Civil War Photo Friday: A Duel Between Confederate Generals

"You're a coward!"

Remember Confederate General John Sappington Marmaduke? He was best known for raiding Missouri, although he had some fatal flaws as a cavalry commander.

This didn't stop him from being judgmental about his fellow officers. After the Battle of Helena, Marmaduke felt General Marsh Walker had let the side down. He accused him of "avoiding danger", basically saying he was a coward. The fact that Walker was later given some of Marmaduke's troops didn't help matters.

That was in July of 1863, but in September, 150 years ago this month, Marmaduke began to be vocal about Walker's supposed cowardice. Walker heard of this and, being a Southern gentleman, demanded satisfaction.

Both were in command of troops defending Little Rock, Arkansas, from an advancing and considerably larger Union army, but they didn't let little things like a military crisis from standing in the way of their egos.

"Wanna fight?"

At dawn on September 6, the two met at a plantation seven miles north of the city. With a crowd of officers looking on, the two men stood back to back with drawn pistols. They then marched fifteen paces, spun, and fired. Both missed. Marmaduke was the first to get another shot off, putting a bullet into Walker's side. The general staggered back, firing off a shot that went wild as he fell to the ground.

Walker lingered for a whole day, during which time he wrote a statement to his friends and family that they should forgive Marmaduke and not do him any harm. Soon after, Walker died, a gentleman to the last.

Marmaduke's commander General Sterling Price could have had him court marshaled and shot, but with the enemy at the gates he kept him in command. The Union army pushed the rebels out of Little Rock on September 10 and as the Confederate army retreated everyone seemed to forget about Marmaduke's deed. He continued to command troops until he was captured in the autumn of 1864.

When you take away a cavalryman's horse, he ain't happy

In a previous post I talked about the 30th Arkansas Infantry, a Confederate unit. That name is a bit misleading because the regiment actually began life as cavalry.

There were chronic supply problems in the Trans-Mississippi Theater, however, and in June of 1863, Major General Hindman realized he didn't have enough fodder for all the horses under his command. In a letter dated June 19, 1863, he wrote, "The scarcity of supplies now caused great distress. Nearly two months must yet elapse before the new crop would ripen. To lessen the consumption of corn, I found it necessary to dismount four regiments of Texans and three of Arkansians. This produced much dissatisfaction, and there were many desertions in consequence."

One of those units was the 30th Arkansas, and the records show a spike of desertions at this time. Cavalry considered themselves superior to infantry, they fancied themselves knights riding into battle rather than commoners slogging through the mud. To lose one's horse was insulting, and many simply went home rather than be turned into infantry.

Civil War Photo Friday: Colonel Robert A. Hart, CSA

This dapper gentleman is Colonel Robert A. Hart.

He was born in Ireland and immigrated to Arkansas before the war. On August 1, 1862, Hart joined the Confederate army and was commissioned the lieutenant colonel of the newly formed 30th Arkansas Infantry. On November 12, he was promoted to colonel and assumed command of the entire regiment.

The 30th Arkansas saw lots of action in the Trans-Mississippi Theater, taking part in most of the major battles as well as the 1864 invasion of Missouri that serves as a backdrop to my novel A Fine Likeness. On July 4, 1863, the regiment was part of a Confederate attack on the Mississippi river town of Helena. This was an attempt to relieve pressure on the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg, which ironically surrendered that very same day. Helena was well fortified and the Confederates were repulsed with heavy losses. Hart was wounded in the leg and taken prisoner. He died of his wounds on August 6, 1863.

The 30th Arkansas suffered 8 killed, 46 wounded, and 39 missing at the Battle of Helena. Lieutenant Colonel J.W. Rogan assumed command and led the regiment until the end of the war. The 30th got into some exciting adventures. More on those in later posts. Also check out Captain Richards Miniature Civil War for some great model soldiers he's made of this regiment!

Vigilantes after the Civil War: The Baldknobbers of the Ozarks

The Civil War hit the Ozarks in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas especially hard. While the region was underpopulated, that made it a good home for guerrillas from both sides as well as simple bandits. Taney County in Missouri went from a prewar population of 3,500 to fewer than 1,000 by war's end.

