Battle of Massard Prairie

A few miles south of Fort Smith, on a flat open stretch of prairie just outside the city, a sharp Confederate cavalry charge took place on July twenty-seventh, eighteen sixty-four. It cost the Union dearly. And almost nobody outside of Sebastian County has heard of it.

Brigadier General Richard Gano led roughly six hundred Confederate soldiers in a thundering assault on the camp of the Sixth Kansas Cavalry, which was bivouacked on Massard Prairie, believing themselves well beyond the reach of Rebel forces. They were wrong. The Confederate column included Texas cavalry alongside Native American units, a combined force that reflected the complicated allegiances of Indian Territory just across the Arkansas border. Many of the Five Civilized Tribes had signed treaties with the Confederacy in eighteen sixty-one, and their fighters were a genuine military force on this front.

The charge broke the Sixth Kansas. Roughly one hundred fifty Union soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured, most of them taken prisoner. Horses, weapons, ammunition, and supplies fell into Confederate hands. The Rebel losses totaled thirty-three men. In military terms it was a rout.

Two months later, in September, Confederate forces won another victory at Cabin Creek in Indian Territory.

For Fort Smith, the summer of eighteen sixty-four was a season of anxiety. The city was a Union-held island in a Confederate-sympathizing river valley, and Massard Prairie was the moment that made that vulnerability impossible to ignore.