Battle Royal
Alabama
At a crossing of the Locust Fork River near here, the Civil War caught up with a desperate Union column. In the spring of eighteen sixty-three, Colonel Abel Streight led a raid deep into Alabama, hoping to cut the railroads that supplied the Confederate army. Hunting him relentlessly was the Confederate cavalryman Nathan Bedford Forrest.
On the first of May, as Streight's men struggled to ford the swift waters of the Locust Fork, Forrest struck them at this place, in a sharp clash that locals remembered as the Battle Royal. The pressure forced Streight's exhausted Federals to make tremendous exertions just to get across. The harassment never let up. Two days later, near Cedar Bluff, Streight surrendered his entire command to Forrest, who had famously bluffed a much larger force into giving up.