Peace didn't come quickly to the Ozarks. When Confederate veterans returned home, many found their land occupied by Union men, confiscated for failure to pay taxes during the war. They couldn’t even vote thanks to a new state constitution that disenfranchised anyone who had supported the rebellion.

The local government became dominated by Union men, many of them newcomers who arrived to snap up cheap land. While some ex-Confederates did manage to get farms again, they had become an underclass. Some turned to lawlessness, usually targeting the wealthier Unionists.

The violence came to a head in the 1880s when a Union veteran named Nat Kinney formed the Baldknobbers, a vigilante group named after their practice of meeting on bald knobs, treeless hills where they could spot anyone coming to spy on their meetings. The Baldknobbers soon took to terrorizing the lawless element at night, wearing masks and whipping people. They soon graduated to lynching. In defense, the former rebels formed the Anti-Baldknobbers.

Soon the Civil War was being reenacted in the Ozarks. Many Baldknobbers were newcomers, Republicans, and ex-Union soldiers. Only a few kept farms, the main occupation of the general population, instead working in county government, law, or owning their own businesses. They looked on the native hill men as backward. The Anti-Baldknnobbers tended to be ex-Confederates and longtime residents, and most farmed for a living.

It's unclear how many died in the fighting. Estimates range from a dozen to more than thirty, with countless more beaten and driven from their land.

The lynchings, night riding, and shootouts were finally stamped out by Governor Marmaduke who, strangely enough, was a former Confederate general who came into power after the restrictions on ex-rebels holding public office was lifted. He didn't care who had fought for whom, he just wanted the killing to stop.

You can read more about the Baldknobbers in my book Outlaw Tales of Missouri.

This Wikimedia Commons photo is from the 1919 film, The Shepherd of the Hills and accurately depicts surviving Baldknobber masks.

The Battle at Old River Lake

By the summer of 1864 the Confederacy west of the Mississippi was in serious trouble. The Union occupied Missouri and northern Arkansas, rebel presence in the Indian Territory was all but gone, and the campaign to take New Mexico and open a corridor to California was a forgotten dream.

The rebels still had some fight in them, however. While the Union controlled the river after taking Vicksburg the year before, rebel soldiers and guerrillas regularly harassed shipping.

In May of 1864, Col. Colton Greene led 800 Confederate soldiers to Chicot County in the extreme southeast of Arkansas. Here the Mississippi was narrow and took several hairpin turns. Riverboats chugging upstream could only go a maximum of 13 mph and made fine targets. Greene set up his six cannon and pounded away at them.

He proudly reported: “I engaged 21 boats of all descriptions, of which five gunboats and marine-boats were disabled, five transports badly damaged, one sunk, two burned, and two captured. My loss was one subaltern and five privates slightly wounded. No guns or horses were hit. The river is blockaded.”

The Union command quickly sent 6,000 men under the command of General Andrew Jackson Smith. On June 5 they landed and 3,000 troops disembarked. There was a bit of skirmishing that evening but it was too late to start a battle.

The next day under heavy rain, the Union troops advanced. Facing them were only 600 rebels, the rest being sent to guard the line of retreat and another potential target to the north. They were positioned behind Ditch Bayou, now swollen with rain yet not visible to the Union men advancing over what they thought was an open field. The rain turned the field to mud and slowed the soldiers' progress and made it impossible to advance their own artillery.

The bluecoats advanced through a withering fire. Soon they discovered the bayou and realized they were trapped. They hunkered down in the mud, unable to advance because of the bayou and unable to retreat for fear of being cut down.

They were saved by some Union cavalry, who were able to cross the bayou to the south and flank the rebels. Greene ordered a retreat. That night the Union soldiers camped in nearby Lake Village, where they plundered homes for food and broke up furniture and fences to build fires. The next day they returned to their boats, only to have Greene's men snipe at them every step of the way.

