the peril? Who will not defend his home and the State?

To arms, then! To arms and the tented field, until the rebel foe shall be baffled and beaten back.

The proclamation was implemented by General Order No. 54, issued by Major General George W. Deitzler, the militia commander, on October 9, designating points of rendezvous at which the militia units were to assemble with supplies and equipment for thirty days service. Curtis on October 10 declared martial law throughout the state and called on all men between 18 and 60 to arm and attach themselves to some military organization.12

These men were without uniforms, and to provide some means of identification Curtis directed that they wear a piece of red material as a badge. Most of them accordingly sported a leaf from the ever-present sumach, turned scarlet at this season, and called themselves the “Sumach Millish” or the “Kansas Tads.”13 Few had any

military training or experience and most were without arms. One later reminisced: “We were about as inefficient a force as could have been mobilized anywhere on earth to check the advance of a seasoned army. . . . What would have happened were we subjected to gunfire can better be imagined than described. Fortunately the Confederates were turned back before they reached us raw recruits. After a service of about twenty-one days we were permitted to return home, where we received our discharges.”14

In obedience to Deitzler’s call, 12,622 men assembled at Olathe, Atchison, Paola, Mound City, Fort Scott, and Wyandotte City. More than 10,000 of this number were concentrated south of the Kansas River. Units detailed for special duty at other points were not counted in these fig-ures, and it was estimated that a total of more than 16,000 Kansans were actually in the field.15

On October 10 Price moved into Boonville with Marmaduke’s and Fagan’s divisions. Shelby was already there. For two days Price remained in camp, resting, recruiting 1,200 to 1,500 new troops, receiving visits from such guerrilla leaders as William C. Quantrill and “Bloody Bill” Anderson, and distributing portions of the booty already acquired. Both Quantrill and Anderson were sent out by Price to destroy railroad lines, Anderson to tear up trackage of the North Missouri railroad and Quantrill to cut the Hannibal and St. Joe line. They effected some damage, according to Price, but none of any material advantage. Anderson is said to have admired and respected Price, and at Boonville presented him with a pair of silver-mounted pistols. When he was killed fifteen days later near Albany, Missouri, a letter was found on his body containing Price’s orders to him. There was no such kindly feeling between Price and Quantrill, and in fact Quantrill remained in Price’s service only a few days.16

During the night and early morning of October 13 the Confederates resumed their march. Sanborn’s brigade, which had been harassing Price during the Boonville occupation,

followed him and continued the hit and run tactics which were designed to prevent Confederate side excursions

11. Samuel J. Crawford, Kansas in the Sixties (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1911), 140, 141; Britton, The Civil War on the Border, 414, 415, 421, 422; U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1 (1893), 308–11, 375, 376, 630, 631.

12. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1 (1893), 311, 340, 467–70; Hinton, Rebel Invasion, 30–33. Leavenworth (Kans.) Daily Conservative, October 15, 1864, was one of many Kansas newspapers which printed the full proclamation.

13. Hinton, Rebel Invasion, 60.

14. George A. Root, “Reminiscences of William Darnell,” Kansas Historical Collections, 1926–1928 17 (1928): 505.

15. Hinton, Rebel Invasion, 44–48.16. Ralph R. Rea, Sterling Price, the Lee of the West (Little Rock, Ark.:

Pioneer Press, 1959), 130, 131. Rea cites Lucy Simmons, “The Life of Sterling Price,” (master’s thesis, University of Chicago, 1921), 101. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1 (1893), 442, 631, 632.


and delay Price until Rosecrans and Smith, who were moving west by river transport, railroad and forced overland marches, could come up in his rear. Sanborn marched along roads behind and to the south of the invaders. Price, as he left Boonville, learned of a cache of several thousand small arms stored in the city hall of Glasgow, and at Arrow Rock he sent a force across the river to capture the garrison and seize these arms and other supplies. This delayed his progress and gave Rosecrans and Smith time to join Sanborn. As Price moved out of Marshall, Missouri, toward Lexington, he found himself pushed from behind by 8,000 Federal troops while another 4,000 moved parallel to his course on his left flank.17

General Curtis meantime was collecting his troops, those under General Deitzler assembling at and near Shawneetown, Kansas, and those under General Blunt at Hickman Mills, Missouri. These two divisions were designated by Curtis as the Army of the Border. Blunt, commanding the first division, organized his units into brigades, the first under Colonel Charles R. Jennison, the second under Colonel Thomas Moonlight, and the third under Colonel C. W. Blair. Militia units commanded by Brigadier General W. H. M. Fishback were directed to report to Colonel Blair. The militia units under Deitzler at Shawneetown were the First, Second, Third, Fourth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Twentieth, and Twenty-first regiments. Other militia regiments were added later.18 Curtis ordered Blunt’s first division to move toward Pleasant Hill and Warrensburg and Deitzler’s second division to move toward Independence and Lexington. Both were to send out cavalry to ascertain the line of Price’s approach and to harass his advance. Blunt reached Pleasant Hill shortly after midnight on October 17 with his First and Second brigades and at daylight moved on toward Warrensburg. Learning that General Sanborn and his cavalry were

A physician who won recognition as Kansas’s first major general during the Civil War, James G. Blunt (1826–1881) was born in Trenton, Hancock County, Maine, on July 21, 1826, and eventually received a degree from the Starling Medical College of Columbus, Ohio. He moved to Kansas Territory in 1856, settled first at Greeley, becoming deeply involved in free-state politics, and served as a delegate to the Wyandotte Constitutional Convention in July 1859. The general was actively engaged on the western frontier and the border throughout the Civil War, but his military career was marked by successes and failure, plaudits, and controversy.

17. Rea, Sterling Price, 131, 132; Britton, The Civil War on the Border, 431, 432; U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1 (1893), 311, 312, 632.

18. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1 (1893), 473, 474, 572, 614, 615.

86 Kansas History

The “silly rumors” to which Curtis referred had been a handicap to his military plans and operations since early in the month. Governor Carney believed it unlikely that Price would actually attempt an invasion of Kansas. He distrusted Curtis, whom he considered a supporter of his bitter political foe, James H. Lane, and in view of the approaching elections Carney believed that the whole idea of mobilizing the militia was nothing more than a scheme of the Lane camp to take the voters away from their homes, thereby making it impossible to hold an election at all or giving the Lane faction the advantage. Carney’s newspaper, the Leavenworth Times, clearly indicated this suspicion, and an anti-Lane editor, Sol Miller of the White Cloud Kansas Chief, on October 6, wrote:

People of Kansas, do you know that Gen. Curtis has entered into a conspiracy with Lane, to call out the entire Kansas Militia, to compel their absence at election time? It is the only hope Lane has of succeeding. They admit that danger is remote, but are determined to make Price’s movements a pretext for taking the voters away into Missouri, or from their homes. . . . We have our information from a trustworthy source.

Further, since Blunt himself was a bitter personal enemy of Carney and a “military and political henchman of Lane,” Carney was unlikely to put much faith in any information received from

him either directly or indirectly. Not until it was known definitely that Price had left Jefferson City and begun moving west did Carney issue the proclamation calling out the militia. For about ten days thereafter the state was gripped by intense excitement. Charles Robinson, who had served as the first governor of Kansas, wrote to his wife from Lawrence on October 9: “The rebels are in Mo. in earnest & coming this way. The entire State Militia are called out & will be in the field in a few days. . . . We had an alarm last night. Several guns were fired east of the town & the guard alarmed the town. It proved to be nothing & we went to bed again.”21

By October 16 some 10,000 militia had taken stations along the border, almost all of them poorly armed and inadequately trained. Even at this time their patriotic en-thusiasm had begun to wear thin. Since the issuance of

near Dunksburg and that General Smith’s infantry and artillery were within supporting distance, Blunt sent a message to Sanborn suggesting a joint offensive. At the same time he requested Curtis to send forward Colonel Blair and the Third brigade, and the Sixteenth Kansas and Second Colorado Cavalry. That evening he began the march toward Lexington, where Colonel Moonlight arrived with the advance on the morning of October 18. Next morning Blunt sent out scouts who encountered Price’s army moving in three columns from Waverly to Lexington. Blunt reinforced his outposts and ordered that the enemy be resisted. Shelby, commanding the Confederate advance, pushed forward and after a sharp encounter drove Blunt’s troops past Lexington and on toward Independence. Blunt reported that the engagement and subsequent withdrawal, which began shortly before noon and continued until dark, inflicted severe punishment on the enemy but more importantly developed Price’s position, strength, and movements for the first time since he had crossed the Arkansas River. The rear guard in this action was the Eleventh Kansas Cavalry under Moonlight.19

Blunt withdrew to the crossing of the Little Blue River nine miles east of Independence, and finding there a strong natural defensive position went into camp in line of battle on the morning of October 20. However, in response to a request for reinforcements, he was ordered by General Curtis to leave an outpost at the Little Blue, under the command of Colonel Moonlight, and retire with the rest of his troops to Independence. Curtis’s message to Blunt read in part as follows:

Your troops must take position here [Independence] where dry corn and provisions are arranged. The militia will not go forward and the Big Blue must be our main line for battle. . . . Probably Moonlight had better be left in command of that point [Little Blue], not to fight a battle, but to delay the rebel approach, and fall back to our main force. I will now be able to bring forward to Kansas City a respectable force. We must pick our battle-ground where we can have united councils as well as a strong position. This we are securing at Big Blue and elsewhere. The blow you gave the enemy is doing good in the rear. It is crushing some of the silly rumors that had well-nigh ruined any prospects of a successful defense.20

21. Charles Robinson to Sara T. D. Robinson, October 9, 1864, The Private Papers of Charles and Sara T. D. Robinson, 1834–1911, microfilm MS640, State Archives Division, Kansas Historical Society, Topeka; See also “Astounding,” White Cloud Kansas Chief, October 6, 1864.

19. Ibid., 312, 475, 573, 574, 632, 633, 657.20. Ibid., 476, 574.


Governor Carney’s proclamation on October 8 nothing had been heard of Price, and even Robinson, serving on General Deitzler’s staff, wrote:

It is beginning to be thought that our being called out is all a sham & trick of Lane & Curtiss [sic] to make political capital. We cannot hear anything of importance as to the movements of Price. We think that we are kept in ignorance of the true condition of affairs in order to keep the people out as long as possible. . . . I have no doubt Price has gone South & that there are only a few guerillas [sic] prowling about. Nobody thinks we shall have anything to do but go home in a few days & attend to our busi-ness.22

On October 16 Lieutenant Colonel James D. Snoddy of Mound City, commanding the Sixth Regiment Kansas State Militia, had asked Blunt’s permission to take his regiment back to Linn County. Upon Blunt’s refusal Snoddy started home anyway, and Blunt had no recourse but to arrest both Snoddy and his immediate superior, Brigadier General William H. M. Fishback. This he did, in person, and the Sixth regiment chose James Montgomery to be its new commanding officer. In his report Blunt stated that no other officers or men of the Fifth, Sixth, and Tenth Militia regiments, all of which had been brigaded under the command of Colonel Blair, had refused to recognize his authority, nor

evinced any other disposition than to do their whole duty and move against the enemy in Missouri or elsewhere that he could be found. Nor could I attach so much criminality to the acts of Brigadier-General Fishback and Colonel Snoddy, especially of the former, and inflict upon them the summary punishment prescribed by the rules of war, viz, death, as would have been the case had I not known that they were the instruments selected by the Executive of Kansas and others, their superiors in the militia organization, to carry out their mischievous and disgraceful designs.23

Pro-Carney, anti-Lane newspapers, among them the Leavenworth Daily Times, White Cloud Kansas Chief, Oskaloosa Independent, and Lawrence Journal, announced that Price had left Missouri and urged that the militiamen should be released from service. Many regiments refused to go any distance into Missouri and some said that they would not cross the state line at all. General Deitzler supported them, believing that Price was below the Arkansas River. The situation as affecting military discipline was so serious that Major H. H. Heath, provost-marshal-general at Fort Leavenworth, sent the following message to General Curtis on October 20:

Leavenworth Times daily publishing demoralizing articles, tendency urging militia to return home and disband. It condemns and seriously and offensively criticises, generally and specially, your acts in keeping militia in arms and martial law in force. . . . Am of opinion that the paper should be temporarily suspended, and editors and writers arrested as enemies to the public and cause. Do not doubt that its incendiary articles are the cause mainly of the tendency to bad conduct of the militia. . . . Please instruct. Course of paper is highly treasonable at this time.24

At this juncture Curtis received a telegram from Rosecrans, dated October 18, reporting Price’s location at Waverly on the sixteenth, with Union forces beginning to move in earnest. Reporting the disposition of his units, Rosecrans concluded that, “combined with yours, it seems to me we can push the old fellow and make him lose his train. His horses’ feet must be in bad order for want of shoes.” Curtis thereupon arranged for newspaper publication of this intelligence in an attempt to convince the militia and state officials that the danger was real, and his effort was bolstered by the news of Blunt’s clash with Price at Lexington.25

On October 21 Price resumed his march to the Little Blue, Marmaduke’s division in advance. Moonlight and the rear guard were driven back across the stream and a hard-fought withdrawal, lasting nearly six hours, ended with the Union forces taking up prepared positions on the Big Blue and Price’s army entering Independence. For

24. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 4 (1893), 148; U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1 (1893), 614, 615.

25. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1 (1893), 475.

22. Charles Robinson to Sara T. D. Robinson, October 16, 1864, Robinson Collection. See Albert Castel, “War and Politics: The Price Raid of 1864,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 24 (Summer 1958): 129–43, for a discussion of the political intrigues in Kansas as they affected the military situation at this time. See also “James Lane on Sterling Price’s 1864 Raid,” in Pearl T. Ponce, ed., Kansas’s War: The Civil War in Documents (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), 139–42.

23. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1 (1893), 572, 573, 597, 619, 620.

88 Kansas History

the defensive Battle of the Big Blue Curtis assigned Blunt to the command of the right wing and Deitzler to the left. His force totaled some 15,000 men, including militia, volunteers, artillery, and a number of colored troops under Captains Richard J. Hinton and James L. Rafety, to oppose an enemy estimated at this time to consist of nearly 30,000. Curtis telegraphed Rosecrans late in the afternoon of October 21 that he was confident of stopping Price and hoped the Missouri commander would come up on the Confederate rear and left. “If you can get that

position we will bag Price, if I succeed, as I hope to do.”26

The Battle of the Big Blue began on the morning of October 22 with a skirmish on Deitzler’s wing. Curtis reported that Price found both this wing and the center too strong and avoided a full-scale attack. In fact, Price’s immediate concern seemed to be the safe passage of his train down the road to Little Santa Fe, about nine miles south of Independence. Shelby attacked Jennison at Byram’s Ford and forced a crossing, thus cutting off and capturing substantial numbers of militia under General M. S. Grant near Hickman Mills. Curtis threw in reinforcements to help Jennison, but by dark Price had penetrated and broken his right flank, taken Hickman Mills and all of the Blue south of Byram’s Ford. Blunt ordered Deitzler to withdraw his troops to Kansas City, and by nightfall all the Union forces except the regiments of Jennison, Moonlight, and Ford were positioned within the lines of fortifications which had been prepared.27

Early on the morning of October 23 the Battle of Westport began. Blunt’s First, Second, and Fourth brigades were deployed into line of battle on the south side of the timber

along Brush Creek. Price’s army, with Shelby’s division in advance, began the attack and forced Blunt’s front line to fall back across the creek. With the arrival of the Sixth and Tenth regiments of militia under Colonel Blair, Blunt ordered a general advance which was successfully accomplished. At noon the center of the Confederate line

General Samuel Curtis’s campaign map, Westport area, from the atlas that accompanied the Official Reports.

26. Ibid., 478, 479, 592, 593, 633, 634.27. Ibid., 479–84, 575, 634, 635, 658.


was broken and the rebel retreat turned into a near rout with Blunt’s cavalry and artillery in rapid pursuit. When this had continued for two miles Blunt reported that he came up with Pleasonton’s forces, which were facing a portion of Price’s army. Blunt’s artillery threw a raking fire into Price’s flank just as the rebels were about to charge Pleasonton. This threw them into confusion and stampeded them with the main column of the retreating enemy. Blunt’s cavalry continued to press Price’s rear, Pleasonton’s cavalry following closely behind, and thus the pursuit continued until dark. Blunt’s Second brigade bivouacked that night at Aubrey and the remainder of his division at Little Santa Fe.28

The Battle of Westport, sometimes called the Gettysburg of the West, was by far the most successful Union operation of the campaign. However, Price’s main objective was to cover the southward movement of his enormous train as it withdrew along the road to Little Santa Fe, and this objective he was able to carry out. The Union forces were also successful in protecting Kansas City and preventing Price from crossing the state line into Kansas.

