Battle of Dry Wood Creek: James Lane and the Mules

In the first summer of the Civil War, before anyone quite understood how long or how brutal the conflict would become, a skirmish along a small Missouri creek established the dangerous character of the war on the western border.

It was September second, eighteen sixty-one. Confederate Major General Sterling Price, flush from his victory at Wilson's Creek three weeks earlier, was leading six thousand members of the Missouri State Guard northwest from Springfield. His destination was Fort Scott, Kansas, and the supply depot that sat there. Price's men were poorly armed and barely organized, but they were numerous, and their goal was to extend Confederate control toward the Kansas line.

Fort Scott's commander sent out former Kansas senator James Lane, now leading a six-hundred-man cavalry battalion, to locate Price's rumored force. Lane found it near Big Dry Wood Creek, about twelve miles from the fort. Lane had the element of surprise and attacked. The fighting was sharp, lasting roughly two hours. But Price's numerical advantage was overwhelming. Lane's Union cavalry was forced to retire toward Fort Scott, and in the confusion of the retreat the Confederates captured the Union mules. The battle's informal name ever since has been the Battle of the Mules.

By Lane's report federal losses were eleven men killed or wounded. By Price's report Confederate losses were about twenty-five. In numbers alone it was a minor engagement. But its strategic significance was real: Price's advance had demonstrated that the Confederacy could threaten the Kansas border, pushing Union forces to consolidate around population centers rather than project force into southwestern Missouri. The result was that for much of the following year, that corner of the state became a contested no-man's-land, setting the stage for the brutal guerrilla warfare that would earn this region the name the Bleeding Border.

Lane himself went on to become one of the most controversial figures of the Kansas conflict, a man some called a liberator and others a plunderer. But here at Dry Wood Creek, in the war's first months, he found out the hard way what Price's numbers meant.