Battle of Devil's Backbone

The ridge about four miles southwest of Greenwood, Arkansas, where the Ouachita Mountains begin to rise from the Arkansas River Valley, is called Devil's Backbone. It is a long, narrow spine of rock with steep drops on both sides, the kind of terrain that any retreating army would want at its back and any pursuing army would dread. On September first, eighteen sixty-three, it became a battlefield.

In the summer of eighteen sixty-three the Union was driving Confederate forces out of the Arkansas River Valley. Fort Smith, which had been a Confederate stronghold, was the target. Union Major General James Blunt had been pushing south through Indian Territory and Arkansas with speed and aggression. Confederate Brigadier General William Cabell commanded the Rebel rearguard, about twelve hundred fifty men, tasked with buying time for the larger Confederate withdrawal.

Blunt sent Colonel William Cloud with fifteen hundred cavalry and artillery to pin Cabell down on the ridge. The fighting opened on the morning of September first along the crest and slopes of Devil's Backbone. Cabell had already sent his wagons and ordnance to the rear the night before, a sign that he never intended to hold the position indefinitely. Union artillery pounded the ridge while cavalry probed the flanks. By afternoon Cabell's men were giving way, retreating southeast toward Waldron, and the road to Fort Smith was open.

Fort Smith fell to Union forces within a day of the battle. The city would remain in Federal hands for the rest of the war. Devil's Backbone was the final obstacle, the last Confederate attempt to protect the Arkansas River Valley corridor.

The battlefield today is largely unpreserved, absorbed by private farmland and timber. But the ridge itself, and the name that settlers gave it long before the battle, survives in the landscape just west of the highway. That ridge won and lost a theater of war in a single afternoon.