Naval Combat at West Point

On August fourteenth, eighteen sixty-three, this narrow stretch of the Little Red River became the scene of a strange running gun battle. The Union gunboat Cricket had steamed upriver chasing Confederate steamboats, capturing them near Searcy and rigging makeshift walls of cotton bales across their decks for protection.

As the captured vessels headed back downstream past West Point, they were ambushed by part of General Joseph Shelby's Iron Brigade. The stream was so narrow that overhanging tree limbs brushed the boats and swung them against the bank. Confederate riflemen pressed so close that boarding was stopped only at the point of the bayonet, with those cotton bales absorbing the fire.

The Cricket eventually rejoined the gunboat Lexington, and the combined cannon fire scattered the remaining Confederates.