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The Battle Of Wilson s Creek

In 1883, veterans of the Blue & Gray united in Springfield to honor the memory of Union General Nathaniel Lyon. This was twenty-two years after the battle on “Bloody Hill” or as the North called it, Wilson Creek. An 18-foot monument was dedicated and unveiled on the Springfield Square. Two years later in 1885, the monument was moved to the National Cemetery where it still stands among the graves of the men from both sides who fought and died at the battle.

When he became the first Civil War general to be killed in action, Lyon was 41 years old. The West Point graduate and professional soldier had served with distinction in the Mexican War. He understood all too well just how devided Missouri was on the question of slavery and session. Prior to being posted to St. Louis just before the outbreak of war, he spent six years in Kansas where he developed an intense dislike for the pro-slavery movement. To Lyon’s dismay, he found St. Louis and much of Missouri including its governor, leaning toward the South. A significant exception was the large German-American population in St. Louis that formed the core of unionist sentiment in the state.

As the war began, Lyon suspected that the pro-Confederate state militia was about to capture the vital arsenal just outside of St. Louis. Lyon surrounded the camp with a force of Regular troops and pro-Union volunteers (to include many German immigrants who were veterans of the 1848 failed revolution there) and informed the militiamen that they were prisoners. As the captives were being taken back to the city, a riot broke out in the streets and Lyon’s men fired into a mob of civilians, killing twenty-eight of them. The incident immediately widened the breach between pro-Union and pro-Confederate Missourians.

After winning easy victories at Jefferson City and Boonville, Lyon established a base at Springfield in June 1861 from which he hoped to drive former Governor Sterling Price and his Confederates completely out of Missouri. The outcome was not as Lyon had planned.

Considering the lesser number of men engaged Wilson’s Creek was far bloodier than Bull Run. One-fourth of the Federal soldiers were killed, wounded, or missing. The 1st Missouri Union Infantry marched on the field with 720 men and left it with just 420; the 1st Kansas lost 300 of 800 men. More than half of the Confederate casualties were from Price’s Missouri regiments, but the 3d Louisiana and two Arkansas regiments also took heavy losses.

So far as the overall War was concerned, Wilson’s Creek changed almost nothing. In or out of the Union, Missouri was doomed by geography to suffer four years of guerrilla fighting. Many of those who would be involved in that border terror---men such as William Quantrill, Frank James, Cole Younger, and Wild Bill Hickok were there at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek.

The family of Jesse Rogers b. 1791 was living in very close to the battlefield. He, like his brother, Major David Rogers b. 1779, was a veteran of the War of 1812. His great-grandson, Charles Elkins Rogers b. 1892, mentioned in an article he wrote that Robert Doak Rogers' son and Jesse's grandson, John Clark Rogers, was eight years old when the Civil War battle of Wilson's Creek took place near their farm on in the summer of 1861 just after the fall of Ft. Sumter. As the battle raged near-by, Johnny's task was to keep the geese quiet so that Grandpa Jesse who was a veteran of the War of 1812 could hear the cannons roar. See: http://198.209.8.166/wrvq/v2/n9/f66b.html for other interesting stories about this line in and around Ozark, Christian County, Missouri.

This page was last updated on: June 15 2010 08:04:02