Battle of Mine Creek
Kansas
On the same day as the skirmish at Marais des Cygnes, a much larger and more decisive fight exploded two miles south, on the banks of Mine Creek. What happened here on October twenty-fifth, eighteen sixty-four, was the second-largest cavalry battle of the entire Civil War and the largest military engagement ever fought on Kansas soil.
General Sterling Price had entered the Trans-Mississippi with twelve thousand men and high ambitions. By the time his battered army staggered south from Westport, it was more mob than military. Hundreds of wagons clogged the prairie roads, slowing everything to a crawl. When Price's column attempted to cross Mine Creek, the wagons jammed. Soldiers bunched up on the north bank in a mass that the Union cavalry could not miss.
Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Benteen and Colonel John Philips, commanding roughly twenty-five hundred troopers, had ridden hard from Westport to catch them. What they saw was an opportunity. They did not pause to dismount, a customary precaution before a charge. They simply rode straight at a Confederate line that outnumbered them nearly three to one. The attack lasted perhaps twenty minutes. Confederate discipline collapsed almost instantly. Soldiers fled, some plunging into Mine Creek to swim across. The Union troopers captured an estimated six hundred prisoners and, most remarkably, two Confederate generals: Major General John Marmaduke and Brigadier General William Cabell. Capturing two general officers in a single engagement was extraordinary. The Confederate Army of Missouri never recovered.
Price continued south to Arkansas with the remnants of his force, having failed to take a single Missouri city or influence the presidential election. His raid was the Confederacy's last major offensive effort west of the Mississippi.
The Mine Creek Battlefield State Historic Site preserves a stretch of the original ground, including the creek crossing where the rout began. A small museum holds artifacts from that chaotic morning when the western Confederacy effectively died.
