Mine Creek battlefield

Major General Sterling Price had marched into Missouri in September 1864 under orders to take St. Louis, rally Southern sympathizers, and — per Edmund Kirby Smith's August 4 directive — weaken Lincoln's chances at reelection. St. Louis and Jefferson City both proved too fortified, so the raid became a plundering circuit that accumulated a five-hundred-wagon supply train. The Union crushed him at Westport on October 23; he turned south through Kansas toward the depot at Fort Scott, fighting a running skirmish on the morning of the 25th from Trading Post down to Mine Creek.

The rear guard bought time for divisions under Major Generals James Fagan and John S. Marmaduke to form on the north bank. Opposite them came the brigades of Colonel John Philips and Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Benteen — the same Benteen who would survive the Little Bighorn twelve years later. Confederate artillery opened first. The Union charge that followed overran the line: roughly 1,200 Confederate casualties against about 100 Union, with six hundred to a thousand prisoners, among them Generals Marmaduke and William Cabell. Price lost again that afternoon at the Marmiton River, burned most of his wagons, and reached Texas in December with a skeleton of the army he had led north.

Among the Kansans on the field was Samuel J. Reader, a farmer-soldier who survived the charge and later painted the battle from memory — 'It Went Against Us,' his own candid title — one of the few Civil War battles documented in oil by an actual participant. His diary and the painting remain primary evidence for how the charge looked from inside it.

The ground itself changed little. The National Register nomination describes rolling pasture, the creek bending south midway, the Trading Post-Fort Scott road crossing at three fords, two still traceable — and the steep bluffs that made the creek 'practically impassable elsewhere,' which is to say the terrain decided the battle before the men did.

Battlefield haunting files are predictable in shape and Mine Creek's fits: visitors report riders where no riders are, the crack and thunder of a fight that ended in an hour, figures in the wet grass along the ford. Nothing documented, the register notes — just the standard residue the archive expects of ground that took 1,300 casualties before noon.

What is documented is the arithmetic: 7,000 men pinned against a creek by their own wagons, two generals captured, a raid for Missouri reduced to refugees bound for Texas. The field kept the fords. The legend keeps the rest.