Ten miles south of Westport, at about 2:30 in the afternoon, Generals Curtis, Pleasonton, and Blunt met in a farmhouse and held a short conference. General Sanborn was also present, as were Governor Carney and General Deitzler of the Kansas Militia. It was agreed that Price must be pursued vigorously to prevent his taking any of the military posts along the state line between the Missouri and Arkansas Rivers, a distance of about 300 miles. Pleasonton’s army, the 10,000 militia, and Curtis’s 4,000 regular volunteers were considered more than sufficient. Pleasonton wished to move his command toward Harrisonville, in Cass County, Missouri, and mentioned the long march of some of his cavalry, which had come up from Arkansas, as well as the importance of allowing his Missouri volunteers to be at home for the approaching election. However, Governor Carney and General Deitzler urged that the Kansas Militia be released first, since they had left their homes and served faithfully in spite of inadequate equipment and pay, if indeed they were to be paid at all. Curtis supported this argument, perhaps to clear himself of any possible charges of political shenanigans such as had been raised earlier, and Pleasonton agreed. Therefore Curtis immediately released all the Kansas Militia whose homes were north of the Kansas River, retaining in service only the Fifth,

Sixth, and Tenth regiments which were from southern Kansas. He also revoked his Order No. 54, which had proclaimed martial law north of the Kansas River, adding: “The enemy are repelled and driven south. Our success is beyond all anticipation.”29

That night the forces of Curtis and Pleasonton also camped at Aubrey and Little Santa Fe, where they arrived at dusk. Early next morning, October 24, they resumed the pursuit. Blunt as

commander of the Kansas forces was given the advance, with Pleasonton following. Blunt’s force was now designated the First division and Pleasonton’s, consisting of Missouri, Iowa, Indiana, and other units, was called the Second division. Moonlight’s Second brigade marched on the Kansas side of the line, on Price’s right flank, in order to protect the state against marauding detachments. At noon Curtis telegraphed General Halleck that he was on the State Line road opposite Paola. Price, he said, “makes rapid progress, but dead horses and debris show his demoralized and destitute condition and my probable success in overhauling him.” He also sent a message to Colonel Samuel A. Drake, commander at Paola, to inform him that the pursuit had passed far enough south to guarantee the safety of the town and that it was continuing rapidly. “I hope fresh mounted troops will press down on Price’s flank by the Fort Scott road,” he added, “and by travelling night and day strike his train. He is scattering his heavy baggage along the road, but making rapid progress due south. I have fears he may move against Fort Scott, but shall press him so hard to-night he will not dare to make the divergence.”30

At dark the pursuit halted for two hours near West Point, Missouri. Price’s army was then camped in the vicinity of Trading Post, in Linn County, Kansas, about twenty-five miles north of Fort Scott. When the march was resumed by the Federal forces about eight o’clock Pleasonton’s division took the advance, a change for which Curtis was criticized because it wasted time. Pleasonton placed Sanborn’s brigade in the lead with orders to push forward until the Confederate pickets were met and driven in. The night was extremely dark and rainy, and the forward regiments, the Sixth and Eighth Missouri State Militia under Colonel Joseph J. Gravely, moved forward cautiously until they encountered Price’s

29. Ibid., 491, 492, 616, 617.30. Ibid., 492, 493, 576. Price was indeed planning to attack Fort Scott.

See ibid., 636, 637.28. Ibid., 485–91, 575, 576.

90 Kansas History

artillery during the rest of the night, but bad weather and washed-out roads made this impossible.31

Shortly after four o’clock in the morning a general advance was ordered. In accordance with instructions from General Pleasonton, Sanborn pushed his line through the timber to the Marais des Cygnes River. Curtis reported that the enemy deserted his camp in great confusion, attempted to make a stand at the river crossing, but was forced to retreat in disorder, leaving his guns behind, because the advance led by the Second Arkansas Cavalry was so close upon him that he had no time to organize. “Cattle, camp equipment, negroes, provisions partly cooked, and stolen goods were scattered over miles of the forest camp, and along the lines of the retreat. Few were killed on either side as the night and early morn attack created a general fright in the rebel lines and only random shots on either side.” Sanborn pursued for about a mile and then halted his brigade to allow the men to eat breakfast while Pleasonton continued to move ahead with the remainder of his division. This was the battle of the Marais des Cygnes, which ended shortly after dawn, October 25.32

Pleasonton’s leading units now consisted of the two brigades commanded by Colonel John F. Phillips and Lieutenant Colonel Frederick W. Benteen. Phillips, who was commander of the

Seventh Missouri State Militia, had replaced Brigadier General E. B. Brown as commander of the First Brigade on October 23. Benteen, commanding officer of the Tenth Missouri Cavalry, had assumed command of the Fourth Brigade on the same date, when Colonel Edward F. Winslow was wounded and forced to retire.33 Phillips’s brigade, totaling some 1,500 men, was composed of the First, Fourth, and Seventh Cavalry, Missouri State Militia. Benteen’s included the Tenth Missouri, Third, and Fourth Iowa, and contingents of the Fourth Missouri and Seventh Indiana regiments, about 1,100 men in all. Against these two brigades were aligned the divisions of Marmaduke and Fagan, estimated to number 7,000 to 8,000 men.

Crossing into Kansas in Linn County on October 24, General Sterling Price’s army camped near Trading Post where, before dawn on October 25, it was overtaken by the pursing Federal force. A running battle commenced, lasting the entire day, but the decisive engagement came late in the morning as the Confederate divisions struggled to cross the steep, muddy banks of Mine Creek. The day’s troop movements are depicted on this campaign map of the area that accompanied Major General Samuel R. Curtis’s official report.

31. Ibid., 390, 413, 493, 494, 576.32. Ibid., 390, 391, 493, 494.33. Benteen is best known today as a member of the U.S. Seventh

cavalry who was with Custer at the time of the battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876, though he did not participate in that battle. After his Civil War service he entered the regular army as a captain in the Seventh cavalry, July 28, 1866. Most of his service until his retirement July 7, 1888, was connected with the Indian campaigns. Thomas H. S. Hamersly, Complete Army and Navy Register of the United States of America, From 1776 to 1887 (New York: T. H. S. Hamersly, 1888), 296.

units near Trading Post. Curtis, when he was informed of the contact, ordered Sanborn to harass the enemy with


341, 851, 352, 495, 637. The Battle of Mine Creek has continued to capture the interest of local and regional scholars and buffs, and a number of important recent studies have resulted; see, for example, Lumir F. Buresh, October 25th and the Battle of Mine Creek (Kansas City, Mo.: Lowell Press, 1977); Kip Lindberg, “Chaos Itself: The Battle of Mine Creek,” North & South 1 (no. 6, 1998): 74–85; in addition, the Mine Creek Battlefield State Historic Site has been the focus of much state level research and considerable resources for development, http://www.kshs.org/mine_creek.

About three miles from the crossing of the Marais des Cygnes Phillips came upon the enemy, drawn up in line of battle on the open prairie with Mine Creek, a tributary of the Marais des Cygnes, immediately behind him. Price’s train, passing slowly across the stream, had blocked the passage of the troops in the rear. Marmaduke and Fagan, defending the withdrawal, had no choice but to stop and fight, for the advance regiment of Phillips’s brigade, the First Missouri Militia under Lieutenant Colonel Bazel F. Lazear, was only 500 or 600 yards behind them. The Confederate commanders decided that they would not have time to dismount their troops, send horses to the rear, and fight on foot, as would have been the normal procedure in such a situation. Instead, their troops were thrown into line for immediate defensive action, Fagan’s division on the right, Marmaduke’s on the left. Shelby and his division had gone ahead in charge of the train, with an additional directive from Price to attack and capture Fort Scott, where Price had been told there were 1,000 Negroes under arms. The defense was formed in two ranks with a projecting angle in the middle and a battery of artillery at the apex of the angle and on each wing. In his report Colonel Phillips gave this description:

The enemy was formed at 600 yards distance in treble lines and in overwhelming force. My ground was high and commanding. Here the whole rebel army and train were in full view. General Price on his famed white horse was plainly visible directing and urging the rapid flight of his train. The scene was grand; the work before us of fearful import. . . . The enemy’s vastly superior numbers enabled him to outflank me, which he evidently intended to do, by his movements.

Another writer who was on the scene commented: “In view of the numbers engaged the spectacle is probably without a parallel in the war.”34

34. Scott, The Story of a Cavalry Regiment, 332, 333; U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1 (1893), 330, 332,

Although technically only a Confederate rear guard action, the engagement on the north bank of Mine Creek was the decisive battle of the latter part of Price’s Raid. The map above of the Mine Creek vicinity, which was published in William F. Scott’s The Story of a Cavalry Regiment (1893), shows the location of both Union and Confederate troops at midmorning on October 25, 1864, as General Curtis’s command approached from the north (bottom of map).

Phillips had no reserve force, and the Union artillery, delayed by obstructions placed by the enemy at the Marais des Cygnes crossing, had not yet come up. The Confederate batteries began to fire on him and the rebels appeared ready to move forward to the attack. At this moment Benteen’s brigade came up on Phillips’s left and two pieces of artillery got into position. The order to charge was given, Benteen against Price’s right and Phillips against his center and left. The Tenth Missouri started forward, bugles sounding, but they hesitated and came to a stop half way down the slope when the enemy showed no sign of breaking. In spite of repeated commands from Benteen and other officers they did not resume the charge, apparently brought up short by some strange psychological block. There was danger that the regiments following them would be thrown into confusion. Just behind was the Fourth Iowa, stretched out in a line which extended the length of two companies beyond the Missourians. Major Abial R. Pierce, commanding the Iowa regiment, galloped to the left of his line and gave the order to charge. The two companies on the left, A and K, responded and were followed by the others as quickly as they could force their way through the confused lines of the Tenth Missouri. This movement seemed to break the spell and the Tenth regained its poise and followed. They struck the enemy line from left to right, broke it, and “it all fell away like a row of bricks.”35 The Third Iowa followed the Fourth into the melee, and Phillips’s brigade quickly joined also. Phillips in his report wrote:

The impetuosity of the onset surprised and confounded the enemy. He trembled and wavered and the wild shouts of our soldiers rising above the din of battle told that he gave way. With pistol we dashed into his disorganized ranks and the scene of death was as terrible as the victory was speedy and glorious.

This fighting at close quarters was described by Ben-teen as surpassing anything “for the time it lasted [that] I have ever witnessed.” The rebel line was routed along its whole length within a few minutes for the long infantry rifles with which many of the troops were armed were difficult to reload on horseback and therefore were almost useless in a cavalry fight. As the Union regiments charged, the Confederates fired and then turned their horses and fled. This, of course, resulted in breaking the defensive

lines formed in their own rear and the whole force was almost immediately demoralized and panic-stricken. Benteen reported that the “enemy was completely routed and driven in the wildest confusion from the field; several of his wagons were abandoned in the narrow road that crosses the creek just in the rear of his position. Many of his force were left dead and wounded upon the field and in our hands.”36

92 Kansas History

35. Scott, The Story of a Cavalry Regiment, 335.

Colonel Samuel J. Crawford (1835–1913), Second Kansas Colored Infantry, served as an aide to General Curtis during the campaign against Price, and on October 25, Crawford was acting as a scout with Pleasonton's advance units. At that time he was also a candidate for Kansas governor, and two weeks after the Battle of Mine Creek, Crawford won the election. In January 1865, at the age of twenty-nine, he took office as the state's third governor. Reelected in 1866, Crawford resigned his office on November 4, 1868, to again don a military uniform to take command of the Nineteenth Kansas Volunteer Cavalry, which had been organized to help subdue hostile Indians threatening white settlers on the state's western frontier.

36. Ibid., 333–35; Britton, The Civil War on the Border, 493–96; U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1 (1893), 332, 335–38, 352, 361, 495, 496, 637. William A. Mitchell, Linn County, Kansas, A History (La Cygne, Kans., 1928) reports on pages 238–40 the recollections of Henry Trinkle. Many Confederates were “forced over the bluff and crushed. . . . The scene after the battle was terrifying. Fully

In the bend of the creek, only a few acres in extent, 300 Confederates were killed or wounded and about 900 were captured. Among the prisoners were Generals Marmaduke and Cabell, the latter a

brigade commander in Fagan’s division, and a number of field and company grade officers. Marmaduke’s capture was credited to Private James Dunlavy of Company D, and Cabell’s to Sergeant Calvary M. Young of Company L, both of the Third Iowa Cavalry. Dunlavy was later awarded a Medal of Honor. Eight artillery pieces and two stands of colors were also taken, besides numerous wagons, small arms, and other equipment and supplies.37

Marmaduke, when he saw that he would be forced to fight at Mine Creek, had at once sent a note to General Price telling him of the situation. Price had been ill and at this time was riding in a carriage with his train, which was escorted by Shelby’s division. Apparently he was not, in spite of Colonel Phillips’s belief, astride his famous white horse until he received Marmaduke’s call for help. Then he mounted and rode back, first ordering Shelby to take command of his old brigade and do what he could to assist Marmaduke and Fagan. Price said that he met the troops of the two divisions “retreating in utter and inde-scribable confusion, many of them having thrown away their arms. They were deaf to all entreaties or commands, and in vain were all efforts to rally them.” Shelby himself said that as he returned he met “the advancing Federals, flushed with success and clamorous for more victims. I knew from the beginning that I could do nothing but re-sist their advance, delay them as much as possible, and depend on energy and night for the rest.”38

So the Battle of Mine Creek came to an end.39 In time elapsed it had been scarcely half an hour from Benteen’s

three hundred horses horribly mangled were running and snorting and trampling the dead and wounded. Their blood had drenched them and added to the ghastliness of it all. One hundred and fifty Union dead were taken to Mound City for burial, and the rebels buried on the battlefield. A lady living there at the time says that three hundred were buried in one grave, while at numerous other places groups of rebel dead were interred.” This account appeared originally in the La Cygne (Kans.) Weekly Journal, June 21, 1895, and was reprinted in the Kansas Historical Collections, 1923–1925 16 (1925): 654, 655.

37. Thomas Julian Bryant, “The Capture of General Marmaduke by James Dunlavy an Iowa Private Cavalryman,” Iowa Journal of History and Politics 11 (April 1913): 248–57.

38. Scott, The Story of a Cavalry Regiment, 338, 339; Rea, Sterling Price, 148, 149; U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1 (1893), 637, 659, 660. According to Lindberg, Sergeant Young was also awarded the Medal of Honor for this action, “Chaos Itself: The Battle of Mine Creek,” 84.

