At dawn on 10 August 1861 Brigadier General Nathaniel Lyon attacked a larger Southern army camped along Wilson's Creek, southwest of Springfield, Missouri: Confederate troops under Ben McCulloch and the Missouri State Guard under Sterling Price. Lyon's main column held a ridge later called Bloody Hill against repeated attacks, but a second Union column under Franz Sigel was routed, and Lyon was killed, the first Union general killed in action. Short of ammunition, the Union troops withdrew to Springfield. The National Park Service calls Wilson's Creek the first major Civil War battle west of the Mississippi. The page also recalls the storming of the Tuileries in Paris on 10 August 1792.
Battle of Wilson's Creek
10 August 1861 · 165 years ago
Two armies, one idea
In the summer of 1861 Lyon's Union Army of the West was camped at Springfield, in southwestern Missouri. Against it stood the Missouri State Guard of Major General Sterling Price, a former governor of the state, and Confederate troops from Arkansas under Brigadier General Ben McCulloch. On 4 August, Price reported, he put his Missourians under McCulloch's direction, and McCulloch wrote that he "assumed command of the entire force".1
The sources count the armies differently. The American Battlefield Trust gives 5,400 Union and 11,000 Confederate troops engaged. The National Park Service's order of battle gives 5,431 for Lyon's army and 12,125 for the Southern Western Army, including an estimated 2,000 unarmed members of the State Guard. George Knapp's staff ride guide for the U.S. Army's Combat Studies Institute has 5,400 Union and 10,200 Confederate troops engaged.2
On 9 August each side planned to attack the other. McCulloch called off his night march when rain began, fearing, as he reported, that his ammunition would be ruined for want of cartridge boxes. Lyon decided to strike first and split his army: the main body would hit the camps from the north while Colonel Franz Sigel would swing wide to the south and strike their rear. The National Park Service gives Sigel 1,200 men; the historian William Garrett Piston gives him 1,100 men and six guns.3
Bloody Hill
Major J. M. Schofield reported that "at about 5 o'clock a brisk skirmish was opened", and the American Battlefield Trust also has the attack begin at about 5 a.m.; McCulloch reported it at 5.30. The National Park Service puts the battlefield ten miles southwest of Springfield, the Trust about 12. At first light Sigel's guns drove Southern cavalry from its camp in a farm field.4
Lyon's men took the crest of the ridge afterwards called Bloody Hill, while Price formed his Missourians on the slope below. The Southerners attacked the Union line there three times that morning without breaking it. Meanwhile McCulloch's men surprised Sigel's column and routed it.5
"I fear the day is lost"
Schofield reported that Lyon, his horse killed, was wounded in the leg and the head: "He walked slowly a few paces to the rear and said, 'I fear the day is lost.' But upon being encouraged that our troops could again be rallied, that the disorder was only temporary, he passed over to the right of the center, where our line seemed to be giving way, obtained another horse, and, swinging his hat in the air, led forward the troops, who promptly rallied around him. A few moments later he was carried from the field dead." Major Samuel D. Sturgis's report gives Lyon's words in the same form and adds that "a fatal ball was lodged in the general's breast".6
The National Park Service has Lyon killed on Bloody Hill at about 9:30 a.m.. Knapp's narrative of the battle also puts the fatal bullet at about 9:30, while his tour of the field has Lyon wounded about 10:00 and then shot through the heart. The Park Service calls him the first Union general killed in action, and Knapp the first Union general officer killed in battle in the war. E. F. Ware, a private in the 1st Iowa, wrote in 1907 that his regiment believed Lyon fell leading one of its charges, and that the 1st Missouri and the 2nd Kansas claimed him too. Price was hit as well: Piston and Thomas L. Snead, acting adjutant general of the Missouri State Guard, have him wounded in the side, and McCulloch reported him wounded "slightly".7
Withdrawal
