Prairie D'Ane: The Bluff That Saved Camden

The open farmland of Nevada County, Arkansas, looks peaceful today. But in April of eighteen sixty-four, it was the pivot point of one of the most consequential Union campaigns in the Trans-Mississippi theater of the Civil War.

The Camden Expedition was part of a larger Red River Campaign. Union planners envisioned two Federal armies converging on Shreveport, Louisiana, the Confederate command center for the entire western theater. Major General Nathaniel Banks would press northward up the Red River from Louisiana; Major General Frederick Steele would drive southwestward from Little Rock with thirteen thousand troops. If the pincer worked, Confederate General Kirby Smith's army would be crushed.

Steele left Little Rock on March twenty-third, eighteen sixty-four. His route brought him southwest through the Arkansas pinelands toward a singular landmark: Prairie de Ann, a circular open prairie roughly twenty-five to thirty miles across, surrounded entirely by forest. It was a crossroads in every sense. To the west lay Washington, the Confederate capital of Arkansas. To the east sat Camden, a heavily fortified Confederate supply hub. To the south, Shreveport waited across the Louisiana border.

Confederate General Sterling Price, commanding roughly seven thousand men, moved to block Steele at the prairie. Skirmishing erupted on April tenth. Steele's forces attacked the Confederate line, driving it back about a mile before being checked. Fighting continued through the eleventh and twelfth. On the thirteenth, Price's men returned and fell hard on Steele's rearguard under Brigadier General John Thayer. After four hours of fighting, Price disengaged.

The result was a Union victory, but a narrow and strategically complicated one. Rather than continue toward Shreveport, Steele pivoted east into Camden, abandoning the original objective. The campaign's momentum was stalling. Subsequent Confederate victories at Poison Spring and Marks' Mills would eventually force Steele to retreat entirely back to Little Rock.

The battlefield was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-four, and in nineteen ninety-four it became part of the Camden Expedition Sites National Historic Landmark. The open prairie where Price and Steele maneuvered is largely preserved, one of the few intact Civil War landscapes in Arkansas.