39. A description of the events of October 24 and 25, from the view of a man in the ranks, is found in the diary of Fletcher Pomeroy, quartermaster sergeant of the Seventh Kansas cavalry and a member of Company D: “Our march was on the state line road. The country was

A native of Arrow Rock, Missouri, John Sappington Marmaduke (1833–1887) was an 1857 graduate of West Point. In 1861 he resigned his U.S. commission to join the Confederate army and was promoted to brigadier-general following the Battle of Shiloh. General Marmaduke, who directed the rear guard action at Mine Creek, was captured during the battle and spent the remainder of the war as a Union prisoner. Subsequently, Marmaduke returned to Missouri, where in the 1880s he served the people of his state as governor.

entirely devastated. For thirty miles lone chimneys and piles of brick and stone marked the site of once happy homes, now desolated by the hand of war that for nearly four years has afflicted this border. About 4.00 P. M. we passed Price’s last nights camp. We reached West Point about ten P. M. Monday, where we passed Gen Blunt’s command and continued our march nine miles when we struck the rebel pickets within a mile of the Maridezene River at three A. M. Tuesday morning. Gen. Curtis’s and Blunt’s forces came up at daylight and our whole army moved forward. The enemy’s pickets were driven and his whole army was pressed back across the river at Choteau trading post, and about two hundred head of cattle captured from him. Our forces crossed and moved upon the enemy who were in position on Flint [Mine] Creek. After some skirmishing a cavalry charge was made by the 10th Mo. Cavalry under Maj. Benton [Benteen] which resulted in the capture of the rebel Major Gen. Marmaduke, Brig. Gen. Cabal [Cabell] and four colonels and nearly four hundred soldiers and seven pieces of artillary [sic]. Many rebel dead and wounded were left on the field. Not a man was killed on our side, though several were wounded. After this the enemy made several stands as we pursued him, but was easily driven. The whole action of the day has been a succession of charges during


charge to the panicky flight of the rebel divisions. According to Samuel J. Crawford, an aide on General Curtis's staff, after the two forces closed in battle a life and death struggle continued for about twenty minutes. Within thirty minutes Marmaduke and other officers were prisoners and the rest of the Confederate troops were fleeing as though they felt the devil prodding them. The best efforts of Fagan and Shelby were unable to stem the rout, which continued across the prairie to the crossing of the Little Osage River near Fort Lincoln, twelve miles northwest of Fort Scott. There Shelby posted a brigade, or part of a brigade, to cover the further retreat of the train and the rest of Price’s army. Sanborn’s brigade was now the advance of the Union forces, and as he approached Shelby withdrew to the timber along the river. From here he was pushed south another five miles. Sanborn stopped to rest his horses and men and McNeil took over the pursuit with the Second Brigade. Benteen and the Fourth Brigade soon joined him, and about six miles northeast of Fort Scott they came upon Price’s whole army drawn up for battle on Shiloh Creek. Artillery fire eventually broke the Confederate lines and near sundown Price again began a rapid retreat.40

It was at this time that one of the several inexplicable incidents connected with the Price raid occurred. Gen-eral Curtis in his official report wrote that as twilight approached and the enemy lines were slowly retiring, he saw a large portion of his own forces moving to the right as if to turn the enemy’s left flank. However, as they contin-ued well beyond the flank he rode to the head of the column to determine what was happening, and was told by General Pleasonton that his troops were exhausted and they were going to Fort Scott to rest and obtain supplies.

Pleasonton was informed, as Curtis listened, that it was only two or two and a half miles to the fort, though Curtis protested that it was at least six miles. He urged Pleasonton not to abandon McNeil’s brigade and suggested that the troops be allowed to rest in the field while supplies were sent out from the fort. However, Pleasonton did not concur and General Sanborn continued to lead the march toward Fort Scott. Curtis then sent word back to Blunt to hurry forward to support McNeil. Going into Fort Scott himself after dark, Curtis had a further talk with Pleasonton, who said that he would have to withdraw personally from the campaign for reasons of health although his troops might continue. Blunt also came into Fort Scott, either through misunderstanding or failure to receive Curtis’s orders to reinforce McNeil, who, with Benteen’s brigade, was still on the field. Curtis then ordered rations sent out to the men of McNeil’s and Blunt’s commands, but the supply train met Blunt’s men coming in to Fort Scott and so turned around and came back. McNeil’s troops were thus left to spend a miserable night without food.41

By this time Price’s remaining troops had reached the limit of their endurance. On the night of October 25, at the Marmaton River, Colonel Sidney D. Jackman, one of Shel-by’s brigade commanders, was given orders to burn most of the remaining wagons and to blow up the surplus am-munition. Then the retreat continued. In two days Price put forty miles between himself and the Union army, camping on October 28 just south of Newtonia, Missouri. In this area crops had been good, and Price lost no time in sending out foraging parties to get food for men and horses.42

On the night that Price’s train was being destroyed General Curtis, at Fort Scott, issued an order rescinding martial law in the southern part of Kansas. Next morning he sent

a telegram to General Halleck in Washington announcing that he had saved Fort Scott from attack by his constant pressure against Price and that he intended to continue the pursuit with all the troops at his command. Meantime Pleasonton had reported to his superior, General Rosecrans, that the enemy was beating a rapid retreat and that his own men and horses were exhausted from almost six days and nights of action. He said he would be unable to do anything more until he could obtain fresh

41. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1 (1893), 502, 503, 576, 577.

42. Ibid., 637, 861; Rea, Sterling Price, 149.

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which we drove the enemy forty-five miles. We are halted to-night in line of battle on the open prairie with nothing to burn, and nothing to hitch our horses to. I tied my horse to my saddle and used my saddle for my pillow. Some others ran their sabers into the ground and tied them to the hilts. We get corn for our horses from a field half a mile distant which is the first they have had to eat in thirty-two hours, during which time we have marched one hundred twelve miles.” Fletcher Pomeroy, Civil War Diary: 1861–1865, Collection 475, State Archives Division, Kansas Historical Society.

40. Crawford, Kansas in the Sixties, 181; Scott, The Story of a Cavalry Regiment, 838; U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1 (1893), 391, 392, 502, 660. The twenty-nine-year-old Colonel Crawford, who had left his own command with the Second Kansas Colored Infantry after accepting the Lane faction’s Republican Party nomination for governor of Kansas at the end of September, defeated the Republican-Union candidate in November and became the state’s third governor in January 1865. Homer E. Socolofsky, Kansas Governors (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990), 90; Albert Castel, Civil War Kansas: Reaping the Whirlwind. The Authorized Edition with a New Preface (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 177–83.

horses, and recommended that Sanborn’s and McNeil’s brigades follow in support of Curtis as long as there was any prospect of damaging the enemy and then return to their own districts. Rosecrans accepted this suggestion, and accordingly Pleasonton, with Phillips’s brigade, withdrew from the pursuit and returned to Warrensburg, Missouri. Blunt, following orders from Curtis, moved out in pursuit next morning, October 26, with the brigades

of Sanborn and McNeil following. Benteen’s brigade remained under Curtis’s command but took no part in the remainder of the campaign. That night Curtis’s force camped near Shanghai, Missouri, where they struck Price’s trail, and on October 27 continued on his trace all day and most of the night.43

Blunt, in the advance, about one o’clock in the afternoon of October 28 allowed Colonel Moonlight to halt his brigade to feed his horses. McNeil came up behind Moonlight and also halted, and Curtis, assuming that Blunt had stopped his entire division to rest and feed, allowed the other troops to do the same. However, Blunt had gone on with Jennison’s and Ford’s brigades, and when Curtis learned this he ordered Sanborn to move on as quickly as possible, fearing that Blunt might overtake the enemy with insufficient force at his disposal. McNeil was also directed to follow as soon as he was able. As Blunt approached Newtonia he found Price encamped in the timber south of the town. The rebels, when they saw Blunt coming up, hastily broke camp and began to move out, deploying Shelby’s and part of Fagan’s divisions to cover their withdrawal. Blunt’s attack against this superior force nearly ended in disaster, but near sundown, after the fight had been underway for almost two hours, he was reinforced by Sanborn’s brigade. This turned the tide and the enemy retreated.

By midafternoon, October 29, Blunt was ready to resume the pursuit, but that morning Curtis received a message from Pleasonton that he had been instructed by Rosecrans to send Generals Sanborn and McNeil to their home districts and to lead the other brigades of his command to Warrensburg. This left Curtis with only the troops of Blunt’s division, less than 1,000 men, and he therefore instructed Blunt to abandon the pursuit. Curtis was greatly disappointed at this inconclusive end to the campaign, and was therefore pleased to receive a message from Halleck stating that General Grant desired the pursuit of Price to continue to the Arkansas River. Since this instruction overruled Rosecrans’s earlier order, Curtis at once sent messengers to each of the retiring brigades to recall them. On October 31 he moved toward Cassville and next day he was joined by Benteen and his brigade. With this force he continued to the vicinity of Pea Ridge, Arkansas, and then south to Fayetteville, arriving there November 4. Thereafter he marched south to the Arkansas River, only to find that Price had already

43. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1 (1893), 314, 338, 342, 504–7, 577.

Born and educated in Washington, D. C., Alfred Pleasonton (1824–1897) graduated from West Point in 1844, served with distinction throughout the Mexican War, and saw duty on the Indian frontier of the 1850s. During the early years of the Civil War, Pleasonton won promotions and praise as a cavalry officer in the Army of the Potomac. At Chancellorsville, he engineered a successful stand against Confederate General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson and was promoted to major general of volunteers in June of 1863. A subsequent setback in Pleasonton’s military career led to a transfer to the Western Theater, and during the campaign against Price, Pleasonton commanded troops defending Jefferson City, Missouri, and troops under his command played a major role in the victories at Westport and Mine Creek.


crossed. On November 8 he issued the final order of the campaign, dismissing the troops who still remained with him and thanking them for their loyal and successful service.44

Conflicting statements and over-enthusiastic reports of commanding officers make it difficult to evaluate sat-isfactorily the results of the Price raid. Obviously Price did not succeed in accomplishing the military objectives set forth in Kirby Smith’s order: the seizure of St. Louis and its supplies and stores. He was unable to capture Jef-ferson City, his secondary objective. He failed signally to achieve his political goal of revolutionizing Missouri by overthrowing the pro-Union administration and install-ing a Confederate government with Thomas Reynolds as governor. In Kansas he failed to inflict damage of any tactical significance as he retreated. Finally, he failed to influence the result of the national elections against Lin-coln. On the other hand, he claimed that he captured and paroled more than 3,000 Federal officers and men, seized large quantities of supplies and stores of all kinds, destroyed many miles of railroads and burned depots and bridges, all this property amounting to not less than $10,000,000 in value, and added at least 5,000 new recruits to the Southern armies. His losses he put at about 1,000 prisoners, ten pieces of artillery, 1,000 small arms, and two stand of colors. He failed to mention the hundreds of wagons and horses and the tons of ammunition and other supplies and contraband which he was forced to abandon or destroy during his retreat.45

General Shelby, probably Price’s most capable and effective division commander, also was inclined, not unnaturally, to put the best possible face on the incidents and outcome of

the campaign. In his official report he found no difficulty, for example, in describing the battle of Newtonia as “another beautiful victory” for the Confederate arms when it should more accurately be classed as another successful withdrawal. Shelby was a romantic who found emotional release in the tensions of battle and who gloried in the clash of forces. During the Confederate retreats down the Kansas-Missouri line, and especially following the Battle of Mine Creek, the Southern troops were worn-out, ragged, half-starved, and intent only on getting away as rapidly as possible. Yet Shelby could describe one rear guard action in these words:

The fate of the army hung upon the result, and our very existence tottered and tossed in the smoke of the strife. The red sun looked down upon the scene, and the redder clouds floated away with angry, sullen glare. Slowly, slowly my old brigade was melting away. The high-toned and chivalric Dobbin, formed on my right, stood by me in all that fiery storm, and Elliott’s and Gordon’s voices sounded high above the rage of the conflict: “My merry men, fight on.”46

Criticisms of the Confederate plans and tactics were directed at Price personally and not against his subordinate commanders. After the raid it was said that Kirby Smith himself considered Price “as a military man ‘absolutely good for nothing.’” Shelby, according to William E. Connelley, had a poor opinion of Price as a commander and agreed with the comment of Major John N. Edwards that Price had “the roar of a lion and the spring of a guinea-pig.” However, Shelby added, in Missouri, where Price was highly esteemed and respected, it was treason to say so, and Shelby himself had a high opinion of Price as a patriot and a gentleman.47 One of Price’s chief military shortcomings was his ignorance of cavalry tactics. He concentrated on supply problems as an infantry commander would and was reluctant to live off the country. He failed to realize the importance of mobility and attached undue importance to saving his train. He conducted a retreat “that one might expect of a worn-out infantry column” instead of a rapidly moving cavalry force and allowed his units to melt away by desertion.48

A most scathing attack on Price was made immediately after the raid by Thomas C. Reynolds, recognized by the Confederacy as the governor of Missouri, in an open letter dated at Marshall, Texas, December 17, 1864, and printed in the Marshall Texas Republican on December 23. Reynolds was ostensibly defending Marmaduke and Cabell against charges of drunkenness but actually was

44. Ibid., 314, 392, 507–18, 577, 578.45. Ibid., 640.

96 Kansas History

46. Ibid., 660, 661; Scott, The Story of a Cavalry Regiment, 351, 352; John N. Edwards, Shelby and his Men: Or the War in the West (Cincinnati, Ohio: Miami Printing and Publishing Co, 1867), 10. S. J. Crawford, Kansas in the Sixties, 167, later commented on this description that it was indeed a fateful hour for Shelby, and the fate of his army did hang upon the result. However, he said, “nobody was ‘tossed in the smoke’ of battle, and nobody on our side, in so far as I ever heard, was either killed, wounded, or turned up missing. It was simply a lively skirmish.”

47. Statement of William E. Connelley, September 19, 1908, William Elsey Connelley Collection, folder 405, box 43, State Archives Division, Kansas Historical Society, Topeka.

48. Oates, Confederate Cavalry, 151, 153.

bitterly denouncing Price for ineptness, dilatoriness, confusion, ignorance, timidity, lack of leadership, somnolence, lack of discipline, and almost every other failure of command that can be imagined.

With reference to the Battle of Mine Creek, Reynolds had this to say:

All these causes, and many others . . . had visibly affected the tone, spirits and efficiency of the troops. Military men had forebodings of disaster to an army that General Price’s mismanagement had converted into an escort for a caravan; God-fearing men trembled lest . . . some thunderbolt of calamity should fall upon our arms.

It did fall, and like a thunderbolt.As the army left the Osage or Marais des Cygnes,

Marmaduke’s division and Fagan’s were in the rear of the train, Tyler’s brigade guarded it, Shelby’s division was in the advance. A force of Federal cavalry, estimated by most who fought with it at twenty-five hundred, and without artillery closely followed us. To gain time for the enormous train to pass on safely, it was deemed necessary to form rapidly, and, without dismounting receive the attack; the ground was unfavorable, but the alternative was to sacrifice the rear of the petted but detested train. The two divisions were mainly the same heroic Arkansans and Missourians, well disposed and readily disciplined, who had, under the immediate direction of their own officers, aided in driving the well trained troops of Steele from the Washita valley; but under General Price’s direct command they had become seriously demoralized. The enemy, not mounted riflemen but real cavalry using the saber, charged our lines. It matters little to inquire which company or regiment first gave way; the whole six large brigades, were in a few minutes utterly routed, losing all their cannon, Marmaduke, Cabbell, Slemmons and Jeffers were captured, “standing with the last of their troops;” Fagan, almost surrounded, escaped by sheer luck; Clark owed his safety to his cool intrepidity and his saber. . . .

Seated in his ambulance, in which he had remained most if not all of that morning, at the head of the train, General Price was six or eight miles off when all this happened. Cabbell had informed him the night before that the enemy was actually attacking our rear; he believed that experienced

officer mistaken. Marmaduke had sent him word that morning that about three thousand Federal cavalry threatened our rear; he thought that Marmaduke, having called on Fagan for support, could manage them. After a day’s march of only sixteen miles the army was ordered, to the general astonishment, to go into camp on the Little Osage, and had already commenced doing so, when news of the rout reached General Price. He sent for Shelby and besought that clearheaded and heroic young general to “save the army.”

Joseph O. “Jo” Shelby (1830–1897) was one of Missouri’s wealthiest slave owners. In 1861 he cast his lot with the Confederacy, enlisted, and rose to the rank of brigadier general in three years. During the 1864 campaign, Shelby commanded one of General Price’s three divisions, and his skill in fighting rear guard actions probably saved the army from total destruction. On the morning of October 25, however, Shelby's division was guarding the wagon train several miles south of Mine Creek when the Rebel forces under Marmaduke and Fagan were routed before Shelby could move his troops to the battlefield. After the war, Shelby eventually returned to Bates County, Missouri, where he worked to rebuild his fortune.


And Shelby did it. Like a lion in the path of the triumphant Federals, he gathered around him his two brigades, depleted in previous successive fights, harassed and weary, but still defiant.

