ADDRESS TO THE ARMY OF THE SOUTH-WEST
AT NATIONAL ENCAMPMENT, G. A. R.
WASHINGTON, D. C.
OCTOBER, 1902
My connection with the United States forces west of the Mississippi River
commenced at the beginning of the war, when I took my Regiment, the Fourth
Iowa, to St. Louis, and fell under the command of Fremont. I took part in
the campaigns of that Department until after the Battle of Pea Ridge, when
I left the command and went to the Army of the Tennessee. After the
Atlanta campaign, in November, 1864, I returned to Missouri as commander
of that Department and Army.
Of the transactions of the troops south of Missouri I have very little
knowledge; but I know that the troops which served west of the Mississippi
never had credit for the amount of work, hardships and exposures they
endured. Owing to the fact of there having been fought there but two great
battles, Wilson's Creek and Pea Ridge, and two minor ones, what they did
was swallowed up in the great events that occurred east of the
Mississippi. Even Pope's campaign opening up a portion of the Mississippi
is hardly ever spoken of.
The Battle of Wilson's Creek, the first signal contest west of the
Mississippi, was fought before my command reached St. Louis. The history
of that battle, and the credit that is due to the commander of that Army,
General Lyon, and his men, are well known. There participated in the
battle many officers who were afterwards greatly distinguished; among them
Schofield, Sturgis, Hunter, and others. It was the first battle that
called attention to the West, and to the troops west of the Mississippi.
That battle was lost because a portion of the command did not comprehend
and fulfill General Lyon's orders. This mistake would have been overcome
if it had not been for the loss in the battle of its commander, General
Lyon. But the fighting of the troops and the boldness of the movement
immediately attracted the attention of the country, and held it until
after the battle of Pea Ridge.
The Army of the Southwest, which General Curtis commanded, and which
traveled three hundred miles from its base without water or rail
communication, and lived off a barren country, and which fought that
decisive Battle of Pea Ridge and cleared the country until nearly the end
of the war of any organized force of the enemy, had more marching and
endured more suffering than the great Armies I was connected with east of
the Mississippi, and its three days' fighting at Pea Ridge compared
favorably with any of our battles, when the numbers engaged are
considered.
Then again, at the end of the war, the sufferings of the troops that I
took onto the plains in the Indian campaigns in the winters of 1864-5,
1865-6, were far beyond any of the sufferings of any of our Armies during
the Civil War. Their exposures through the cold weather, and the
brutalities and butcheries of the Indians, which it was impossible for
them to avenge or retaliate, were beyond description.
Our early campaign in Missouri was without previous experience. It was
simply one soldier standing up against another in battle, and we had to
learn all the tricks of camp life, and from experience how to take care of
our soldiers.
There were a great many funny incidents in the Pea Ridge campaign. The
Southwestern Army was organized at Rolla, Missouri, of which post I was in
command. My quartermaster was Captain Philip H. Sheridan, and my
commissary, Captain M. P. Small. No one who knew or saw Sheridan then
thought of the great position he was to occupy in our Army, but when he
took hold of that Army and stripped it and fed it, three hundred miles
away from rail or water communication, we all knew that his was a
master-mind. When he came to me at Rolla, the first order he gave was to
take away about three-quarters of our transportation. I think we had about
two wagons to the company, and he brought us down to about four to a
regiment. You can all appreciate the rebellion I had on my hands when I
undertook to enforce his order. I know he stood by and watched to see what
I was going to do. Every Regiment and Command entered a protest, and said
some very unkind things of him, denouncing him as a regular officer who
had no mercy upon a volunteer; but I had then had experience enough to
appreciate our necessities, and started in by stripping my own Regiment,
and then enforcing the orders upon the others. We were not long on that
march before they appreciated the foresight of Sheridan. He had great
energy and great resources. He had to run all the mills along our line of
march; he had to forage in every direction, and the punishment that he
gave to some of the people to make them tell where their horses, forage
and sweet potatoes were hidden would astonish those of our people who have
been so horrified at the mild persuasions used for similar purposes in the
Philippines.
To show you how little we knew of war on our first march, in January,
1862, from Rolla to Springfield, Missouri, all the reports we had obtained
were that Price and his Army were in Springfield. The troops of our Army
were divided into two commands, those under Siegel, composed of two
Divisions, commanded by Osterhaus and Asboth, mostly Germans, and two
Divisions of Americans commanded by Colonel Jeff C. Davis and Colonel E.
A. Carr. I commanded a Brigade on the extreme left in Carr's Division,
and, in accordance with instructions, put out a company in front of me as
skirmishers. It was dark, and impossible for us to see much, and the first
thing I knew I had lost my skirmishers, and was in great distress until
about daylight in the morning, when, while Siegel's guns and our own were
booming away at Springfield, my company came back mounted on Confederate
horses and mules--old hacks that the enemy had left behind them--and
brought us news that there was no enemy in Springfield, and had not been
for two or three days.
As we marched along towards Pea Ridge through the country, Price's Army
faced us with a rear guard only, his main body keeping a long distance
ahead of us. At every stream they would halt our advance, and move out a
couple of pieces of their artillery, and put out a strong skirmish-line,
which would force our Army into line, thinking we were going to have a
battle. My Brigade led the advance most of the time on that march, and as
soon as they would line up the officers would have the boys strip. They
would throw down their chickens, sweet potatoes, and everything they had
gathered, and by the time they had gone forward, and the enemy had run,
the Thirty-sixth Illinois, or some other Regiment, would come up and
gobble what they had left. About the third time we lined up I discovered
that every boy was hanging on to his chickens, sweet potatoes, and
provender, and when I gave orders to the Colonels to have them throw them
aside, the boys made answer: "No you don't, Colonel! You can't fool us any
more; we have fed those Thirty-sixth Illinois fellows as long as we
propose to."