Union casualties numbered about 180, while the Confederates lost about 100. Green's men withdrew from the area for fear of another attack but the harassment of steamboats continued until the end of the war. The Battle at Old River Lake was the last significant engagement in Arkansas, yet it's almost forgotten today.

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Destroying a Confederate saltpeter works

The Civil War in Missouri and Arkansas was made up of mostly small skirmishes. Researcher Carolyn Bartels counted 1100 fights in Missouri alone, and suspects that estimate is low. Only a couple of dozen of them could rightly be called battles. As I've written before, there's no such thing as an insignificant skirmish. One small action in Arkansas in January of 1863 shows why.

At this time, northern Arkansas was a sort of No-Mans-Land between the two sides. There was little infrastructure in the Ozarks to support a large force, and the rough hills and thick brush made any supply wagons easy targets for ambush. The region was full of deserters and bushwhackers, sandwiched between the Union army to the north and the Confederates to the south.

There was one Confederate outpost, however. Along the Buffalo River in northern Arkansas was a large saltpeter works. Saltpeter, of course, is a key ingredient in gunpowder, something of which the rebels were always in short supply. While they didn't have the manpower to control the Buffalo River, they left a few men to run the saltpeter works in order to supply the beleaguered Arkansas Confederates.

Union troops learned of this operation and decided to put a stop to it. Major J.W. Caldwell of the First Iowa Cavalry took 300 men from Huntsville in northwestern Arkansas and rode out on the morning of January 9. That evening he camped in the general vicinity of the works and sent out scouts to find its exact location. Before dawn the next day, he set out and completely surprised the rebels. Of the 20 workers, only three escaped and the rest were captured.

In his report, Maj. Caldwell says he destroyed 14 buildings, 2 steam engines, 3 boilers, 7 large iron kettles, and half a ton of saltpeter. This was a large enterprise indeed. As a bonus, his men found a second, smaller works four miles downriver and destroyed that too. The workers there managed to escape but the Iowa boys had made a good haul. The expedition also netted 20 bushwhacker prisoners.

While military histories tend to focus on the big battles, these skirmishes had an accumulated effect far beyond any single battle. The works on the Buffalo River weren't the only supply of saltpeter for the rebels in Arkansas, but its loss exacerbated their supply problem and made them that much weaker. Losing all those men to Union prisons didn't help their cause either.


This Wikipedia photo shows a reproduction of Anderson Mill, built in the 1850s as a corn mill and cotton gin. It was converted to a gunpowder mill for the Civil War. After the war it resumed as corn, wheat, and cotton processing. It was bought by Pioneer Mills of San Antonio and idled at the turn of the century. This reproduction was built in 1965 in Anderson Mill, Texas when the original site was flooded by the Lake Travis reservoir. OK, so it isn't a saltpeter works. I couldn't find a good public domain photo of one! Here's one I couldn't use.

Civil War Photo Friday: Taking the Oath of Loyalty

This week's image shows a group of Confederate prisoners taking the Loyalty Oath in 1864. This was an option given to most rebel prisoners. The deal was that if they swore loyalty to the United States, they'd be given a certificate proving they'd done so and could return to civilian life. If their home was in Union-occupied territory, they could even go home.

Most prisoners honored the oath. Some were sick of the war, while others were draftees who had never wanted to be in it in the first place. The temptation of a return to civilian life was a strong one. The Confederate armies in all theaters of the war were plagued with desertions.

Not everyone honored the oath, however. Sometimes a rebel would be captured and would take the oath in order to get out of prison. They considered the oath to have been taken under duress and therefore invalid. Often these guys would become bushwhackers. The Union Military correspondence in Missouri and Arkansas is filled with reports of bushwhackers being killed and having the loyalty oath paper being found on their persons.

Right at the bottom of the form was a line that said that if you broke the oath by acting in support of the Confederacy, the punishment was death. Sometimes oath breakers were taken alive. They nearly always faced execution.

In my next post I'll be talking about the oath of loyalty two Confederate bushwhackers named Frank and Jesse James took.

OK, so this isn't a photo, but hey, it's a photo of a drawing, right?

Image courtesy Library of Congress.

"Cut your hair, soldier!"