Price replied to these charges with a terse comment in the Shreveport (La.) News, January 10, 1865, which concluded: “So far as the communication pays tribute to the gallantry displayed by the officers and soldiers engaged in that expedition, I heartily concur in it. So far as it relates to myself, however, I pronounce it to be a tissue of falsehoods.”49

Price requested a full investigation by a court-martial but instead was granted a court of inquiry “to investigate the facts and circumstances connected with the recent Missouri expedition.” The court was appointed by General Smith on March 8, 1865, and convened April 21 at Shreveport. Hearings were held until May 3, but no accusers appeared and Reynolds, though invited, refused to testify. The end of the war brought the deliberations to an end and no judgment was ever handed down.50

On the Union side there were equally severe criticisms of the conduct of the campaign. A Kansas newspaper, commenting on Price’s escape across the Arkansas River, said:

It is humiliating in the extreme to think that this hoary headed miscreant should make such a successful raid as he accomplished, with so little loss, comparatively. Some terribly criminal negligence on the part of some of our Generals has been manifested during this great Price excursion. We are almost tempted to proclaim that the officials who are responsible for Price’s escape are as deserving of the rope as old Price himself. We believe that Gen. Curtis and his command did all that could be performed toward giving the old sinner his dues; and had he (Gen. Curtis,) met with adequate and even the available co-operation from the other departments that he ought to have received, the laxative Missourian and all his followers might have been bagged.51

49. Reynolds’s letter is printed in its entirety, with Price’s reply and a rebuttal by Reynolds, in Edwards, Shelby and his Men, 467–74.

50. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1 (1893), 701–29; Rea, Sterling Price, 153–58.

51. (Burlington) Kansas Patriot, November 19, 1864.

Another newspaper, more favorable toward other commanders, wrote: “To Gen. Pleasanton [sic] we owe our gratitude. Through swift and tiresome marches he approached the enemy, caught him, flung his flying squadrons on him. . . . Gen. Curtis, for whom we have had no admiration did his part well. This we concede to him. Everything that he could do to contribute to our salvation, we learn that he did so.”52

Samuel J. Crawford, who said of Price that he “had no conception of the formation of a line of battle, nor did he know how to handle troops in action,” also said that three times in three days the Southern army had been trapped and each time had been allowed to escape. At the end, he remarked, instead of moving into Fort Scott, Curtis, Blunt, and Pleasonton “should have moved around Price on the east and halted long enough for him to surrender. That would have saved the Generals a deal of trouble and their tired troops and jaded horses untold hardships.”53

General Steele, commanding the Department of Arkansas, was not involved in the campaign against Price and for that very reason was castigated by General Halleck, who complained

that he “neither opposed the crossing of the Arkansas River by Price and Shelby, nor sent any forces in pursuit of them.”54 General Grant later removed both Steele and Rosecrans for what he considered their incompetence in allowing Price to maneuver almost at will through Arkansas and Missouri, and Curtis was transferred to the Department of the Northwest. Rosecrans and his staff were reported to hold Curtis in low esteem, calling him a bungler and a “regular old muddle-head” and sometimes going so far as to ignore his orders. Curtis and Pleasonton also differed sharply as to strategy. Curtis wished to drive Price south, out of Kansas and Missouri and into the Arkansas hills where provisions for his troops and forage for his animals was scarce or nonexistent, and thus by depriving him of the necessities force his army to disband. Pleasonton on the other hand wanted to overtake and crush Price, although—to compound the confusion—it was also reported that General Smith, commanding the infantry, five times sent orders to Pleasonton that he must attack and bring Price to bay so that the infantry could

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52. (Lawrence) Kansas State Journal, October 27, 1864.53. Crawford, Kansas in the Sixties, 171–73.54. Major General Henry W. Halleck to Major General E. R. S. Canby,

October 17, 1864, in U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 4 (1893), 24.

close with him, and the fifth time threatened to send Pleasonton to the rear if he failed to obey.

There were errors on the part of subordinate commanders, too. McNeil, ordered by Pleasonton to move his brigade at full speed to Little Santa Fe, so as to intercept Price as he retreated after the Battle of Westport, delayed so long that Price made good his escape. If McNeil had accomplished his mission it might well have led to Price’s complete destruction. At Newtonia Blunt attacked the Southern army with only two regiments, the Second Colorado and the Sixteenth Kansas, aided by two sections of artillery. Jennison and his brigade came up to help, but the attack was foolhardy and Blunt was saved only by the arrival of Sanborn. One critic has written that Blunt’s action would hardly have been excusable in a captain commanding a company, much less a major general commanding a division. Blunt’s own story, written in 1866, is a strong defense of his conduct during the campaign, and indeed throughout the four years of his military service, largely at the expense of Curtis and other ranking officers with whom he was associated.55

One source of antagonism between Curtis and Pleasonton toward the end of the campaign was Curtis’s order to his provost marshal to take charge of the prisoners, artillery and other spoils captured at Mine Creek and transport them to Leavenworth. This order, issued at Fort Scott on October 25, had the effect


55. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1 (1893), 546–50; U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 4 (1893), 126, 673, 674, 811; U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 48, pt. 1 (1896), 656, 780; Castel, “War and Politics,” 143; James G. Blunt, “General Blunt’s Account of His Civil War Experiences,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 1 (May 1932): 211–65.

of antagonizing some of the officers of Pleasonton’s department, who interpreted it as meaning that credit for the victory was being taken from his troops and given instead to the Kansas department which had taken no part in the actual fighting. It was undoubtedly a factor in Pleasonton’s decision to withdraw from the campaign at that point. Curtis himself, in his report, disclaimed any interest in where the prisoners were taken, stating merely his preference that “they should stop at Leavenworth, as an exchange will probably be made and delivery through Arkansas may be most convenient and preferable.” Pleasonton concurred in Curtis’s wishes in a letter of October 27 and said that he would furnish Curtis’s provost marshal with an adequate guard. To this extent, at least, the two generals were in accord, but too many indications of disagreement are on record to dismiss the whole incident as without significance.56

The Battle of Mine Creek was the most important Civil War battle fought in Kansas. Including the supporting troops, the numbers involved were about 25,000. Its ma-jor significance, in addition to the prisoners, guns and other material captured, was that Price was forced out of Kansas and was unable to carry out his planned attack on Fort Scott. It was the conclusive battle of the Price raid, after Westport, and it was the last significant battle of the Civil War, with the possible exception of Newtonia, in the trans-Mississippi area.

56. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1 (1893), 338–40, 505–7.

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Portrait of Samuel J. Reader when he was eighteen years old in 1855.


“I was a prisoner of war.” The Autobiography of SAMUEL J. READER

edited by Virgil W. Dean

Born in Greenfield, Pennsylvania, on January 25, 1836, Samuel J. Reader subsequently lived in Illinois before his removal to Kansas Territory in May 1855. He settled on a farm north of Topeka where he lived until his death on September 15, 1914. “Reader’s unique contribution to Kansas history,” wrote George A. Root, a long-time member of the Kansas State Historical Society staff, “was a diary which he began when he was thirteen years old and in which he wrote every day to the

end of his life.” Reader’s formal education was “meager,” but he cultivated “an active and observant mind by reading and study. . . . In some places his diary is a strange mixture of shorthand, French and abbreviated English. It is illustrated throughout with marginal and full-page sketches, many in water color. During his later years he wrote his ‘Reminiscences,’ based upon the diary.”1

Reader, a free-state partisan, honed his skills as a diarist and artist during his first, strife-torn decade as a Kansan. He observed and participated in much of the conflict that marked the territorial and Civil War years on the Kansas border. At the first day’s battle at Hickory Point on September 13, 1856, Reader was with James H. Lane’s company, and during Confederate General Sterling Price’s attempted invasion of Kansas in October 1864, Reader served with the Second Kansas State Militia, the Shawnee County unit. Taken prisoner on the afternoon of October 22, “southeast of the Mockbee barn” in Jackson County, Missouri, during the Battle of the Big Blue, Reader chronicled the experience in one of his autobiographical volumes: “A Prisoner of War.”2

“I was a prisoner of war.” 101

Virgil W. Dean, who received his PhD from the University of Kansas, edited Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains for the Kansas Historical Society from 1991 until his retirement in 2011, and currently acts as consulting editor. His publications include Territorial Kansas Reader (2005) and John Brown to Bob Dole: Movers and Shakers in Kansas History (2006).

1. George A. Root, ed., “The First Day’s Battle at Hickory Point: From the Diary and Reminiscences of Samuel James Reader,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 1 (November 1931): 28; see also “The Letters of Samuel James Reader, 1861–1863; Pioneer of Soldier Township, Shawnee County,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 9 (February 1940): 26–57; part two, 9 (May 1940): 141–74.

2. “A Prisoner of War” is actually the second half of the volume; the first is titled “Extracts from an old Diary, 1864; and Personal recollection of the Battle of Big Blue fought October 22d 1864. By an eyewitness,” all in the “Autobiography From Diary [of] S. J. Reader, 1864, Topeka, Kansas,” Volume 3, ca. 1907, State Archives Division, Kansas Historical Society, http://www.kansasmemory.org/item/206900. The complete “Autobiography” is in the collections of the Kansas Historical Society and available online through Kansas Memory: http://www.kansasmemory.org/item/206900. Page numbers reference the online version.

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“All hope of escape by flight was now at an end,” explained Reader years later.

In a few more jumps they would ride me down, even if I escaped their bullets. Instinctively I threw myself on my face among the old cornstalks and dried up weeds. . . . In less than half a minute, two more horsemen galloped past, but instead of going on after the main party, pulled, and rode back to where I lay. I was still breathing heavily from my little sprint, and knew well enough I should never be able to counterfeit death in such a condition. I would surrender and take my chances. I had said, and believed, that instant death on the battlefield would be far preferable to the torture and starvation of a Southern prison; but I somewhat modified my resolution when the test was applied. A soldier’s glorious death could now be mine. The slightest resistance—motion of a hand toward my weapons, would bring it about, swift and sure. But I was in no mood for martyrdom. Sudden Death has an ugly look, when he sternly and unexpectedly stares one in the face. One naturally clings to life under almost any circumstances, and I decided to not throw it away in this particular case. . . . As the two confederates halted beside me, I arose deliberately from the ground. . . . “I surrender,” I cried out, as my carbine fell from my hand, and hung suspended by the sling. . . . I was a prisoner of war.3

Reader wrote of his journey south with the retreating Confederate army and his treatment at the hands of his captors. His was a unique perspective on Price’s campaign, as the rebel troops moved and fought their way through eastern Kansas. As Price’s army “hurried on over the open prairie . . . [Reader] heard the thunder of artillery. . . . When a few miles north of Ft. Scott, the rebels turned us to the left in a south-easterly direction, at a double-quick. I could see nothing myself, but knew that Price was headed off from his prey. . . . The road was now littered with cast-away plunder. Like a ship in a storm, the cargo was being thrown overboard.” Soon, Reader made his escape, fleeing north on the Missouri

side of the border. On October 26, 1864, he “came to a number of fields lying west of a creek. But all the fences were gone, and weeds covered the ground. The remains of chimneys showed where the buildings had formerly stood. This was the handi-work of Gen. Lane, when he laid the country waste, the year before.”4

What follows is excerpted from the “Autobiography, Samuel J. Reader, From Diary of 1864, Topeka, Kansas,” which Reader compiled, with illustrations, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. To add additional color and explanation, Reader interspersed quotes from official reports, various writers, and even Macbeth, in addition, of course, to his many drawings/watercolors.5 Most of these original embellishments have been omitted from the reprint version, but all can be

3. “Autobiography,” 130–38.

4. “Autobiography,” 350.5. “Autobiography,” 323. Lines from Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3, appear

under one of Reader’s many drawings: “And let’s not be dainty of leavetaking, / But shift away. There’s warrant in that theft / Which steals itself, when there’s no mercy left.”


examined online in the original or text versions. The portion printed below reflects Reader’s experience during the Kansas retreat of General Sterling Price’s Confederate command through eastern Kansas, which most notably included the Battle of Mine Creek in Linn County on October 25, 1864.

From the Autobiography

The twilight faded out and was gone. The night was clear, but quite dark. After considerable marching we were filed through a gate way and halted in front of a one-story frame house. It was painted white, and a porch extended along the east side. (It was called the “Boston Adams Place.”)6

Half a dozen fires, or more, were burning brightly in the yard between the house and a stone wall or fence that enclosed the yard from the road.

By these fires a number of men were sitting, with others standing or walking about amidst much noise and bustle. We were ordered to go to the fires and sit down. . . .

About sunrise I heard a sound off to the west, like the violent slamming heavy door. In two or three seconds came a similar sound, almost equally loud—A cannon shot, and the explosion of a shell—It was the opening of the Battle of Westport. Sunday October 23rd 1864.7

The rebels were evidently feeling for the Federal position. The reports now followed each other with more and more rapidity, which showed plainly enough that the Union Batteries had taken a hand, and the Battle was on.

The road in front of the house was now crowded with mounted men, all hurrying forward to the sound of the cannonade. Some passed at a trot. And all seemed eager to get to the front. It was a brave sight but no doubt there were plenty of men in that motley throng whose hearts chilled at the sound of those murderous engines of war.

For some little time I watched this constant stream of humanity with feelings of the deepest dejection. To my unaccustomed eyes the hostile host seemed almost

innumerable. That our own forces could successfully cope with them, I considered extremely doubtful. There was to be a second day defeat and disaster to our arms. So I dismally inferred.

The bustle and hurry at the house and about the out buildings, increased. Gen. Price came out on the porch several times but if I saw him I did not know.

A young man in a neat grey uniform wore a large white plume. He was very conspicuous.

Another man in Confederate grey came out to us. He was a surgeon, and came to see if any of our wounded

6. “Autobiography,” 195, http://www.kansasmemory.org/item/ 206900/page/195.


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had been overlooked. He made the round of our fires, and left us. A kindly mannered, quiet gentleman. . . .

Another set of guards came. One, who was posted near our fire, was a lank, sallow faced man of uncertain age. He wore a long skirted butternut coat, with large smooth brass buttons. The color of the coat was a dingy yellowish brown. As quite a number of the rebels wore similar coats to this I concluded it was a sort of uniform among them.8

The man seemed somewhat interested in me, and asked me a number of questions. One of the first was:

“Ever been in a fight before?”

I came near telling him, I had been at Hickory Point, in 1856, but fortunately did not. There was odium enough in being a Union Yankee; but a Kansas Free-state Yankee was looked upon as something dreadful by the average Southerner.

I asked him a few questions myself:“How many men has Gen. Price?”“About thirty five thousand.”“Do you think he will remain here during

the winter?”“Don’t know. Think he will.”My heart sank at the bare possibility. After

a moment he inquired in his drawling tone of voice:

“Do you always have such cold weather in the Fall?”

“Often,” I replied.“It’s a H___ of a climate,” remarked another

of our guards.” “I don’t want any more of it.”I was more than willing they should dislike

it.I hinted about breakfast to my butternut

custodian, but he could give me no satisfaction. I learned that most of the rebels in Price’s army lived on parched corn, and fresh beef. That few had tents or sufficient clothing. I could see for myself that many were poorly armed. But they all seemed to worship “Grand-Pap” as they affectionately called the old General. . . .

We marched south a little way; and then turned west, toward the sound of the cannonade which was now quite heavy. . . .

Wagon trains and soldiers filled the crowded highway, or traversed the adjoining fields; all pushing toward the front.9

To my mind there could be but one explanation. The rebels were driving our forces from the field—Kansas would be over-run, and the National cause itself imperiled. I gave up all for lost, and was sunk in the lowest depths of despondency. I said to Bickell:

“Kansas will be invaded, and our homes destroyed. They’re beating us.”

Pretty soon we came in the neighborhood of our battlefield of the day before. Here I noticed the wagons ahead of us were turning south, and going at a lively rate.




In a few minutes we also were led southward through the eastern portion of the old cornfield where our battle had been fought. My relief was immense. I said to those about me:

“They must be getting whipped.” . . . All this time we could hear the roar of battle over

toward Westport. Our halt made me fear that the rebels were gaining some advantage. But the wagons kept on and that looked encouraging, for us.

I saw some of our men taking the badges from their hats. Mine was a piece of red flannel, one inch square, pinned to the band of my hat. I removed it and put it in my pocket for possible future use. (I noticed that some of the rebels had badges of pale blue ribbon fastened to their hats, also.)10

About the middle of the forenoon we were started on again, marching almost due south.

And now began that terrible, weary march, never to be forgotten by the surviving participants.

Fatal to some—injurious to the health of many—all were subjected to such tortures of hunger and thirst, fatigue and exposure, as few mortals are called upon to suffer.

The country we traversed was mostly rolling prairie land, with here and there a cultivated field.

Our pace was rapid. At first I suffered little distress, being well seasoned to walking, but toward noon my feet and ankles were chafed. . . .

We were now being forced onward at a fearful rate. Many of the prisoners were utterly unable to walk as fast as we were being driven; and as a consequence intervals were forming here and there in our column, all the time.

