Prairie Grove: The Last Battle for Northwest Arkansas

Nine months after Pea Ridge sealed the Union's hold on Missouri, Confederate General Thomas Hindman made one final attempt to reclaim northwest Arkansas. The result was the Battle of Prairie Grove , twenty thousand men locked in a brutal winter engagement on December seventh, eighteen sixty-two, producing twenty-seven hundred casualties and effectively ending Confederate hopes for the region.

Hindman had assembled a force of about eleven thousand in the Boston Mountains south of Fayetteville. His plan was to strike two Union columns before they could join forces. He nearly succeeded. But a series of coordination failures delayed his attack, and by the morning of December seventh, Union General James Blunt's forces from the west and General Francis Herron's column from the north had converged near a small farming community on a ridge above the Illinois River valley.

Hindman established a strong position in the trees along the ridge crest, anchored around the Prairie Grove Church. Herron attacked uphill repeatedly through the afternoon, taking devastating fire, while Blunt struck from the south. The fighting ebbed and surged across open fields and through the church cemetery, leaving bodies among the headstones. Neither side broke. As darkness ended the shooting, the field was a draw , roughly equal losses on both sides.

But in the night, Hindman retreated. He was short on ammunition and had no prospect of reinforcement. Federal troops occupied the ridge the next morning, and The Confederate threat to northwest Arkansas faded, and Union forces held most of the Ozark corridor for the remaining two and a half years of the war.

What makes Prairie Grove remarkable today is how much of it survives. Established as a park in nineteen oh eight, when veterans of the battle still held reunions on the ground where they had fought, it has been protected for more than a century. Walking the ridge today, the sight lines and terrain are essentially unchanged from the afternoon the armies collided. Arkansas holds its largest Civil War reenactment here every other December , the same fields, the same cold, the same ridge.