I'm reading The Civil War on the Border by Wiley Britton, a 1000-page magnum opus on the Trans-Mississippi Theater written by a Union veteran in the 1890s. It was one of the earliest books to exhaustively cover the war west of the Mississippi and contains lots of interesting anecdotes.

This one comes from early 1863. The First Arkansas Union Infantry at Fayetteville was a new unit and was filling up rapidly. Many were Arkansas Unionists who had been in hiding from Confederate recruiters or who had been conscripted into the rebel army and had deserted. When they joined the Union army they found life a little different.

"Long hair was the fashion in the South, in that section, and among Southern soldiers, and there was at least one instance where one of these Arkansas recruits refused to have his hair cut and had to be caught and held until the operation was performed, and where one man was sent to the guardhouse because he refused to serve as one of the detail to catch and hold the comrade for shearing."


Photo of unidentified Confederate First Lieutenant courtesy Cowan Auctions.

Interview with men's adventure author Hank Brown

Today we're chatting with action author Hank Brown, who is doing a blog tour for his most recent release, Tier Zero. Hank has come out with several novels and short stories in the men's adventure genre, a genre that was in the doldrums before the current publishing revolution. So with no further ado. . .

Checking out your list of publications, one that jumped to my attention was Radical Times, a Civil War story. Actually it's a Reconstruction story set in Arkansas right after the war. What made you pick a setting well away from the epic drama of the major battles?

Mostly it was because of history and my exposure to it. In school I had only learned the superficial facts about the Civil War...North, South, slaves, Abraham Lincoln...that was about it. Public school taught us even less about Reconstruction, which is to say: nothing.

Then about a year or two before I wrote Radical Times, I checked out a book from the library about that historic period. It blew me away how much I didn't know about it. And when that happens I'm compelled to set off on a researching spree. It annoys me how the truth of this tumultuous period are ignored, at best; or censored, at worst. Our present political dynamic depends on that ignorance (or censorship). Anyway, as all this information was floating around in my mind I began conceiving characters (as often happens). The story grew out of all that.

You served in the Armed Forces. Beyond the obvious, what are the main differences between warfare in the 1860s and the modern day? How is the soldier's experience different? Are there any similarities?

Beyond the obvious, I'd say it's the officers and men themselves that are most different, followed by the command doctrine. The US armed forces have become extremely top-heavy organizations, with a cumbersome bureaucracy only slightly less inept than the non-uniformed government institutions. The technology which enables unprecedented micromanaging runs the risk of turning fighting men into robots. The technological advantages and overwhelming air support our troops have enjoyed since WWII glosses over the chinks in our armor, of which I believe this is an example.

When Von Steuben was drilling Washington's troops to fight the British he remarked on what made the American soldier unique: You couldn't just institute a policy and expect Americans to follow it, without first explaining its purpose. That does not seem to be the case any longer. Once when training with some soldiers from the Mother Country, after Desert Storm, I remember the ironic moment when one of the Brits cried out in frustration about all the suffocating regulations he had to abide by while attached to the US Army. Holy historic role-reversal, Uncle Sam!

Civil War Photo Friday: Veterans of the Battle of Prairie Grove

Today is the 150th anniversary of the Union victory at the Battle of Prairie Grove. This was a brutal slugfest in northwestern Arkansas that spelled the end to Confederate hopes of invading Missouri and opened up Arkansas for Union invasion. It would take both sides some time to fully realize the significance of this battle.

The battle has been well described in many places, such as this official site and the awesome blog Civil War Daily Gazette. So I'll just give you this interesting photo of the veterans of Company K, 34th Arkansas Infantry, taken at a reunion at the battlefield sometime around 1905-1916. This public domain image comes courtesy Campsite Artifacts, a very cool website run by a metal detectorist who specializes in finding (and selling) Civil War artifacts.

Civil War Photo Friday: Confederate General John S. Marmaduke

I'm back safely from Iraq and while I've been blogging about my trip, it's time to get back to some Civil War and Wild West stuff! My Iraq series for Gadling will be starting shortly and I'll announce it here.