“Close up! Close up!” could be heard almost continually; and then we would have to double-quick to overtake those in our front, and close up the gaps. The prisoners walking at the front, naturally suffered the least—those at the rear, the most. I spoke to one of the guards, and told him we could not keep on much longer at such a pace.

10. The Kansas State Militia, which initially numbered about ten thousand men, was called into service by Governor Thomas Carney on October 8, 1864. The militia was poorly armed (the men supplied their own arms and ammunition, as well as clothing, blankets, etc.), and its only uniform was a red badge pinned to each man’s hat. Edgar Langsdorf, “Price’s Raid and the Battle of Mine Creek,” Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 37 (Summer 2014): 84. Albert Castel, Civil War Kansas: Reaping the Whirlwind (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 186–89; Albert Castel, “War and Politics: The Price Raid of 1864,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 24 (Summer 1958): 129.

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“Yes you can,” said the fellow. “I was a prisoner myself, once, and a Yankee tied a rope to me, and trotted his horse ten miles and I had to keep up. This is nothing. You can stand it well enough if you only think so.”

There were few settlers on our line of march, and a great scarcity of woodland and water.

The season had been dry and most of the small streams were dried up, causing us great suffering from thirst. This was aggravated by the day being rather warm and the roads dusty. . . .

At one time I noticed some of our men almost completely exhausted. I think E.B. Williams was one—

I ran forward and called out: “Lieutenant, can’t you give us a rest?” “Some of the men back here are about tuckered out.”

Capt. Huntoon—who was walking at the front, also spoke up: “Yes, yes, give us a rest.”

Sentelle looked around, and without comment, ordered a halt. . . .

Mid-day had passed without a hint of dinner, or a desire for it on my part. My mouth was parched, and a feeling of nausea invaded my stomach. A sip of clear cold water, would have seemed worth its weight in gold. Now and then a cluster of trees would awaken hopes of relief, always to be disappointed.11

My wounded foot was sore, and both were badly blistered. One of our men had given out and was mounted on a large raw-boned mule. I received permission to get on behind. In my exhausted condition I had great difficulty in doing so, which excited the jeers and laughter of some of our unfeeling custodians.

The relief I experienced was immense; and I could well say: “Let those laugh who win.”—although I must admit, I found their mirth more disagreeable than their curses—



ate it with a relish, and wished I could have it duplicated many times.

We had very good fires, and the night was quite pleasant.

The guards were stationed about us, on all sides, and were very strict and watchful. None of them talked with us as they did the night before. In fact we prisoners were too utterly worn out to talk among ourselves. . . .

The guards started us on our way at a very early hour [Monday Oct. 24 1864].

There was not even a pretense of giving us breakfast. . . . Water was scarce, and few houses were to be seen. . . .We were marching a little west of south, and after

awhile crossed the line, and entered Kansas. The exact time and place I cannot state with any degree of accuracy. We now saw more houses and improvements, and the rebels began to burn everything in the shape of forage. No houses were fired, so far as I could see. All kinds of stock were collected and driven along.

Sometime during the day a number of soldiers passed, going on ahead of us. I saw a battery of artillery go by at a brisk trot.

I heard a guard call attention to a pet bear, that he said was riding on one of the gun carriages. I looked, but failed

Soon after this we came to an old well. I do not think there were any buildings near it. Very likely they had been burned, as the whole country looked desolate. I slipped from the mule and crowded up to the well. Someone had drawn up a bucket full, and I heard a man say that the water was not good, as there was a half-rotten skunk in it.

I was told long afterwards, that there were also the bodies of two men at the bottom of this well—When my turn came, I drained the pint cup to its last drop, in spite of the terrible stench and flavor. . . .

Then on again we went. Quite a number of rebel soldiers overtook, and passed us, probably to guard against a possible flank attack on their train. Some of these soldiers gave us greeting as they passed. Most of their remarks were directed at the Negro prisoner. His life would not have been worth a straw out-side the guard-line, judging from their expressions of deadly hatred. But the rest of us were not overlooked.

A rebel officer galloped up. The very sight of us seemed to enrage him beyond all bounds. Interlarded with the most savage profanity, he fairly yelled: “Kill them! Shoot every last one of them—They don’t take us prisoners—What are we keeping these men for?” “I know what I’m talking about—I’ve been at the front all day—I’ve seen the Yanks ride up to our wounded as they lay on the ground, and shoot them in cold blood!” During this bloodthirsty ebullition I watched Lieut. Sentelle. He partly turned in his saddle, and after glancing at the officer, paid no further attention to him. . . .

About dark we reached a stream, and went into camp among a lot of young trees. The ground was rough and broken. A number of the guards and prisoners, brought us plenty of clear spring water.

For the first time, the rebels issued rations to us. We ten Indianola men were in a mess together, and received a few handfuls of course flour for our share and nothing more—12

I was at a loss what to do with our provision, when Sergeant John Kemp spread a large pocket handkerchief on the ground, and upon it mixed our flour into a stiff dough, and gave each man as near an equal share as possible. Mine was about the size of an ordinary biscuit. I took a forked twig, wrapped my dough about it, and held it in the fire until it was partly cooked, and partly burnt. I

12. Just north and a little west of Topeka in Shawnee County near Soldier Creek, Indianola was the site of Reader’s initial claim upon moving to Kansas Territory in July 1855. “Autobiography,” 266, http://www.kansasmemory.org/item/206900/page/266; see also Kansas Memory (http://www.kansasmemory.org/item/90350) for Reader’s account of the Battle of Indianola, August 30, 1856.

Sketch of Confederate General Sterling Price.

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“What is it?”“Yankees,” was the reply. I looked, and saw something

that resembled the shadow of a cloud resting on the slope of the hill. By close watching I could see that it was moving south.

In all the time I was a prisoner, I never longed for liberty as I did at that particular moment. It was indescribably tantalizing to know that only a little strip of open prairie was between me and my freedom. It was Dives regarding Lazarus, across the gulf.13

At one place we passed a shanty that stood by the roadside. The people were gone, and the door stood wide open. How inviting it looked, and how I longed to enter and drop my weary frame upon the floor. But the hateful: “Close up:—Double quick!” soon hurried us by. . . .

During the afternoon, time dragged fearfully. The sun seemed almost at a stand still, and minutes seemed hours. Would the night ever come?

At sun-set we came to a heavy body of timber land near a place called “Trading Post.”14 Under the trees, lying side by side I saw a number of men—whether corpses or wounded men, it was impossible to tell.

A man was riding a grey horse just outside the line of guards. One of them asked: “Are you one of the prisoners?” The man nodded. It was G.G. Gage. Prevarication might have secured his liberty at this time, or it might not. No doubt the risk was too great, in spite of the gathering obscurity.

We soon reached a large stream of water, and camped on the north bank. As we halted I was startled by a series of heart rending groans.

One of our men being maltreated or murdered, was my instant thought. In a few moments all was quiet.

The second Lieutenant—whose name I have forgotten—called out to the guards:

“Treat these prisoners kindly but let no man escape.”“Your head’s level,” one of our men responded.Sentelle drew his revolver, and told some of us to

follow him to the water. Half the prisoners sprang to their feet.

“Sit down! Sit down!” yelled the Lieutenant. We all dropped to the earth as if we had been shot.He, then selected about a dozen of us and led us down

to the creek; a strong guard enclosing us on all sides. I

to see it. But I saw something else, of more interest to me. As a cannon swept past a few rods to our right, my eye caught the inscription on the limber chest:

“Capt. W.W.H. Lawrence Topeka Kansas.”It was our old brass howitzer, and I then and there

probably saw the last of it.As usual, many of the rebels reviled us, in passing.

Some of the officers rode close along side to look at us. Some of these were gentlemen; some were not.

One foul-mouthed fellow swore himself nearly hoarse, at the bare sight of us. A small man, wearing a cloth cap, especially excited his animosity.

“Why, you can’t look an honest man in the face!” yelled the rebel. Then followed a torrent of threats and profanity.

But he was not partial. As he worked his way up along our column, men were singled out, here and there for special abuse. . . .

We marched over a long stretch of prairie, with higher ground some two miles off to our right. I noticed our guards were watching something in that direction. One of them asked:

13. Reader here alluded to the biblical parable of the rich man (Dives) and Lazarus found in Luke 16:19–31.

14. Trading Post is located on the north bank of the Marias des Cygnes River in eastern Linn County, Kansas. “Autobiography,” http://www.kansasmemory.org/item/206900/page/282.

15. “*Note—‘Gen. Curtis with the Kansas men took the lead in the pursuit, but soon gave place to Pleasonton’s horsemen, who after a march of 60 miles, struck them about midnight at the Marais-des-Cygnes, [Trading Post] opening upon their bivouac at 4 A.M., with artillery, setting them at once in motion, and chasing them to the Little


drank and drank, and then filled my hat. As we climbed the bank on our return, Sentelle and I were a little in advance of the party.

The night was very dark. A bold leap, and I might escape. But the thrill of half formed resolve, was but momentary. The rebel Lieutenant turned, and my opportunity was lost.

It was here that our first man—Jake Klein—escaped.

Some of the prisoners were overlooked, and got no water at all. I passed my hat around to my nearest comrades; then drank all my stomach would hold, and emptied out the muddy settlings—as I needed my hat.

“Rations for the prisoners” was announced.They consisted of fresh beef and corn meal.

Captain Huntoon took charge and issued. I felt too miserable to even offer to help. My old knife was borrowed to cut up the beef, and when the Capt. returned it, he remarked that I kept “a very dull knife.” But there again, the beef was exceedingly tough, and hard to cut.

My share of the meat was about half a pound. I soon had it scorched and devoured. The corn meal could not be cooked—there being no water to mix it. I had an ear of corn which I half parched, half burnt on the cob and ate as best I could. The outside was black as a coal, the inside, raw.

We were in a heavy wood. Many old logs and stumps were about us, but for some reason our fires were poor.

There was a chilly east wind, and the western sky was over cast. Altogether, a most gloomy prospect above and below.

The only possible solace was sleep. I wrapped the old quilt over my butternut coat, pulled my muddy, water soaked hat well on my head, and dropped down under the shelter of a big log. . . .

Long before daylight [Tuesday October 25 1864] we were aroused and started on our way.* It was exceedingly dark, and a misty rain added to the obscurity as well as our general discomfort.15

We waded the stream—which seemed to me rather wide and shallow—and reached the up-land beyond.

I saw a number of fires on ahead and at first supposed them to be the smoldering fires of a burned village; but they were only campfires.

After tramping several miles we were halted, and waited for daylight. The rain had now increased to quite a shower. But my rebel coat and the old quilt kept me tolerably dry. . . .

Day light slowly appeared. . . .Lieut. Sentelle formed us in line and looked us over.His inspection was seemingly unsatisfactory, for

presently he cried out with a savage malediction:

Osage.’” Reader referenced and quoted Horace Greeley’s The American Conflict: A History of the Great Rebellion in the United States of America, 1860–’65. (Hartford, Conn.: O.D. Case & Company, 1867), 561, on page 289 of the original, online version of the autobiography (http://www.kansasmemory.org/item/206900/page/289).

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“Men, you’ve let half a dozen or more gat away last night!” He then made another count, and looked us all over carefully—as I have frequently seen stockmen do in rounding up a herd of cattle.

“One hundred and ten.” Was announced as our number, all told.

Again the rebel lieutenant rode up and down our line carefully scanning each face as he passed. It was not so bad as he had feared. Only one man was missing. He merely remarked in a surly tone:

“That damned little Dutchman is gone!”Someone said to me: “It’s Jake Klein.”John Kemp was quite sick. He showed his tongue,

and it was very badly coated. He was of course quite despondent, and remarked:

“Sam, We’ll never see home again.”His words depressed me extremely, but I tried to cheer

him up with the old story of one being paroled. But hope was about dead with both of us.

Then on again we went. The rain ceased, and after awhile the clouds cleared away.

I felt much better than I had the day before. The air was fresh, and the rain had softened the road so I could walk with less pain from my lame feet. I began to hope that I was getting my “second wind”, and would stand the trip all right. I even tried to whistle at one time, but it was a lamentable failure.

For awhile I walked near the head of the column, J.S. Stanfield was at my side.

“Mr. Reader!” he suddenly called out. “This is a little harder than running for office, isn’t it?”

The man was actually laughing aloud, and looked as merry as if there were not a rebel within a thousand miles. Amid our dismal surroundings, it was encouraging to see and hear him giving vent to his irrepressible gaiety.

Another man who seemed to stand tramping remarkably well, was a tall young Missourian. He told me he had been a prisoner about two weeks, and that after a few days of distress he had seemingly become seasoned to hard marching and now suffered little pain or fatigue. He also told me that he had neglected several good chances to escape—preferring to be paroled.

Some of our men declared he was put among us by the rebels in order to more closely watch us. Possible, but not probable.

Nothing seemed to escape the notice of Lieut. Sentelle. He saw my coat, and demanded how I came by it. I told him. He nodded and at last, rather gruffly said: “All right.”

One of the guards called out: “Say, have any of you fellows ever been across the plains?”

“Yes, I have,” answered a prisoner. They talked for some time. I heard the rebel say: “When this war is over I’m going to make the trip myself.” It was pleasant to hear him say that.

But the end of the war seemed a long way off, not with-standing.

Another guard was a good vocalist. At one time he sang Kingdom Coming—a rank abolition song of the incendiary type—

“That song can hardly be popular, down South.” I en-quired.

16. Here Reader described the crossing of Mine Creek and the Confederate preparation for battle. He again referenced and briefly quoted Greeley, American Conflict, 561, who incorrectly identified this action as on the Little Osage, a few miles south (http://www.kansasmemory.org/item/206900/page/302).


He laughed good humoredly: “Well no, it isn’t.”They were not all so peaceable. Two of the guards had

a fierce quarrel, and threatened to shoot. One—fellow with fiery red hair—leaped from his horse, close by me, and called to the other to come on with his gun. But his challenge was declined, much to my relief if they were going to shoot among us prisoners. . . .

We suffered for want of water but not so terribly as on Sunday and Monday. The rain had left some water on the ground, and at one place I drank from horse tracks. We passed more streams and found water more frequently than before.

I also secured a few eatables. Turnip parings and cabbage leaves were scattered along the road and I gathered up a handful or so. A piece of a turnip I also picked up, which was quite a prize.

A rebel Samaritan brought us an armful of sugar cane. I very thankfully received one, although some of our men

refused, fearing the cane would make them sick. I ate mine without bad effects. About noon we crossed a creek and took a short cut through the woods. Here I picked up two large hickory-nuts.

We scrambled up a very steep bank at the edge of the woods, and found a number of cannons placed in position at the top, and a line of battle forming. We were hurried on over the open prairie to the south.16

We met numerous parties of rebels returning at a trot. Half a mile from the creek, a long thin line stretched far across the open ground, to stop and turn back the stragglers. They halted us too, but immediately opened

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and let us go on. We marched rapidly. After a while we heard the thunder of artillery, and knew that the battle was begun.

We heard firing off and on, for several hours afterwards. It was a running fight, as we could easily guess; and the rebels were seemingly hard pressed by our forces. Many soldiers passed us, as if to guard against a flank attack on the right. Some of the Federals were quite close to us at one time. John P. Mayors expressed the wish that they would charge right over us all.

“I would be willing to die right here, to see it done.” He said to me in an undertone.

My own feelings just then were less self-sacrificing, perhaps.

The excitement of battle seemed to infuse fresh ferocity in some of the rebels, and we received an additional share of abusive language. Some of them yelled like wild Indians at sight of the Negro prisoner, and various were the modes proposed of killing him.

“Don’t shoot him! Kill him with a white oak club!” shouted one ruffian.

The Negro happened to be walking by my side, and I took an opportunity to advise him to escape at the first opportunity.

“Yes sir.” Was his stolid response.He exhibited no alarm, and probably felt none.

The afternoon was bright and warm, and I began to get very tired. Several of us asked the guards for a ride, but were told they had no extra horses.

A Negro was riding along, leading a horse. One of our men pointed him out to a guard: “There, that fellow has an extra horse.”

The rebel looked, and then turned savagely on the prisoner.

“So you call that a fellow? Hell! That’s a nigger!”My corrected comrade was abashed and silent.When a few miles north of Ft. Scott, the rebels turned

us to the left in a south-easterly direction, at a double quick. I could see nothing myself, but knew that Price was headed off from his prey.