Command passed to Sturgis. He wrote: "Our ammunition was well-nigh exhausted, and should the enemy make this discovery through a slackening of our fire, total annihilation was all we could expect". With no word from Sigel, Sturgis and his officers decided to withdraw. The National Park Service has Sturgis order the withdrawal by 11 a.m., Schofield has the fighting close "at about 11.30 o'clock", and Snead also writes that it was half past eleven. The Southerners did not pursue.8
McCulloch told the end differently. In his report of 12 August he wrote: "The incessant roll of musketry was deafening, and the balls fell thick as hailstones, but still our gallant Southerners pushed onward, and with one wild yell broke upon the enemy, pushing them back and strewing the ground with their dead." The battle, he added, "lasted six hours and a half".9
Lyon's body was left on the field. According to the National Park Service, Southern forces turned John Ray's farmhouse into a field hospital and the body was carried there; the family laid it out on their best bed, and Roxanna Ray supplied a bedspread to cover it. Dr. S. H. Melcher, assistant surgeon of the 5th Missouri, said in testimony printed in 1883 that the body was "placed on a bed" and later covered "with a spread or sheet furnished me by Mrs. Ray".10
Counting the cost
The Union return of casualties in the Official Records lists 223 killed, 721 wounded and 291 missing, an aggregate of 1,235, and the American Battlefield Trust's estimate for the Union is also 1,235. The National Park Service gives 1,317 Union casualties, and Knapp gives the same 1,317 as 258 killed, 873 wounded and 186 missing or captured.11
For the Southern side the Trust estimates 1,095 casualties and the National Park Service gives 1,222; Knapp writes that the Confederates reported 1,230, with 279 killed and 951 wounded. McCulloch's report gave 265 killed, 800 wounded and 30 missing. Price counted his State Guard alone: "our State forces consisted of only 5,221 officers and men; that of those no less than 156 died upon the field, while 517 were wounded".12
A disputed victory
The American Battlefield Trust records Wilson's Creek as a Confederate victory, the most significant 1861 battle west of the Mississippi, and says it gave the Confederates control of southwestern Missouri. The National Park Service calls it the first major Civil War battle fought west of the Mississippi and says the costly Southern victory focused national attention on the war in Missouri. The Park Service's longer account reaches the opposite verdict on the campaign: "Lyon lost the battle and his life, but he achieved his goal: Missouri remained under Union control". Piston calls it the second major Confederate victory of the war and notes that the Southerners held the field, yet contemporaries and historians argued over who had won. The war's larger battles are surveyed in our guide to the greatest battles of the Civil War.13
Battle of the Yellow Sea, 1904: the Port Arthur squadron's failed escape
10 August 1904 · 122 years ago
In the Yellow Sea, the Russian squadron trapped at Port Arthur tried to break out to Vladivostok and was met by the Japanese fleet in the Russo-Japanese War. The breakout failed, most Russian ships returned to port and several others were interned in neutral harbors.
Read the full story of Battle of the Yellow Sea, 1904: the Port Arthur squadron's failed escape ›Also on this day
1792: armed insurgents stormed the Tuileries palace in Paris, defended by the regiment of Swiss Guards. Alain-Jacques Czouz-Tornare, in the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, puts the Guards at 800 to 900 and writes that Louis XVI ordered them to lay down their arms in the middle of the fight; Karl Pfyffer von Altishofen's Récit, written by a man who was not in Paris that day, prints the king's note ordering the Swiss to lay down their arms and withdraw to their barracks. The same day, according to the Archives parlementaires, the Legislative Assembly invited the French people to form a National Convention and decreed that the head of the executive power was "provisoirement suspendu de ses fonctions" (provisionally suspended from his functions, our translation). The Swiss dead are disputed. The Lion Monument in Lucerne owes its origin to Pfyffer's account. According to swissinfo, its inscription gives 760 dead and 350 survivors. Tornare cites a report of 12 November 1792 by the regiment's colonel, d'Affry, for about 300 Swiss killed, and writes that the revolutionaries recorded 300 dead of their own. swissinfo, in a passage built on Tornare's comments, reports that recent studies put the Guards killed at about 300, not 760 as on the monument.14