This week's Civil War photo is of John Sappington Marmaduke, a Confederate commander from Missouri. Born to a wealthy plantation family in Arrow Rock, he went with the South when his uncle, Governor Claiborne Fox Jackson, planned the state's secession from the Union. Marmaduke commanded the rebel troops and tasted defeat at the Battle of Boonville, one of the first battles of the Civil War.

Marmaduke rose in the ranks and was appointed a Brigadier General 150 years ago this month. He's most famous for two raids he conducted into Union-dominated Missouri in 1863 in an effort to reduce pressure on Confederate-held Arkansas. The first raid saw him in a bitter fight in Springfield. The second saw him causing havoc in southeast Missouri. Neither raid was particularly successful. His career was further tarnished when he challenged a fellow officer to a duel and shot him dead.

Marmaduke's career ended at the Battle of Mine Creek on October 25, 1864. This was near the end of General Price's disastrous invasion of Missouri, the background for my Civil War novel A Fine Likeness. Marmaduke positioned his artillery and men poorly and the Union army cut him off from the rest of the rebel army and captured him and some 800 of his men. I'll cover all of these events in more detail as their 150th anniversaries come up.

Despite his failings as a commander, Marmaduke remained a popular figure and served as governor of Missouri from 1885 to his death in office in 1887.

Photo courtesy Wikipedia.

Civil War Photo Friday: Arkansas Confederate regimental flags

We're lucky that so many regimental flags from the Civil War have come down to us. As treasured banners, veterans strove to preserve them and thus many museums have examples. Here are some from the Arkansas Confederate regiments. The one above is from the 22nd Arkansas Infantry shows off some of the battles they fought in. Oak Hills is the Confederate name for the Battle of Wilson's Creek and Elk Horn is the Confederate name for the Battle of Pea Ridge. The opposing sides often had different names for the same battle.

The 8th Arkansas Infantry also showed off their battle experience.

The 9th Arkansas Infantry incorporated the Confederate battle flag into their regimental banner. The Stars and Bars is a common element to Confederate regimental flags.

The 15th Northwest Arkansas regiment put a nice fringe around theirs. It's remained in wonderful condition.

Photos courtesy Wikimedia Commons, which has a nice collection of Arkansas Confederate flags.

If you like Civil War flags, check out my posts on the bushwhacker Quantrill's black flag, the banner of the 22nd US Colored Troops, and two Confederate flags of Missouri.

Civil War Missouri enters a new phase

In 1861, things looked good for the Confederate cause in Missouri. The victories at Wilson's Creek and Lexington were heralded as a sign of things to come. The optimism didn't last. Soon the Confederate forces were pushed into the southwestern part of the state, where they stayed for the rest of the year. At the battle of Pea Ridge in March, 1862, the rebels were solidly defeated in northwest Arkansas and hopes of conquering Missouri for the South began to fade.

With attention shifted to New Orleans, which had just fallen to the Union, and the slow Union creep up the Mississippi River, those rebels still in Missouri must have felt somewhat forgotten. That didn't stop them from fighting, however. Guerrillas and small units of regular troops skirmished with Union troops regularly.

In the first three weeks of May, there were skirmishes at Bloomfield (twice), French Point (several times), Center Creek (several times), Big Creek, Carthage, Hog Island, Richfield, and Santa Fe Road. And these are only the skirmishes that made it into the Official Records! Several smaller ones were probably not reported, plus the numerous cases of individual violence would not have been reported except in local newspapers.

The war was far from over.

The above drawing is by Alfred Waud and is captioned "On skirmish line Officer turning to look at a dying soldier". This hasty sketch immediately gripped me when I was looking through the Library of Congress collection. It looks like it was drawn from life and is more expressive than many more polished works of art.

S is for Slavery in Civil War Missouri

We're now more than halfway through the April A to Z Challenge. I've been meeting lots of interesting bloggers!