Many of our men were nearly exhausted; especially E.B. Williams. He told me that he was suffering with a severe head-ache, as well as from fatigue. He had also been thrown from his horse during our Battle, and several of his ribs were injured. On the other hand, John Kemp seemed better. He proposed that we lean our backs together, instead of lying flat on the ground during our rests. It was a decided improvement.

We stopped at a large pond of water on the prairie. I was in such a state of exhaustion that everything seemed misty and dream-like while we remained there. I have an uncertain remembrance of seeing a wounded rebel

17. “Shelby” was General Jo Shelby, a commander of one of Price’s three divisions during the 1864 raid and one of Missouri’s wealthiest slave owners. In 1861 he cast his lot with the Confederacy, enlisted, and rose to the rank of brigadier general in three years. His skill in fighting rear guard actions probably saved the army from total destruction. On the morning of October 25, however, Shelby’s division was guarding the wagon train several miles south of Mine Creek. The Rebel forces under General John Sappington Marmaduke, a native of Arrow Rock, Missouri, who was captured during the battle, and General James Fleming Fagan were routed before Shelby could move his troops to the battlefield. “Autobiography,” http://www.kansasmemory.org/item/206900/page/314.


sitting near us by the water; and of thinking that his plight was perhaps worse than my own.

We drank our fill of the water, then up and on again.

The road was now littered with cast away plunder.

Like a ship in a storm, the cargo was being thrown overboard.

I first picked up a book. To my surprise it was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Next was a ledger. It was too heavy to carry, and I cut out what paper I wanted for a diary, and left the two books on the ground.

More than a dozen new axes were scattered along the roadside, in one place. . . .

Near the road I saw two barrels that had been emptied of their contents on the ground. By the smell, it was whisky. . . .

Then on and on we went, often at double quick, until at times I felt ready to drop from sheer exhaustion. To do so meant death, and I told one of the guards he had better shoot me then and there, as I could hold out but little longer. He looked at me without reply. Had he shown the least disposition to take me at my word, no doubt it would have infused me with fresh life and energy. The ordinary individual will endure an incredible amount of misery before he will part with life, and I would not have been an exception.

Again I clung to the tail of a rebel’s horse, and stumbled on as best I could.

About sunset, Bickell seeing how badly off I was, told me to take the pony. It had a rope halter, but no saddle or bridle. . . . I had walked all day long, and the relief experienced from riding was to my tired frame, “like beds of downy ease.” My boots were tied together and I hung them over the pony’s neck. Bickell held the end of the rope and led the animal along side our column, and just inside the line of guards.

We were approaching a heavy body of timber. Just before we reached it, we entered a lane, with a fenced field on the left hand side. In the field were many horsemen. Some were shouting:

“Shelby’s men, fall in here!” A little farther on, others were calling out:

“Marmaduke’s men, fall in.” It was a perfect bedlam of orders and confused outcries.17

The road was thronged with mounted men, evidently very badly demoralized. Some no doubt fell in with their commands, but the greater part seemed anxious to go on.

At this time I did not know that these were fugitives from a lost battle-field.

It was quite dark when we entered the woods. (The stream was the Marmiton, and we were now back in Missouri.)

Near the creek the jam and uproar increased four-fold. Our guards halted us every few rods to allow those in front

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to make way. Ahead of us I heard a terrible yelling and cracking of whips, and supposed the train was crossing at a ford. At our first halt in the woods the prisoners as usual, dropped flat upon the ground.

Bickell gave me the rope for fear the pony might tread on some of the prisoners.

When we started up again the animal found an opening in the rebel guard line, and crowed in. I was well enough pleased, seeing I could do little in guiding him with the rope. We kept on—starting up and halting again, for the space of several minutes. I heard the guards now and then warning outsiders to keep off and not break their line.

I was riding on the left hand side of the column. We had come to another halt. The shadows of the over

hanging trees made the night additionally dark at that particular place.

A man rode up to me and inquired: “Where can I find Col. Ellis’s men?”

I told the man I didn’t know. He was turning to go away when he happened to see our men lying on the ground—a dark mass indistinguishable in the obscurity—

“What have you got there?” he asked in some surprise.

Up to this moment I had believed that escape would be next to an impossibility. I had even advised Mat. Clark that afternoon to not attempt it. That he would be recaptured and shot, almost to a certainty.

Our custodians had impressed it upon our minds, that the man who attempted an escape would be shown no mercy at their hands when recaptured. But here was a chance that might never occur again. My questioner evidently took me for a rebel. I could encourage that belief and perhaps gain my liberty. For one moment the gates of Paradise stood ajar—I would take the risk at all hazards, for escape. The contending emotions of hope and fear rushed over me with such tumultuous force, that I could scarcely control my voice as I answered: “Yankee prisoners.”

To keep him from going, I added that we had one hundred and ten in all; the greater part captured near Westport. He seemed interested for the moment. I then asked: “How did the battle go today?” The rebel lowered his voice:

“It went against us.” Remembering the battery that I had seen in position during some part of the day, I questioned further:

“Did we lose any guns?” “Yes,” he replied “a good many.” My confidence had

increased amazingly. The soldier was reining up to go on, when I kicked up the pony and left the guard line, with the excuse that I wanted a drink of water from his canteen—which I saw the man was carrying, as it had no cover—

“You can have a little sip,” he responded, as he gave it me. I was terribly thirsty, but the nervous tension was so great I could scarcely drink a drop. In the meantime, the prisoners were still at rest—the guard who rode behind me, only a few feet distant from us.

Was he deceived, or willfully blind? I may never know. The suspense was more than I could endure.

Returning the canteen with a mumbled statement that I would get water from the creek—which I saw was just alongside the road—I seized my boots, and slipped from the pony’s back. As I did so, the soldier exclaimed:


“I see you’ve lost your saddle.” My heart was in my mouth. For an instant I feared all was discovered. But he drew no weapon; he did not appear to suspect.

“Yes, I have,” I replied, “then I used a wagon cover, and lost that too.”

A lame story—lamely told—but it sufficed. He too, was blind as a bat.

“Yes sir,” he remarked; turned, and rode away. My involuntary deliverer, in truth.

Hastily I tied the pony to a branch—to help prove that I intended to get a drink, and return, if re-captured—and plunged down the steep bank to the water’s edge.

My first frantic intention was to wade across the stream, but when I stepped in I found the water too deep. I took a hasty drink, returned, and pulled on my boots.

Exhaustion was gone. I felt I could travel to the ends of the earth.

I ran north, under the creek bank, for about fifty yards, where I saw several foot-men coming down a cow-path, from the road above. I had to meet them, unless I turned back. I foolishly feared they would detect me, even in the dark. Had they been as many grizzly bears, they would hardly have inspired me with a greater terror. In sheer desperation I rushed up to them and called out: “O say! Have you seen a loose horse run by?”

They stopped, and with real concern in their voices, said they had not.

“I’ve lost mine.” I cried as I ran past them up the bank.Here I found myself in the road again, surrounded by

men mounted and dismounted.“A bay horse,” I cried breathlessly to the first man I

met, “Have you seen him pass this way?”“No I haven’t,” he replied. Safe so far. In the darkness

and confusion I saw there would be little trouble in personating a rebel soldier, as long no searching questions were asked.

I had learned that the Provost Guard belonged in part, to a regiment commanded by Col. Crawford; but its

number, brigade and division I was entirely ignorant of.To claim membership with this organization, however,

would be my best course if brought to bay. A broken reed, no doubt, but still one poor little chance for life and liberty.

I pushed on up the road against the tide of fugitives that crowded the roadway. I met footmen, and to several of them related my fabricated story of loss. Some responded, some did not. One of these men seemed to recognize in me, one of his comrades.

“Jim is back there a little way, and wants to see you.” I replied that I would look for him, and hurried away. (“Jim” was certainly one of the last persons in the world that I wanted to see just then.) The next man I spoke to

showed considerable sympathy, and I almost feared he would volunteer to help me in my hunt. Embroidered by his friendliness, I asked him if the pickets were out.

“No,” he replied, “not likely.” His tone expressed surprise at my question, and fearing I had aroused his suspicions, I hurried away.

After following the road north for about one hundred yards, the creek made a bend to the eastward. At this point a country road left the highway and turned to the right; and here a party of soldiers had started a number of bright fires.

I halted. It would be impossible to take the right hand road without passing close to several of the fires, and their light would betray me. Sentinels were no doubt posted near by, and I would certainly be challenged, and made to give an account of myself.

The simple question: “What command do you belong to?” would probably be my death sentence. But hesitation only increasing my peril, and with many misgivings I walked rapidly toward the fires determined to put the matter to the test.

A dozen men were warming themselves or walking about. In spite of myself I could not get rid of the feeling that they would see by my very countenance, that I was a Yankee.

But when I was fully within the circle of firelight, my fears proved groundless.

Not a man paid the slightest attention to me. I had to pass very close to one of them. He turned and looked me full in the face, as I almost jostled against him. (Perhaps it was “Jim?”)

“Did you see a loose horse going this way?”“No.”“Mine got away.”With rapid strides I passed on, nor slackened my

pace until I was again within the friendly shelter of the darkness. My spirits rose. No sentinel had challenged me so far; but fearing to meet a patrol or foraging party on the road, I left it as soon as possible, and turned off to the left.

Presently I came to a flat common overgrown with tall weeds and bushes. There was a movement and rustling of some kind, directly in front of me. A rebel picket, without a doubt.

I immediately fell on my face and listened with bated breath for what seemed to me half an hour. I could now hear movements in several different directions, but could see nothing. I was very much alarmed, but resolved to resist re-capture to the last extremity. My life was forfeit, but even if it were spared I could not endure the thought of returning to the miseries of captivity. The blade of my knife was pointed, and more than three inches long. In a nocturnal encounter it would possess some advantages over firearms. I held it open in my hand. No one man should take me, without a desperate struggle, at all events.

The night was quite still, and I could hear every movement of the hidden enemy. Some of them were almost upon me, when I heard a grunt, that unmistakably betrayed the nature of my foe.

116 Kansas History

Ashamed, but immensely re-lieved, I sprang to my feet, while a number of hogs scampered away with their familiar “wouf-a-wouf!”

But the time had not been lost. It had given me a breathing spell, and time to think. I was now quite certain of being outside the rebel outposts, even if there were any.

I stopped a moment to listen. The noise from the direction of the rebel army was peculiar. At that distance the shouting of soldiers and teamsters resembled a continuous roar. Now and then it would rise, and swell into a more formidable volume of sound; then it would sink again as the light breeze wafted it away.

A vivid imagination could easily compare it to a wait of distress, and I failed not to remember that my unfortunate comrades were still in the midst of all that din and misery.

It was a saddening thought, as I turned to go.

I walked rapidly in a northerly direction, across field and prairie. My thirst became intolerable. All the moisture of my system seemed to be drying up. I chewed the rebel bullet without relief. My mouth remained dry as ashes. In all my three days of torture, I had never suffered from thirst like this. It is something that I have never been able to understand, for the night was sufficiently cool. But relief was nearer than I expected.

I stumbled across a ravine and found a puddle of stagnant water. How much of it I drank, I should probably hesitate to tell, even if I could remember. I bathed my blistered and inflamed feet, and took a good rest. Remembering the two hickory–nuts in my pocket, I cut them open with my knife and ate them as best I could. From another pocket I fished up the stem of a cabbage leaf, and devoured it to the last fiber. I do not think I was ever happier in my life. My spirits were buoyant as a feather, in spite of the knowledge that I was far from absolute safety. There was danger from rebel bushwhackers; and

the Federal soldiers would undoubtedly take me for a rebel at first sight. I concluded it would be safer to have a flag of truce ready for an emergency. My outer shirt was white, and would answer the purpose admirably. I cut a stout stick that would serve as a cane and a flag staff, as occasion required.

For the purpose of identification, in case I should be killed, I wrote on a scrap of paper: “S.J. Reader, Indianola Kansas. Second reg’t. K.S.M.” This I pinned to my waistband.

Soon after leaving the ravine, I came to a house. There was a light inside, but I did not dare venture too near.


I passed to the east of it through a stable yard and remember to my credit, pulling up the bars after me.

I then came to a small stream of running water. I drank my fill, and started on again, with a quart or so in my hat.

I reached open ground and attempted to lay my course by the stars. Ursa Major was low in the northwest; the Pleiades just above the eastern horizon. I had some trouble in locating the “pointers of the dipper,” so as to find the North Star. Brightly it shone in the clear northern sky, the fugitives friend in all ages, past and present.

The familiar hymn: “Lead Kindly Light,” might with little change apply to my condition at that moment. . . .

I went on at a brisk pace until I came to an elevated spot on the prairie. It must have been four or five miles from where my escape was effected; and a little east of north. A small creek was to my right. A few clouds

were now gathering, with some lightening. There were sounds like cannon shots, from the direction of the Marmiton Crossing. Off to the west the prairie grass had been fired, and the light was reflected on the clouds.

I stood for a few moments and viewed my surroundings. I could hardly realize that all was not a dream.

I was supremely happy. But the tremendous mental and physical strain of the last two hours could not be longer sustained.

I pulled up some dead grass for a pillow, and was soon luxuriously couched. Before I closed my eyes, the shrill bark of a wolf broke the silence of the night. My first thought was, that he was on his way to the battlefield, to feast on the slain—but the field was probably too far away for that. All the same, it was not a pleasant sound to hear under the circumstances, and I was glad when his vocal efforts ceased.

I must have slept five or six hours, when I was awakened by a feeling of chilliness, and found that a very light rain was falling.

I started up, and guiding myself by a slight breeze, set out on my way again. After an hours walk, I was

warm, but very tired and sleepy. I threw myself down in the grass, and slept, in spite of the showers of rain that still continued at intervals. I soon waked up again feeling cold and wet.

Then on again I went, to repeat the alternate tramping and sleeping, until the grey light of morning struggled through the overcast sky.

The drizzly rain had ceased and the clouds broke away [Wednesday, morning, October 26]. I was now getting fearfully weak. The sun presently came out, bright and warm. I sat down for a long time.

There were no signs of habitations to be seen in any di-rection. Nothing but the undulating swells of the prairie, and a line of woodland to the east.

I was on the crest of a ridge and had an extensive view.I took out my memorandum book, and jotted down in

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a rough way, the exciting incidents of the last four days. As I sat writing, a flock of merry crows serenaded me from a neighboring knoll.

I will here give verbatim the closing lines as I wrote them, sitting in that vast solitude:

“I slept a little, and walked a lot in the night—I am very weak—I hear crows cawing—Some clouds, now and then—I must go—.”

I put up my book, and started on again.The prairie grass had dried off, and the walking

became exceedingly difficult and slippery.I generally kept in sight of woodland, that I might have

a better chance of escape if pursued by horsemen.In a wooded ravine I found grapes and elm bark,

together with clear running water: My breakfast lacked in variety, but not in quantity.

After leaving this place I came to a number of fields lying west of a creek.

But all the fences were gone, and weeds covered the ground. The remains of chimneys showed where the buildings had formerly stood. This was the handi-work of Gen. Lane, when he laid the country waste, the year before.

I was now so completely worn out, that I was unable to walk more than a few minutes at a time. I would then have to lie on the ground awhile to rest.

I began to bear off more to the west and toward mid-day came to an enclosed field in which were a number of


cabbages. I lost no time in securing a head, and after eating all I dared, filled my pockets. I then struck a road which I followed to the northwest, and soon after came in sight of a farm house. As I approached it, an old man rode out from an adjoining field, and came toward me. A short distance behind were other armed and mounted men. I never thought about my flag of truce, and it was not displayed, very fortunately.

When the old man had approached near enough, I called out to him: “Are you a Union man?” He nodded and said: “Yes.”

“Then I’m all right!” I cried, immensely relieved.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” he rejoined, “You must be a rebel!”

His words were harsh, but there was something about the man that pleasantly reminded me of old Osawatomie Brown.

I hastened to explain to him, that I was a Union soldier, and had escaped from the rebels during the night.

He looked at my butternut coat and my dilapidated appearance generally, and shook his head.

“Several of you fellows have already been picked up, straggling about the neighborhood.” Then he added:

“There’s just one thing in your favor. You were going the wrong way for a rebel.”

The other men now joined him and they took me to the house. From their glum and sullen aspect it was easy to guess their opinion of me.

