JOPLIN, Mo. —
Hearth and home
“(Sterling) Price’s rebels were not the only Missourians who fought to defend — or to recover — heart and home,” wrote historians William Shea and Earl Hess in their book, “Pea Ridge: Civil War Campaign in the West.”
According to the historians, many of the men in the Union’s Army of the Southwest had a “personal stake in the success of the campaign.”
They were men who lived in Southwest Missouri, and some of them even had been driven from their homes by Southern sympathizers and soldiers. A Congressman from Springfield organized many of these men into a regiment known as the 25th Missouri, which like the 24th Missouri “contained substantial numbers of refugees from the southwestern corner of the state.”
Joplin resident Paul Butler said his ancestors helped illustrate this truth of the Pea Ridge campaign. Butler’s great-great-grandfather, Cornelius Gann, left his farm in Dallas County to enlist in the 24th Missouri in 1861. Gann was 42 years old at the time and the father of nine children. Eight other men in his company were related to him, or would be by marriage after the war. One would die in the fighting around Elkhorn Tavern and another would die later in the war in Missouri, but Gann and the others survived.
Tough fight
“I charged the battlements of Vicksburg ... and assisted in driving the Confederates from their almost impregnable position on Missionary Ridge ... but in all my army experience I did not see any fighting compared with the plain open field conflict that occurred in and around the Elkhorn Tavern on March 7, 1862.”
— Jacob Platt, Union officer
Source: Pea Ridge National Military Park
Jasper County general
“When a group of disbelieving Missouri soldiers asked Brig. Gen. (James) Rains of the 8th Missouri Guard Division if it was true they had lost the battle, the Missouri officer bellowed: ‘By God, nobody was whipped at Pea Ridge but Van Dorn.’ The Confederate commander was well within earshot of this intemperate outburst and promptly placed Rains under arrest.”
Rains was from Jasper County and was a former state senator for Southwest Missouri.
Source: Pea Ridge, Civil War Campaign in the West,” by William Shea and Earl Hess
‘Great misery’
An account of Pvt. Vinson Holman, an Iowa infantryman who enlisted on Aug. 23, 1861, and fought at Pea Ridge. This was his first battle.
March 7, 1862: “Isaac Arwine was wounded very bad in the Sholder. the ball entered the right sholder and lodged in the left sholder. now at present he is in very bad misery and is thought that he wont live. he said he thought he was a dead man.”
March 9, 1862: “I am still in Camp waiting on Arwine and the Boys that is wounded. There is any amount of legs, arms, hands lying around in Damp that had to be cut off on account of thair bones being broken. the Doctors are taking off arms, and legs and hands evry day. it is nothing to see them cut a mans arm off or a leg. I hope to God that I wont have to witness the same again. it is horable to think of.”
March 12, 1862: “the Doctors are stil taken legs and Arms off everyday. ... Arwine is in great misery and isnt expected to live.”
March 13, 1862: “this morning is very warm day and Arwine very bad. he was very bad all night and to day about eleven oclock Arwine died. we laid him on a hard board out of doors and Buried him about three oclock. We put a cople of Blankets around him and put him in a big grave and covered him up. it looks hard but cant be helped. there wasent no Man that suffered any more. while he lived his pain was so great that it gave him the lock jaw. he was in his rite mind all the while. half of his breath cam out of the wound on his back. he smelt awful. it was enough to make any bady sick to be around him. He wanted the Doctor to give him something to ease him and put him to sleep so he would never wake up again. he said he was sorry that he could not get home once more. but he said it was the fate of War and his time has come and he must go.”
Pvt. Arwine is buried in the national cemetery, Fayetteville, Ark.
Pvt. Holman died of jaundice Dec. 7, 1862. He was 20 years old.
Source: Pea Ridge National Military Park
Civil War 150th
Vignettes from the Battle of Pea Ridge
- Civil War 150th
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Living history events will commemorate 1862 Newtonia battle
One of the oldest and most historic homes in Southwest Missouri — the two-story brick mansion built by Matthew Ritchey about 160 years ago — will be the centerpiece for the 150th anniversary of the first Civil War battle at Newtonia.
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More Civil War events scheduled for this fall
The 150th anniversary of the 1862 battle at Newtonia isn’t the only Civil War event slated for the region this fall. A site dedication and sesquicentennial celebration will take place in late October at the Battle of Island Mound State Historic Site near Butler.
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Confederate Gen. Price led 1864 campaign into Missouri to liberate state, disrupt election
When former Missouri governor and Confederate Maj. Gen. Sterling Price led an invasion of the state in 1864, he hoped to liberate Missouri from what he believed was Union occupation that had been in place since the first year of the war.
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'Angel of death'
Maj. Henry Frisbie of the 37th Illinois — a Union veteran of the campaign that culminated near here in December 1862 — wondered after the Civil War why events in the East so often overshadowed events in the West.
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Civil War: Order No. 11 reduced border to a wasteland
Solomon Young epitomized everything Americans admire in one of their own: self-made, a restless, westering soul hewing a life out of the wilderness with nothing but “a gun and an ax and two babies and a blanket,” according to family tradition.
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William Quantrill’s legacy remains mixed 150 years after Civil War
In the spring of 1881 — the American Civil War had been over for 16 years — a newspaper editor from Dover, Ohio, wrote an open letter to Joplin residents, asking them to tell their stories about William Clarke Quantrill.
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Battle of Wilson’s Creek played key role in Civil War
The Battle of Wilson’s Creek, 150 years ago this week, was a victory for the Confederates. It also resulted in the first death of a Union commander, Brig. Gen. Nathaniel Lyon.
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Battle of Island Mound marked first time blacks fought in Civil War combat
In October 1862, Rufus Vann’s journey brought him to the farm of imprisoned bushwhacker John Toothman in Bates County.
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Part 8. King Cotton
Slavery arrived in the New World before the Pilgrims, and it might not have survived to see Southern secession had it not been for Eli Whitney’s cotton gin.
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Part 7. ‘Pavement of Dead Men’
Having captured Forts Henry and Donelson in February 1862, Ulysses Grant and his Army of the Tennessee pushed up the river of the same name as spring came.
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