Continuing in the more serious vein that I started yesterday, today I want to briefly discuss slavery in Civil War Missouri. Slavery there was of a different character than in many other states. Most slave owners had only one or two slaves, and worked alongside them in the fields. The giant plantations we think of when we imagine the Antebellum South were a rarity in Missouri. The only large-scale use of slaves was for hemp cultivation, which required exacting manual labor.

The first generations of white immigrants into Missouri were mainly from Southern states and they brought their ideas and slaves with them. Starting in the 1840s, however, a large number of German immigrants arrived. Many were refugees from social upheavals back home where they tried, and failed, to improve the lot of the peasant. They looked upon slavery as another form of exploitation. Also, Americans from Northern states started to arrive at the booming river ports such as St. Louis.

At the start of the war, urban areas were generally Unionist, while rural areas were generally secessionist. The Union army quickly took control of the state, and ironically this kept many slaves in bondage. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 only freed slaves in states then in rebellion. Since Missouri wasn't in rebellion, slavery continued nearly to the end of the war.

Arkansas, however, was considered a state in rebellion, so many Arkansas slaves fled north to Missouri, where they were set free. Some settled in St. Louis, while others took (or were forced to take) jobs with the Union army. Many of the men joined black regiments like the First Kansas Colored Volunteers.

Once the slaves were freed and the war ended, black Missourians had other hurdles to overcome. Segregation laws were soon put in place as a result of white fear of what all these former slaves might do with their freedom.


Eastman Johnson's Ride for Liberty courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

B is for Bushwhackers

It's the second day of the A to Z Challenge and so of course B is for bushwhackers!

Bushwhackers were Confederate guerrillas. They generally did not have an official position in the Confederate army and fought the war "on their own hook." They were especially rife in Missouri and Arkansas, where they burned bridges, tore down telegraph wire, ambushed Union patrols and supply wagons, and even attacked small towns.

One of the protagonists of my Civil War novel A Fine Likeness is teenaged bushwhacker Jimmy Rawlins. He and his friends cause trouble in Missouri until they meet up with the band of Bloody Bill Anderson, the most notorious bushwhacker of them all. Jimmy is fictional, but Bloody Bill was all too real.

This photo shows three of Bloody Bill's men, well equipped with Colt Navy revolvers and bottles of liquor. Number 2 is Dave Poole, who has a memorable scene in the novel at the Battle of Fayette.

B is also for the Battle of Boonville, the first battle in Civil War Missouri and one of the first anywhere in that war. While it only lasted twenty minutes, it had an important effect on the war west of the Mississippi. Hit the link to see an article I wrote about it.


Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Civil War Photo Friday: Captain Daniel Turrentine, 12th Arkansas Infantry

Here's a Library of Congress photo of Captain Daniel Turrentine of Company G, 12th Arkansas Infantry Regiment. What struck me about this photo is how young this guy looks. He looks a lot like someone I had in one of my freshman-level writing classes back when I taught at Pima Community College.

According to his family history website, he was born in 1832, so he was actually in his thirties when this shot was taken. He survived the war and died in 1905.

A hundred and fifty years ago today, Captain Turrentine was having a bad time of it. He was at Island No. 10 in the Mississippi getting bombarded by the Union navy. The fortification would fall on April 8 and the regiment was captured. They were exchanged later that same year and fought again.

Civil War Photo Friday: Union soldier of the VII Corps (Department of Arkansas)

This is an unidentified soldier from the Union VII Corps of the Department of Arkansas. The Corps was formed in January of 1864 and got most of its fighting during the Camden Campaign under General Steele.

The soldier carries a "Volcanic pistol" from the fearsomely named Volcanic Repeating Arms Company. This was a lever-action repeating pistol that saw some use during the war although it wasn't as popular as the Colt revolver.

Was this Union soldier from Arkansas, or just assigned there? Although Arkansas was a Confederate state, several Union regiments were raised there. In fact, every Confederate state contributed regiments to the Union army. Support for secession was by no means universal in the South. Desertion was rife and Unionist guerrilla bands operated in many areas. On the other hand, there were Southern sympathizers in northern states, although their activities were limited.

Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Northern Arkansas in chaos during the Civil War

In my last post about foot burning in the Civil War, I talked about how northern Arkansas was a No Man's Land during the late Civil War.