I sat on a log at the wood-pile, while the men talked together, a little apart. For myself I was perfectly at my ease; and was rather amused than otherwise.

The women in the house looked out, and viewed me with considerable curiosity. Perhaps I was

120 Kansas History

18. Colonel George W. Veale of Topeka commanded the Second Kansas State Militia, Reader’s Shawnee County regiment, which contained nearly six hundred men. According to Adjutant General Cyrus K. Holiday, the Second suffered the only serious casualties of the action around Kansas City; on October 23 the regiment fought “Jackman’s Brigade of Shelby’s Division—six times our numbers—for three quarters of an hour.” The colonel reported critically on the command decisions that placed him in a numerically vulnerable position: “I acted under orders, and by so doing lost twenty-four brave Kansans killed, about the same number wounded, and sixty-eight taken prisoners.” Report of the Adjutant General of the State of Kansas, 1864 (Leavenworth: P. H. Hubbell & Co., 1865), 64; “Autobiography,” http://www.kansasmemory.org/item/206900/page/363.

the first real live rebel they had ever seen. Dead rebels, some of them had just seen on the battlefield—which was not far away—as I heard them speaking about it.

I took out my book and began writing up my diary for that morning. One of the men held out his hand: “Give me that book.”

My diary was written in shorthand. He looked puzzled and suspicious. But I had him turn to the business part of the book—which was in longhand—and explained to them all who and what I was, and all about my capture and escape. My statement of facts appeared to be convincing. The old man said:

“Well I suppose you are all right, but we must be sure about it. After dinner I will take you to Fort Scott and turn you over to the soldiers there.”

I was now taken indoors. On the margin of a newspaper was “Juo. McNeal.” This I suppose was the old man’s name; and so I call him.

The dinner hour arrived—to me, an epicurean feast—biscuit, fresh pork and sweet potatoes, were, I remember a part of the bill of fare. I was treated as an honored guest by my kind entertainer, and all offers of payment on my part were politely declined.

“If you’re a Union man—as I think you are—I am very glad to serve you. And if you’re not—well, that will be all right, too.”

Mr. McNeal furnished me with a horse, and in company with him and another militia man, we started for Fort Scott—some ten miles to the southwest.

I was told that we would pass over one of the battlefields of the day before. But pretty soon we met a party of men who advised Mr. McNeal to take me to Barnsville—which was only six miles to the northwest—We accordingly changed our course, and by so doing, missed seeing the battlefield—no doubt a gruesome sight enough, and better avoided.

One of the members of the new party joined us.He was a self-confidant chatter-box of sixteen, and

claimed that he had participated in the fight—or at any rate the pursuit—of the day before. He showed us a Sharp’s carbine, that he had picked up on the field.

“The rebels don’t look like our men,” he remarked. “And I saw so many of the dead rebels who had red hair. I helped guard prisoners for awhile,” he continued. “I asked one of them: ‘We’ve whipped you good, haven’t we?’ and he says: ‘yes’. Then says I: ‘You’ve been fighting on the wrong side! Don’t you feel sorry?’ And says he: ‘I believe I do.’ When he said that, it made me mad, and I says to him, ‘Now I’m going to shoot you!’ I began to put a cap on my gun, and the rebel began to beg. When I got

my gun ready I thought I wouldn’t shoot him—he begged so—But I wish now, I’d shot him.” I [Reader] felt a great desire to read this young ruffian a lecture on the proper treatment of prisoners, but as I was to all appearances a Confederate prisoner myself, and the disappointed youth possessed a breach loader, I wisely concluded to waste no words on him.

When we reached Barnsville Mr. McNeal turned me over to Sergeant Pickerell of the 15th Kansas Cavalry. I was not personally acquainted with the Sergeant, although he was a resident of Topeka.

He was very thorough in his examination of me, and among other things, asked me to name a number of prominent citizens of Topeka.

I remember giving the names of Jake Smith, and Dan Horne; and a personal description of these gentlemen was required and given, as well.

But my memorandum book served me better than anything else. Sergeant Pickerall carefully examined it, and after a few more searching questions, which I could readily answer, he declared himself satisfied, and pronounced the welcome words: “You are free.”

In grimy, footsore, woful plight,But free, and filled with glory.

Distant home has loom’d in sight,And here I’ll end my story.

My account properly ends here. I will add however that I started the next morning, on foot, and reached Topeka at noon, Sunday Oct. 30th.

I reported to Col. Veale in person; crossed the Kansas river and reached home at about three o’clock p.m.18


122 Kansas History

Willard Garvey: An Epic Life by Maura McEnaney

xix + 309 pages, illustrations, notes, index. Oakland, Calif.: Liberty Tree Press, 2013, cloth $26.95.

Maura McEnaney’s Willard Garvey: An Epic Life is an engaging biography of Wichita entrepreneur Willard Garvey. The son of Ray Garvey, who transformed Kansas’s grain industry in the 1930s and 1940s, Willard Garvey built on his father’s business endeavors and then went further to develop a multitude of projects and ventures from real estate to ranching. The book is a celebration of Garvey and his dedication to the ideals of self-reliance, capitalism, and the free market. The tone is understandable given McEnaney’s background as a researcher affiliated with the libertarian-leaning Independent Institute, which itself has ties to the Garvey family. The publisher is the institute’s Liberty Tree Press. In addition, the accolades for the work in the beginning pages read like a who’s who of Kansas conservative/libertarian figures.

McEnaney chronicles the life of Garvey from his youth in Depression-era Wichita through his World War II military service to his death in 2002. With wife Jean at his side, Willard displayed a nearly inexhaustible energy and creativity, firing out ideas and plans often faster that those around him could handle. Garvey developed a talent for organizing activities with military-like precision, insisting that everyone around him, from employees to his own children, report regularly on their efforts based on a “GO” (“Goal-Oriented”) format.

The study presents a resoundingly positive view of Garvey and his legacy. Miscalculations in business practices do figure prominently, such as his unsuccessful efforts to promote private home ownership in developing countries. Family ties to John Birch–related figures are presented openly. However, the author offers little detailed analysis of controversial racial, economic, and social issues in the city, much less of how the Garveys figured in those dynamics. Critical voices appear in the text only in passing, just long enough for Garvey to dismiss them and move on. For a deeper sense of the social debates of late twentieth-century Wichita, other books such as Gretchen Eick’s Dissent in Wichita may be more useful.

It may be helpful to compare this work with that by another Garvey biographer: historian Craig Miner, who held a Garvey-endowed chair in business history. Miner wrote Harvesting the High Plains, the story of how Willard’s father Ray and John Kriss created a dynamic agricultural business model in the midst of the Great Depression. Like McEnaney, who describes herself as a family friend, Miner worked with the Garveys. Both authors are gifted storytellers and present their respective Garveys as exemplars of American business acumen. Miner, however, better explores the context of agriculture and business, helping explain why the elder Garvey functioned the way he did. Thus, Miner’s Ray Garvey comes across as remarkable and accomplished,

yet still an ordinary human being who happened to see opportunities that many of his colleagues did not. McEnaney’s Willard Garvey appears as a confident, larger-than-life leader, and from childhood mostly free from the insecurities that plague the rest of us. In Willard Garvey: An Epic Life, the reader gets a sense of setting, such as Wichita of the 1950s, but merely as backdrop instead of as the context in which he functioned. In Harvesting the High Plains, John Kriss is a revealing foil; in Willard Garvey, other figures, such as wife Jean or assistant Bob Page, are influential and significant yet remain supporting cast members to the leading man.

It is hard for locals, including myself, to ignore the legacy of Willard Garvey in Wichita. Craig Miner was my first department chair. I bought my first house in Garvey’s first major suburban project, Bonnie Brae, with a backyard that overlooked the Garvey-founded Independent School. Willard Garvey, An Epic Life, therefore, is a useful, entertaining, and revealing window into a person and a family that has left its mark on Wichita, on Kansas, and on the nation. Moreover, there are few scholarly books about Wichita in the later decades of the twentieth century, Miner’s Wichita: The Magic City and Eick’s Dissent in Wichita being the most prominent. This book fills an important niche in explaining how Wichita developed from the 1950s through the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Reviewed by Jay Price, professor of history, Wichita State University.

R E V I E W S

Harry Truman and the Struggle for Racial Justiceby Robert Shogan

xi + 233 pages, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013, cloth $34.95.

Recent years have brought a number of studies on American presidents and their civil rights records, in particular many attempting to reevaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the modern civil rights movement–era presidents—Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. The best of these studies include: Nick Bryant, The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality (2006); David Allen Nichols, A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution (2007); and Nick Kotz, Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws that Changed America (2005). Robert T. Shogan’s Harry Truman and the Struggle for Racial Justice is a worthy addition to the literature.

Shogan, a former national political correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, outlines how Truman, born and raised in former slaveholding Missouri, grew from a racially prejudiced individual who did not fully embrace civil rights and African American equality into a president praised for having awakened the nation’s conscience and ushering in the modern struggle for civil rights and American democracy. Shogan tracks the Missourian’s development as a politician, especially his tutelage under “Boss Tom” Pendergast, who taught Truman the value of African American votes in Kansas City. As a county judge and a director of reemployment, Truman won the hearts and minds of the African American community as he dealt fairly with many who sought his assistance or came before his bench. These actions paid off when he ran for the U.S. Senate and secured nearly 90 percent of the black vote. According to C. A. Franklin, the editor of the Kansas City Call, Truman earned the landslide support from his years of service: “If ever a man deserved public confidence on the basis of the record made in public’s service that man is Harry S. Truman” (p. 48).

According to Shogan, Truman gathered what he had learned in Kansas City and Missouri politics and took it onto the national stage. Once elected president he became the first in the office to denounce segregation and make racial justice a priority. He created the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, which “would ultimately give new focus to his presidency and lead to a transformation of race relations in the country” (p. 99). In the summer of 1947, Truman made an unprecedented address before the NAACP in which he deliberately connected the struggle for civil rights to the fundamental principles of America’s values and the international fight against communism. The following year he ordered the desegregation of the armed forces. Additionally, Truman’s Justice Department, with his guidance and encouragement, began to push for desegregation in housing and ultimately in education. Based on these actions and others, Shogan maintains that Truman was the most influential pro–

civil rights president. According to the author, Truman’s legacy speaks for itself. “To compare Truman’s civil rights record to that of any of his predecessors in the White House,” argues Shogan, “is like comparing Gulliver to the Lilliputians” (p. 180).

In the end, Harry Truman and the Struggle for Racial Justice successfully demonstrates that Truman was centrally important to the modern civil rights movement. It was his presidency that set the tone and laid the foundation. Truman was the “first to make the struggle for racial justice part of the national agenda, to define bias against Americans of color as an evil that violated the Constitution, and . . . to define segregation, as distinguished from discrimination, as inherently a component of that evil” (p. 180). Shogan’s well-executed study provides us with a fuller understanding of Truman’s importance in the civil rights struggle and the role of the executive branch in the overall modern civil rights movement.

Reviewed by Shawn Leigh Alexander, associate professor of African and African American Studies, University of Kansas.

Reviews 123

Edmund G. Ross: Soldier, Senator, Abolitionist by Richard A Ruddy

xvi + 328 pages, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013, cloth $39.95.

There was a time when one might safely assume that most Kansans knew the name Edmund G. Ross. In recent years, however, the Kansan celebrated in John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage (1955) alongside John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, and a handful of other notable American politicians has passed from our collective memory. Ross was omitted from two popular Kansas histories for school-age students and is nowhere to be found in the index to Craig Miner’s impressive Kansas: The History of the Sunflower State (2002). Richard Ruddy, a retired photographer and student of Albuquerque history, seeks to reinsert Ross into our historical consciousness and to enhance our understanding of the Kansas senator and New Mexico governor’s true place in Civil War and Gilded Age America. For the most part, Ruddy succeeds. Indeed, as the author demonstrates in this first comprehensive, scholarly biography of Edmund G. Ross, “There is . . . more, much more, to be known of the life” of the man who famously “looked down into [his] open grave,” politically speaking, and cast the decisive acquittal vote in the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson on May 16, 1868 (pp. xi, 272).

To those Kansans, such as this reviewer, who got their early Kansas history during the years of Kansas’s centennial commemorations and of President Kennedy’s “Camelot,” the basics of the Ross story are or at least were familiar. A native of Ohio, Edmund Ross came of age as the agitation against slavery became more and more militant—according to Ruddy, the Ross “siblings were raised to be abolitionist” (p. 2). Ross trained as a printer and newspaper man and moved west during the mid-nineteenth century like so many of his contemporaries, and in 1856 he led a small party of free-state settlers that included his father, mother, wife, and three small children to Kansas Territory, soon to be known nationally as Bleeding Kansas. With his brother William, who made the move in 1855, Edmund entered the newspaper business and served as Wabaunsee County delegate to the Wyandotte Constitutional Convention, which gave Kansas the free-state constitution under which it was admitted to the Union in 1861. In early 1862, Ross helped raise the Eleventh Kansas Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, was elected captain of Co. E, and saw action along the Kansas-Missouri border and south. After the war, Ross pursued his newspaper career in Lawrence until his July 1866 appointment to the U.S. Senate to fill the vacancy left by the suicide of James H. Lane. The following January, the Kansas legislature elected Ross to the U.S. Senate for the short term ending in January 1871. His political career all but ended in 1868, however, when he defected from the Radical Republicans and voted to acquit President Johnson of impeachment charges, despite the chorus of Kansas voices calling for Johnson’s ouster. Kansas governor

Samuel J. Crawford wired that Kansas demanded a guilty vote, and the irascible Leavenworth editor Daniel R. Anthony wrote, “Kansas has heard the evidence and demands the conviction of the President.” When Ross insisted that he would be guided by his own conscience, Anthony exclaimed: “Kansas repudiates you as she does all perjurers and skunks” (pp. 129, 137). And so they did. Press and public reaction was bitter, but the people of Kansas, for the most part, quickly forgot and forgave, and as early as 1871, some papers were applauding the “courage” that the future president rediscovered in the 1950s. Nevertheless, time and forgiveness did not mean a revival of Ross’s political fortunes in Republican Kansas. Eventually he joined the Democratic Party and accepted President Grover Cleveland’s 1885 appointment as governor of New Mexico Territory.

Ruddy does a more than credible job chronicling and analyzing the ups and downs of Ross’s Kansas and New Mexico life and career. Although he may be too quick to give Ross the benefit of the doubt and is often a bit too speculative, for the most part his research is solid and thorough. With a bit more he might have tied up some annoying loose ends—for example, “a Judge Adams” (p. 54) was Franklin G. Adams, an important early Kansas journalist and the first director of the Kansas State Historical Society; and a “Kansas editor named Sol Miller” (p. 131) was the influential, long-serving (1857–1897), and often cantankerous editor of the Kansas Chief, White Cloud and Troy, who probably never forgave Ross for his 1868 vote. But these oversights are insignificant in the context of a 300-page biography, which is also good history and a significant contribution to the literature.

Reviewed by Virgil W. Dean, consulting editor, Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains.

124 Kansas History

Oklahoma’s Indian New Deal

by Jon S. Blackman

ix + 225 pages, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014, cloth, $24.95.

The New Deal of the 1930s is much in the news these days as each signatory piece of the social safety net is held up for critical review by politicians and the media. The New Deal’s changes to Indian policy, however, are virtually unknown today. The Wheeler–Howard Act, also known as the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), provided a limited framework for a new relationship between the federal government and Native nations. Although the federal government continued to hold the vast majority of Native lands and resources in trust, the Indian New Deal opened the door for Indian leadership and eventual control of their own resources, schools, health care and justice. In short, the IRA marked the first real opportunity for Native sovereignty in the United States since the Revolutionary War. Changes in federal Indian policy also spurred developments at the state level, none more significant than Oklahoma’s version of the Indian New Deal. In his study of this unfamiliar portion of an already underappreciated slice of FDR’s legacy, Jon Blackman lays out the history of what he calls the “mongrelized compromise” that became the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act.

Until the appointment of social worker John Collier as Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1933, the unapologetic goal of every federal program for Indians, beginning with Thomas Jefferson, was their assimilation into mainstream non-Indian society. Collier’s approach was the antithesis of assimilation. In principal, Collier’s 1934 Indian New Deal would celebrate, enhance and empower cultural difference, or pluralism, by allowing a greater level of self-rule by Native peoples, help reconstitute homelands broken up by allotment in the 1890s, and provide development assistance for tribes to restart economic and artistic traditions. Although the practical results of the Indian New Deal were mixed, historians are united in their interpretation of the IRA as the start of a new era of self-determination.

