Wilson's Creek, The First Blood West of the Mississippi
Near Springfield, Missouri
The morning of August tenth, eighteen sixty-one began in darkness and dew. Union Brigadier General Nathaniel Lyon had decided to attack before the Confederates attacked him. He split his force of roughly five thousand men into two columns, one under himself and one under Colonel Franz Sigel, a German-born officer commanding a largely German-American force from St.
Louis. The plan was to hit the Confederate encampment at Wilson's Creek from two directions simultaneously. Sigel's column succeeded at first, rolling up the Confederate right and causing real panic in the Southern camp.
Then it fell apart. Confederates regrouped, Sigel's men mistook gray-uniformed Louisiana soldiers for fellow Federals and held their fire, and the column was routed. Sigel fled the field.
Lyon pressed on with his column at a ridge called Bloody Hill. He was outnumbered nearly two to one. He had already been wounded twice, in the leg and in the head.
At approximately nine-thirty in the morning, while leading a charge personally to rally his faltering men, Nathaniel Lyon was shot through the chest and killed. He was the first Union general to die in the Civil War. The Union force, now leaderless, withdrew.
The battle was technically a Confederate victory. They had held Wilson's Creek. But the Confederates were too exhausted and short of supplies to pursue, and Missouri would never fall fully to the Confederate cause.
Wilson's Creek was the second major land battle of the Civil War, coming just three weeks after Bull Run. It sent a message to Washington that the war in the West was real. More than seventeen thousand men had fought here, on land that was mostly farms and creek bottoms, and roughly twenty-five hundred of them were killed, wounded, or missing.
The battlefield is preserved today as a National Battlefield. Walk out to Bloody Hill and the terrain does most of the explaining. The ridge is exposed.
There is nowhere to hide. Lyon's men stood here for hours knowing what was coming, and most of them stood anyway.
