Pea Ridge: Native American Soldiers and the Battle That Saved Missouri

On March seventh and eighth of eighteen sixty-two, more than twenty-six thousand soldiers fought in the hills of northwestern Arkansas in what became the largest Civil War engagement west of the Mississippi River. The Union forces under General Samuel Curtis had been pushed north through Missouri and pursued into Arkansas. The Confederate commander Earl Van Dorn had moved to flank and envelop the Union position, dividing his army in a maneuver that required a night march through below-freezing temperatures. The Battle of Pea Ridge, also called Elkhorn Tavern, lasted two days. The Confederates ran short of ammunition. Van Dorn ordered a retreat.

The Union victory did not merely prevent a Confederate advance into Missouri; it effectively ended Confederate hopes of controlling the trans-Mississippi West for the duration of the war. Missouri remained in the Union. The strategic consequence of these two days in the Arkansas Ozarks shaped the western theater of the war for the next three years.

Among the Confederate forces at Pea Ridge were two regiments of Cherokee soldiers serving under Colonel Stand Watie, a Cherokee leader who had signed the controversial eighteen thirty-five treaty that authorized the Trail of Tears removal. Watie and his Cherokee soldiers fighting for the Confederacy is one of the war's more complex biographical facts. The Confederacy had promised treaty protections to the Five Civilized Tribes in Indian Territory; the Union, whatever its stated ideals, had broken its own treaties consistently for decades.

Stand Watie continued fighting long after Appomattox. He did not surrender until June twenty-third, eighteen sixty-five, more than two months after Lee's surrender, making him the last Confederate general to lay down arms.