Collier’s biggest challenge in administering his new policies stemmed from his need to work with a Congress steeped in assimilationist theory and practice, and even from some Indians themselves who continued to value assimilation as the ultimate solution to the “Indian Problem.” Many Native leaders, understandably, were reluctant to trust in new programs or agreements of any sort, citing previous disappointments in their dealings with the Bureau. Oklahoma’s add-on legislation to the Indian New Deal, the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act (OIWA), was a response to the special circumstances faced by the tribal nations of that state. Unlike Native groups in other states, Oklahoma’s Indian population was highly diverse, composed of indigenous and immigrant tribes, and complicated by the presence of valuable resources, primarily oil, on tribal lands. The OIWA sought to address the rapacious exploitation of Native resources

by providing tribal governments with a line of revolving credit with which to develop their own extraction and agricultural industries. Blackman concludes that the contentious national debate that shaped the passage of the OIWA undermined its effectiveness through needless compromise and piecemeal cuts and additions.

Blackman’s story is supported mainly by the records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and its tribal offices. As an employee of the U.S. State Department, Blackman’s familiarity with the official records of the OIWA is valuable. What his interpretation lacks, however, is a clear narrative of Native perceptions of the passage and implementation of the OIWA. Blackman rightly points out that only a fraction of tribes in Oklahoma chose to participate in any of the programs provided by the OIWA, very likely because funding for them was delayed until nearly the end of 1937, and because much of the damage to Indian resources had already taken place—long before the passage of the original Wheeler–Howard Act. Any legacy that Blackman claims for the OIWA then is largely symbolic. According to Blackman, although Indians were reluctant to take up the terms of the OIWA at the time, this offer of self-determination beat a new path toward sovereignty in the 1950s that continues today. Regardless of the merit of Blackman’s claims for the significance of the OIWA in the history of American Indian policy, Oklahoma’s Indian New Deal serves as a succinct summary of a messy tangle of differing non-Indian interests attempting to shape the future of American Indians.

Reviewed by Bonnie Lynn-Sherow, associate professor of history,

Kansas State University.

Reviews 125

Standing Firmly by the Flag: Nebraska Territory and the Civil War, 1861–1867by James E. Potter

xxi + 375 pages, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012, paper $29.95.

James E. Potter has provided a much-needed study of the tumultuous events in territorial and Civil War–era Nebraska. With neighboring Kansas generally receiving the lion’s share of historical attention given its importance to the coming of the war, this book fills a pronounced gap in the literature on the period as it details the links between wartime and postwar events in Nebraska Territory—something lacking in nearly all books on the Civil War in the American West.

Using evidence drawn from an array of traditional sources, from letters and diaries to newspapers to government documents, Potter, a senior research historian at the Nebraska State Historical Society, largely succeeds in depicting Nebraska—as many scholars have done for neighboring Kansas—as something of a proving ground for the politics of slavery and antislavery by way of the national fiction of popular sovereignty. Nebraska lay at the center of the nation’s ideological struggle for its future, and Nebraska’s politics resembled those of its neighboring territory to the south. Although historians have long viewed the triumph of antislavery in Nebraska as a foregone conclusion, Potter reminds us that the politics of slavery were alive and well, and that the activism of the freestaters was essential to staving off proslavery efforts to extend the peculiar institution there.

Like Kansas and other border areas of the nation long overlooked by historians, Nebraska’s fault lines reveal the war’s truest nature better than in other areas of the nation. By extending his study through the war years to statehood, Potter has offered a fuller explanation of the local contest not only for and against slavery in Nebraska, but also for and against wartime emancipation. The territory’s freestaters, mostly Republicans, were products of activist traditions and exerted political agency against wartime dissenters just as they took up arms against guerrillas, especially in the southeastern counties. They liberated the territory’s few slaves, helped them to escape, and assisted their enlistment in federal ranks. The settlers themselves enlisted as well, invading Missouri to punish former antagonists with a hard war policy that predated the employment of that strategy in the eastern theaters of war. Then they moved on to other campaigns farther south in Arkansas before returning to their home to combat Native Americans who used the war as an opportunity to defend traditional homelands from further white expansion, especially after Congress passed the 1862 Homestead Act. Potter’s study offers a realistic portrayal of the often violent wartime negotiations between neighbors, white, black, and red, on the windswept prairies of Nebraska. The dichotomous terms “Border Ruffian” and “Jayhawker” more delineated on which side of the border the users of the terms lived than any real distinction between paramilitary and even terroristic activities.

Helpful as it is, this book is not without flaws. Potter’s extended focus on the military exploits of the First Nebraska Infantry Regiment detracts from the war on the home front, purportedly his main focus. In truth, that focus is itself too often cursory. Readers will find plenty of information on state-level politics, but far less on the shifting nature of the war’s meanings among common people and the intra-community contests, political and ideological, that it unleashed throughout the West. The concluding chapters on postwar Nebraska and statehood are less integrated with the war narrative than they might have been, leaving readers a largely flat political narrative of the statehood process. The Civil War seems merely a political obstacle rather than a deep scar not fully healed owing to the divided nature of race and war memory on the Nebraska landscape. Nonetheless, Standing Firmly by the Flag will likely stand for a long while as the most appealing history of Nebraska’s civil war within the Civil War.

Reviewed by Christopher Phillips, professor of history, University of Cincinnati.

126 Kansas History

B O O K N O T E SThe Dairies of John Gregory Bourke: Volume Five, May 23, 1881–August 26, 1881. Edited and annotated by Charles M. Robinson III. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2013, xiv + 482 pages, cloth $55.00.)

As mentioned in the journal’s note on volume four of his diaries in the winter 2010–2011 issue, John Gregory Bourke was aide-de-camp to Brigadier General George Crook and a firsthand witness to the early Apache campaigns, the Great Sioux War, the Cheyenne Outbreak, and the Geronimo War. He also was a prolific diarist, filling 124 manuscript volumes with notes, sketches, and photographs. Volume five, edited and annotated by Charles M. Robinson III, finds Bourke at Fort Wingate, New Mexico, in May 1881; on the Pine Ridge Agency; and back in the Southwest among the Zunis, the Rio Grande Pueblos, and the Hopis. This fifth volume is of special interest “because it is the first to deal almost exclusively with Bourke’s ethnological research” and is also noteworthy for its treatment of the Sun Dance (p. 1). It is effectively annotated and includes an appendix of “Persons Mentioned in the Diary” with brief biographical sketches of each.

Harry S. Truman: The Coming of the Cold War. By Nicole L. Anslover. (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014, x + 225 pages, paper $29.95.)

In this fine little biography of the nation’s thirty-third president for the Routledge Historical Americans series, Nicole L. Anslover, effectively situates Harry S. Truman and his presidency in the context of his times. The author clearly states the book’s primary objective at the outset: “to demonstrate the lasting impact that Truman had on American society and America’s role in the world” (p. vii). And she does so in seven concise chapters—beginning with Truman’s life experiences before 1945 and ending with his post-presidency back in Independence, Missouri—and a “Document Log” that should make the volume especially conducive to classroom use. Although Anslover’s subtitle seems to promise a focus on foreign relations, there is plenty of domestic policy and politics as well, including coverage of the mostly ill-fated Fair Deal and “the Miracle of ’48” (p. 98).

Kenneth and Helen Spencer of Kansas: Champions of Culture and Commerce in the Sunflower State. By Kenneth F. Crockett. (Charleston, S.C.: The History Press, 2014, 206 pages, paper $21.99.)

Although their names live on in places like the Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas and the Kenneth A. Spencer Chemistry Building at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, most Kansans are probably unaware of the eponymous couple’s history. Kenneth F. Crockett seeks to reintroduce Kansans to this philanthropic duo in Kenneth and Helen Spencer of Kansas. Drawing heavily from Kenneth’s and Helen’s manuscript collections, Crocket relates how Kenneth Spencer worked his way up in the family business, Pittsburg and Midway Coal Mining Company (P&M), in the 1930s, and, proving his own ability as an industrialist, founded the Spencer Chemical Company. Helen, who greatly supported Kenneth yet remained aloof from business management during their marriage, became more active in the family business upon her husband’s death in 1960. She also became a leading philanthropist in her own right by directing the Kenneth and Helen Spencer Foundation. Crockett pays tribute to a Kansas couple that generously gave back to their native state.

Meaningful Places: Landscape Photographers in the Nineteenth-Century American West. By Rachel McLean Sailor. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014, xxviii + 207 pages, cloth $45.00.)

Minnehaha Falls, Minnesota, the Big Mound near St. Louis, and the Grand Canyon are a few of the places that Rachel Sailor writes about in Meaningful Places. Drawing from archival collections from all over the West, Sailor demonstrates the role that landscape photographs played in perpetuating the national conception of a frontier and how “local communities found site-specific meaning in images of the local and regional places they inhabited” (p. xix). For example, Crater Lake, Oregon, ringed by a mountainous crown, appealed to local settlers because it evoked “completion and culmination,” whereas Yosemite Valley, a gateway to mist shrouded mountains, denoted “beginning” and appealed to the national concept of manifest destiny (p. 71). Late nineteenth-century photographers, explains Sailor, conveyed these ideas through deliberately chosen perspectives. Rich with pictures, Meaningful Places teases out the layers of meaning in late nineteenth-century western photography and recounts the experiences of some fascinating, albeit lesser known, landscape photographers.

An Osage Journey to Europe, 1827–1830: Three French Accounts. Edited and translated by William Least Heat-Moon and James K. Wallace. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013, xiii + 154, cloth $29.95.)

In 1827, for reasons not entirely clear, four Osage men and two Osage women travelled to Europe and toured France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy. Initially, European spectators vied with each other for glimpses of the Osage sojourners, but when their New World novelty wore off the six companions were reduced to begging for their return fare. Travel writer and historian William Least Heat-Moon and James K. Wallace, professor emeritus of French at the University of Missouri, compiled and translated three obscure contemporary French booklets that document the Osage’s trip to Europe. The editors explain how “the booklets present a telling picture of two cultures from different hemispheres . . . each trying to make sense of the other during a massive re-ordering of society” (p. 23). In addition to the documents, readers will appreciate An Osage Journey’s explanatory footnotes and its vibrant color illustrations of the Osage travelers.

Fried Walleye and Cherry Pie: Midwestern Writers on Food. Edited by Peggy Wolff. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013, xvii + 258 pages, paper $19.95.)

In Fried Walleye and Cherry Pie, editor Peggy Wolff brings together thirty authors to reminisce about the significance of food to midwestern culture and their own experiences of living in the heartland. In this collection of “stories told around and about the table,” contributors remember county fairs, corndogs, cherry pie and homemade fudge (p. xiv). Yet while some authors long for comfort foods made with recipes found on box tops, others point to the region’s diverse food culture influenced by migrants from around the U.S. as well as from Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Authors share local secrets, like the hot dog truck in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that sells Hungarian paprikash, and remind us that the corn so ubiquitous on the highways of Indiana becomes both General Mills breakfast cereal and fresh tamales with spinach. Many stories include recipes, from Bundt cake made with instant pudding to goat cheese panna cotta. Through its tour of midwestern fare, Fried Walleye and Cherry Pie emphasizes the importance of examining this often overlooked region to current food studies.

Book Notes 127

The journal is available as one of many benefits of membership with the Kansas Historical Foundation. Find more information online at kshs.org/11413.

Kansas History (USPS 290 620) is published quarterly by the Kansas Historical Foundation, 6425 SW 6th Avenue, Topeka, KS 66615-1099 (kshs.org), officially the Kansas State Historical Society, Inc., an IRS determined 501(c)(3) non-profit. It is distributed to members of the Kansas Historical Foundation. Annual membership rates are $30 for students, $40 for individuals, $50 for organizations, $60 for households, and $70 for international. Single issues are $7. Contact Vicky Henley, executive director and CEO, Kansas Historical Foundation, at 785-272-8681, ext. 201, for more information. Periodicals postage paid at Topeka, Kansas, and additional mailing office in Lawrence, Kansas. Postmaster: Send address changes to Kansas History, 6425 SW 6th Avenue, Topeka, KS 66615-1099.

Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains is published quarterly through a partnership between the Kansas Historical Foundation and the Department of History at Kansas State University. The Kansas Historical Foundation serves as a fund raising, fund management, membership, and retail organization to support and promote the Kansas Historical Society, a state agency that safeguards and shares the state's history through the collection, preservation, and interpretation of its past. The Society's collections and programs are diverse and are made available through its library and museum in Topeka, historic sites and classrooms

across the state, and publications and web-based resources accessible everywhere. The Department of History at Kansas State University is especially well suited to the study of Kansas, agricultural, and environmental history. As a Land Grant school whose culture and economy have historically been shaped by the economy in the state, the history of Kansas holds a venerable place in the academic offerings of the University. Environmental History, with a particular focus on agricultural, water, and grassland issues in Kansas, has become increasingly more important to university research and curricula worldwide.

The journal publishes scholarly articles, edited documents, and other materials that contribute to an understanding of the history and cultural heritage of Kansas and the central plains. Political, social, intellectual, cultural, economic, and institutional histories are welcome, as are biographical and historiographical interpreta-tions and studies of archaeology, the built environment, and material culture. Articles emphasizing visual documentation, exceptional reminiscences, and autobiographical writings are also considered for publication. Genealogical studies are generally not accepted.

Manuscripts are evaluated anonymously by scholars who determine their suitability for publication based on originality, quality of research, significance, and presentation, among other factors. Previously published articles or manuscripts that are being considered for publication elsewhere will not be considered. The editors reserve the right to make changes in accepted articles and will consult with the authors regarding such. The publishers assume no responsibility for statements of fact or opinion made by contributors.

Kansas History follows the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). A style sheet, which includes a detailed explanation of the journal’s editorial policy, is available at kshs.org/12447. Articles appearing in Kansas History are available online at the Kansas Historical Society’s website (kshs.org/12445) and from EBSCO Publishing. They are available on microfilm from ProQuest Microfilms.

The Edgar Langsdorf Award for Excellence in Writing, which includes a plaque and an honorarium of two hundred dollars, is awarded each year for the best article published in Kansas History.

The editors welcome letters responding to any of the articles published in the journal. With the correspondent’s permission, those that contribute substantively to the scholarly dialogue by offering new insights or historical information may be published. All comments or editorial queries should be addressed to the editors, Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains, Department of History, 208 Eisenhower Hall, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS 66506-1002; 785-532-6730; email: KHJournal@ k-state.edu

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for purchase. Please contact the State Archives Division for ordering information: kshs.org/14154; 785-272-8681, ext. 321.

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KANSAS NATURE & AGRICULTURE

University Press of KansasPhone (785) 864-4155 • Fax (785) 864-4586 • www.kansaspress.ku.edu

Kansas FishesKansas Fishes CommitteeIllustrations by Joseph R. Tomelleri

“Kansas Fishes is an authoritative account of the fishes of the Great Plains. The information is the new baseline for streams undergoing rapid change and should form the basis for conservation of the special fishes that inhabit them. And don’t miss the wonderful illustrations by Joe Tomelleri, the best fish artist I know, anywhere.”—Peter B. Moyle, Department of Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology Center for Watershed Sciences

“An exhaustive compilation on the taxonomy, biology, ecology, zoogeography, and conservation status of Kansas fishes. . . . has broad appeal to naturalists, anglers, and scientists within and outside of Kansas.”—Timothy Bonner, coauthor of Freshwater Fishes of Texas

496 pages, 184 color illustrations, 121 maps, 9" x 12", Cloth $39.95

NEW IN PAPERBACK

Time’s ShadowRemembering a Family Farm in KansasArnold Bauer

Named one of the Top Five Books of 2012 by The Atlantic

“A moving and meditative account that depicts a century of struggle, survival, and demise. This coming-of-age memoir, set from the 1930s to the 1950s, blends local history with personal reflection to paint a realistic picture of farm life and families.”—Topeka Capital-Journal

176 pages, 9 photographs, Paper $17.95

KansasHistorical Foundation

Department of History

Volume 37, Number 2 | Summer 2014

Documents

Transcript of Volume 37, Number 2 | Summer 2014