For the first two years of the war, most of Arkansas was firmly in Confederate hands. The Ozarks in the northern part of the state, however, went their own way as they always have. Some people were for the south, others for the north, and many simply wanted to stay out of it. When Little Rock fell on 10 September 1863, central Arkansas came under the control of the Union. The rebel armies retreated to southern Arkansas and were too weak to challenge the Union troops in the center of the state.

The Union troops in Arkansas were undermanned, and could do little more than hold the line. Large swaths of the Arkansas Ozarks were left unguarded and soon became prey to roving bands who robbed civilians. Some of these groups claimed to be on one side or the other, but many were simply bandits.

In the fall of 1864, Confederate General Sterling Price decided to launch an ambitious plan to march north from southern Arkansas and invade Missouri. This is the setting for my Missouri Civil War novel A Fine Likeness. In preparation for the invasion, Price sent Confederate cavalry raider J.O. Shelby and his Iron Brigade to slip across the Arkansas River into northern Arkansas to round up deserters and conscript locals. Shelby reported “the entire country overrun with able-bodied men; recruiting officers quarreling or sunk in total apathy; predatory bands of thieves roaming over the country at will, killing some, burning the feet of others, and all hungering with the lust of robbery; one officer refusing to report to another, no organizations, no discipline, no arms, no leader, no desire to fight, no anything.”

Currently I'm writing another book in the House Divided series that is loosely tired to A Fine Likeness. One of the protagonists is a member of Shelby's Iron Brigade who deserts after Price is defeated and retreats south. He finds himself hiding out in this chaotic region. It's a great setting for a historical novel because anything can happen there, and everything does.

For more on Shelby and his Iron Brigade, check out my book Ride Around Missouri: Shelby's Great Raid 1863.

Foot burning in the Civil War

As I've noted before in my post about scalping (Warning: graphic image) the Civil War was anything but civil in some parts. One common method of torture in the Trans-Mississippi theater was foot burning.

An example from Turnbo's Tales of the Ozarks: War and Guerrilla Stories is typical. Silas Claborn Turnbo was born in Taney County, Missouri in 1844 and fought with the 27th Arkansas Confederate Infantry. After the war he collected many tales from the Ozarks about the chaotic times that region experienced. In one story, he relates how a man named John Sights or Sykes living in Madison County, Arkansas, lived alone in a sparsely populated region. Two of his sons were in the Federal army and two in the Confederate army. He himself was for the South. Sights/Sykes sent his daughter and slaves to Texas for the duration of the war and sent all his valuables with her.

Turnbo relates: "One night in the fall of 1864, a set of cut-throats rode up to Sight's house and told Mr. Sights in a threatening way to give up his money. His answer was, 'I won't do it, you devils.' They told him they would make him do it.

"'Well,' said he, 'go to work if you think you can make me do it, you heathenish set of scoundrels.'"

The gang then strung him up as if to hang him, then let him drop. They did this twice but he refused to tell them anything. Interestingly, this is the same method of interrogation used on Reuben Samuel, the father-in-law of Jesse James in an attempt to learn the whereabouts of Frank James and his guerrilla buddies.

When hanging didn't work on poor Sights, they "tied his feet fast together and his hands behind his back and took his shoes and socks off his feet, and when this was accomplished, the wretches picked him up and poked him feet foremost into the fire and pulled him back, then jabbed them into the fire again." They continued this torture until "the flesh on his feet was burned to a crisp and the flesh on his legs was cooked half way to the knees."

Eventually they left him for dead. Later one of his few neighbors happened by and summoned a doctor from the Federal army, who had no choice but to amputate both legs. Sights survived the war for four years and all his children survived too, but they must have all been forever traumatized by what had happened.

Note that Turnbo doesn't state which side the ruthless gang was on. Chances are they weren't on either side. Northern Arkansas was sort of a No Man's Land at that time, filled with deserters from both sides, bushwhackers who claimed to fight for the South, Jayhawkers who claimed to fight for the North, and simple bandits. More on that next time.