Charles Zagonyi, Soldier on Two Continents

At the start of the Civil War, both sides were desperate for men with military experience. The last major U.S. conflict had been the Mexican-American War, long enough before that its veterans were beyond prime fighting age. Luckily for the North, it had a good supply of immigrants who were veterans of wars in Europe.

One of them was Charles Zagonyi, a Hungarian who had fought with distinction in his nation's revolution of 1848. Having been born in 1828 he, too, was beyond prime fighting age, but that didn't stop him.

Through connections in the Hungarian community, Zagonyi was invited to join the large personal bodyguard of General John C. Fremont in St. Louis. Fremont was entranced with the pomp and splendor of European armies and surrounded himself with foreigners in glittering costumes. Southerners sneered at all the foreign accents, and Northerners wondered if these strange fellows could actually fight.

Zagonyi got a chance to answer this question October 25, 1861, during the First Battle of Springfield, and the answer was both "yes" and "no". Confederate General Sterling Price's army had taken Lexington in the center of the state before retreating in the face of superior numbers. Now he was in southwest Missouri and only holding one major city in the region--Springfield.

Fremont led 38,000 men to make sure Price didn't come back. At its vanguard was Zagonyi. The Hungarian was given the task of retaking Springfield and decided to do it with a splendid cavalry charge. The charge was splendid all right, that is until it fell into a Confederate ambush.

Zagonyi's men numbered a little more than 300, while there were about 2,000 rebels in town. The Hungarian was in a tight spot, but he pressed forward and after some tough fighting the rebels wavered and ran. "Zagonyi's Charge" soon hit headlines across a North eager for some victories. He could rightly say that he'd seen off a far larger force and taken an important city. On the other hand, he really only defeated a poorly armed rearguard of an already retreating army.

When Fremont was relieved of duty for corruption and failure to adequately defend Missouri (a story I'll get to sometime) Zagonyi found himself out of a job. Fremont later managed to get a command in the Shenandoah Valley in West Virginia, and again hired his old bodyguard as a cavalry commander. Both made a poor showing of themselves and resigned under a cloud.

It's unclear what happened to Zagonyi after the war. While many officers wrote memoirs, for some reason Zagonyi never did.

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Skirmish at Yellow Creek

Compared with the great Civil War campaigns back East, the struggle west of the Mississippi River had relatively few battles. Most of the fights were skirmishes that are all but forgotten today, yet they had a cumulative effect on the outcome of the war.

One such was the skirmish at Yellow Creek on August 13, 1862. Since August 9, Union forces under Col. Odon Guitar and Brig. Gen. Benjamin Loan had been pursuing pro-Confederate Missouri State Guard forces under Col. James Poindexter through Chariton and Livingston Counties in north-central Missouri.

The chase ran across 250 miles. The Union forces numbered 550 horsemen, while Poindexter's rebel force was much larger but suffering from supply problems. Col. Guitar estimated their number to be 1,500-2,000 but officers on both sides were not averse to exaggerating enemy numbers to inflate a victory or excuse a defeat.

Whatever the numbers involved, it was still a sound Union victory. The running fight cost the rebels horses and men, who were shot or fell by the wayside to be captured. The chase only ended when the rebels destroyed the bridge over the Muscle Fork river, stopping the Union pursuit cold.

Guitar boasted that by that point Poindexter only had about 400 men left, "with few arms and no ammunition. All of the latter I captured at Little Compton, with several hundred guns and horses, all his wagons, a large amount of clothing, and other plunder. In the round I have killed, wounded, and drowned 150 of his men and taken about 100 prisoners. Our loss has been 5 men wounded and some 10 horses shot."

He added, "I was unable to bring away a great part of the horses and plunder captured at Little Compton; besides, the condition of the greater part of them was such as to render them worthless. I have killed and worn down the greater part of my horses."

The Westernmost Battle of the Civil War

As I mentioned in my post on the Civil War in Arizona, the year 1862 saw the westernmost fighting of the war when a group of Texas Confederates made it all the way to the western New Mexico Territory (what's now Arizona) and were pushed out by the Union California Column.

The main "battle" happened on April 15 at Picacho Peak, 50 miles northwest of Tucson at 111° 24' 17'' W longitude, when the advance guard of the column clashed with Confederate pickets. This is often called the westernmost land battle of the Civil War.

Well, it wasn't really a battle but a skirmish with only 23 soldiers involved, and there was a skirmish even further west than that one. On March 30, while the California Column was still headed for Tucson, it came upon a group of ten Confederates at Stanwix Station led by 2nd Lt. Jack Swilling, pictured here in this Wikimedia Commons image. They were burning hay that had been left out on the column's route to supply the horses. Swilling's men were greatly outnumbered and after firing a few shots, one of which wounded Private William Frank Semmelrogge, they wisely withdrew. Semmelrogge later recovered.

But we're not done yet! You see, Stanwix Station was about six miles southwest of Agua Caliente, which is at 113° 19′ 28″ W. Almost a year later on May 20, 1863, there was a shooting at La Paz, Arizona, which is at 114° 25′ 35″ W. Confederate sympathizer William Edwards fired upon a crowd of Union soldiers, killing Privates Ferdinand Behn and Thomas Gainor and wounding a civilian bystander. Edwards fled into the desert, where he later died of thirst. There was no exchange of fire and Edwards wasn't in the Confederate army, so whether you want to call this a skirmish or not is up to you.

In California there was a band of robbers who called themselves Confederate Partisan Rangers. Holding up a stagecoach doesn't count as a skirmish, though. There was also a standoff between Union soldiers and Confederate sympathizers with no shots fired, so let's strike that one out too.

None of these are battles. If you want the westernmost BATTLE of the Civil War, you have to go all the was east to Valverde, New Mexico, where on February 20-21 at longitude 106° 54' 53" W, several thousand men in blue and gray had a real, proper, standup battle.

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.

Underground Exploration: why I'm hooked on caving

I've always liked to explore. That thrill of discovery has taken me to 33 countries, up to 34 next month when I go to Slovenia. But you don't have to go to some faraway land to see something new. One of my hobbies is caving. Anytime I've lived in a region where there were good caves I hurried to get underground. I've traveled beneath New Mexico, Missouri, and now Cantabria in northern Spain where I'm living now.

Caving is physically challenging and emotionally rewarding. The hidden natural beauty of the world beneath our feet is something only a tiny fraction of us ever get to see. Hit that link in the previous paragraph to see some of my caving articles. There are more on the way!

Tracking rebel guerrillas in the Civil War

In Missouri and Arkansas during the Civil War, the thick underbrush was the Confederate guerrillas' greatest ally. Anyone who has hiked in those states knows the foliage gets so thick you can't see ten feet. This meant the Union troops trying to hunt down the rebels had to get good at tracking, using the same techniques they'd used to hunt deer in peacetime.

In 1863, Captain William Kemper of the Ninth Cavalry Regiment, Missouri State Militia, was having trouble with guerrillas in Clay County in western Missouri, especially a band under the command of Fletch Taylor.

Kemper had his men lie beside a road for a while in ambush but the guerrillas never passed, so he turned to tracking. He scouted along the Fishing River and came to the farm of John Eaton, a known secessionist. Kemper reported: "I noticed at the yard fence a path made, both by horses and men. . .I took the  track at once, and followed it through a pasture adjoining the yard into a densely brushy pasture, where I came upon the party of bushwhackers."

The guerrillas were only surprised for a moment. They were used to hasty exits, whether from camp or from the house of some friendly rebel woman cooking them dinner. Covering their retreat with a hail of bullets from their six shooters, they soon disappeared into the brush. Kemper would have to hunt for Taylor's group again.

In that crowd of retreating bushwhackers was a certain Jesse James and his brother Frank James. They were known to authorities as rebel guerrillas. It wouldn't be many years before they were known to the whole world

Lieutenant Sardius Smith on his experiences in Civil War Missouri

As I've mentioned frequently on this blog, the Civil War in Missouri quickly shifted from one of standing battles to a Confederate guerrilla campaign in the Union-occupied state. Guerrilla wars are especially brutal, and Missouri was no exception. Rebel irregulars burnt homes and used various tortures on Unionist civilians such as foot burning.

The Union soldiers assigned to suppress the insurgency became hardened as well. In 1862 Lt. Sardius Smith wrote in his diary, "We are getting quite hardened by this kind of thing, and I can go into a house with a pistol in my hand, with a smile on my face, speak politely to the ladies, ask where their men are in order that I may shoot them or take them prisoner with as much grace as though I was making a call for friendship's sake."

Anna Slayback of St. Joseph had a civilian's view when she wrote on May 9, 1862, "We Union people are very low up here. The laws are becoming more stringent on the rebels in Mo. & they must be put down. They are impudent & rejoice over our defeat. This must not be."

In a later letter she wrote, "Were the rebels a foreign foe or a stronger people, then subduing them might be called victories. But this is a family quarrel, brother against brother, & we bite & devour one another that other nations may mock & laugh at our folly."