[Illustration: FORT COTTONWOOD
Afterwards Fort McPherson, in the Indian Campaign, 1865. The fort was one
hundred miles west of Fort Kearney, and was originally occupied as a
trading post by Sylvanus Dodge, father of General Dodge.]
At Pea Ridge we were surrounded by Van Dorn, who placed Price's two
Divisions in our rear, and he himself on our right flank with McCullough
and McIntosh's Divisions. The great Pea Ridge divided his Army, so it was
impossible for one part to support the other. His Army was twice as large
as that of Curtis, and the fact that it was divided enabled Curtis to whip
his Army in detail, so that Van Dorn's Army was virtually whipped before
Curtis got his entire force into the field, Siegel only coming into battle
after Van Dorn's Arkansas force had left for the South, Jeff C. Davis's
Division having killed its two Division commanders, and Van Dorn had given
Price orders to get out the best way he could, which forced him to retreat
to the east towards White River.
After the Pea Ridge campaign the Battle of Prairie Grove was fought, under
the command of General F. C. Herring, who was Lieutenant-Colonel of the
Ninth Iowa Infantry in the Battle of Pea Ridge. As it was not in my
command I have no knowledge of the detail of it; but from the reports it
evidently was a sharp fight.
In the spring of 1865 Jeff C. Thompson and his command surrendered to me
on the Arkansas line. His command consisted of six thousand men, but he
found he could not gather them, and claimed that not half of his command
was present. When I asked him how it was possible to get them all
together, he suggested that I should send them rations. I therefore loaded
two steamers from St. Louis, and sent them around by the White River, and
Thompson issued his celebrated order bringing the men all in, and there
was gathered about twice the number he had present when he surrendered to
my forces. When asked for his transportation he said that he would show it
to me, and out of the rivers and bayous he run down about one hundred
canoes and flats, as the transportation he had to move his army with. It
was at this time that he made that celebrated speech. When his soldiers
came in without bringing their guns, as he had instructed them to do,
bringing along old shot-guns and muskets that were of no use, he said if
they were not satisfied with the generosity of this Government they should
emigrate to Mexico, and he denounced more than half of them as being
soldiers whom he had never seen, stating that they had stayed in the brush
and along the river-banks in Arkansas until the moss had grown upon their
heads and backs. From this speech of his came the celebrated saying of
"moss-backs."
A part of my Corps fought under that gallant General, A. J. Smith, in the
Banks campaign up the Red River, and there is no doubt but that his
generalship and the fighting of the two Divisions of the Sixteenth Corps
saved that Army from a great defeat. The commander of one of his
Divisions, General T. E. G. Ransom, was a school-mate of mine, and
afterwards came to me in the Atlanta campaign and commanded a Division
under me in the Sixteenth Corps.
When I look at the history of all of the operations west of the
Mississippi River, and see their results, it is a great gratification to
me to know that all the campaigns, except possibly the one of Banks, were
victories for our side.
When I returned to the command of the Department of the Missouri, in
November, 1864, I found all the Indian tribes on the plains at war,
occupying all the lines of communication through to the Pacific, and there
was a great demand from the people upon the Government that those lines
should be opened. General Grant sent a dispatch, asking if a campaign upon
the plains could be made in the winter. Having spent eight or ten years of
my life upon the plains before the war, I answered that it could, if the
troops were properly fed and clothed. His answer to that was to place all
the plains and Indian tribes within my command, instructing me to make an
immediate campaign against them, and I had, therefore, to move the troops
that were at Leavenworth, Fort Riley, and other points, onto the plains in
mid-winter, and I think it was the Eleventh Kansas that had thirteen men
frozen to death on the march to Fort Kearney. Those troops on that winter
march up and down those stage- and telegraph-lines, in forty days opened
them up, repaired the telegraph, and had the stages running. Then came the
longer campaign of the next summer and next fall, where General Cole's
command suffered so much, and also where General Conner fought the Battle
of Tongue River. I remember of the Indians capturing a company of Michigan
troops that were guarding a train that was going to Fort Halleck, loaded
with rations and bacon. They tied some of the soldiers to the wheels of
the wagons, piled the bacon around the wagons, and burned them up. A band
of this party of Indians was captured by a battalion of Pawnees, who were
far north of them and got on their trail and surrounded the band that had
committed these atrocities. The chief of them, an old man, came forward
and spoke to Major North, who commanded the Pawnees, and holding his hand
up to his mouth he said that he was full of white men up to here, and was
ready to die. The Indians virtually cleaned out the white people along the
stage-lines they captured. I took from them a great many of their
prisoners in the fall of 1865, when they came into Laramie to make peace,
and the stories of the suffering of the women were such that it would be
impossible to relate them.
In connection with this campaign on the plains, it is a singular fact that
nearly three thousand Confederates took part. When I took command at St.
Louis I found the prisons full of Confederate prisoners. The war was then
virtually at its end, and they were very anxious to be relieved from
prison life, and as we needed forces on the plains, I obtained authority
from the War Department to organize what was known as the United States
Volunteers, and filled the regiments with these Confederate soldiers,
placing over them as officers, men and officers selected from our own
command, and thus organized a very effective force, which did excellent
service on the plains, three-quarters of which remained in that country
after the war was over.
[Illustration: WHERE GENERAL MCPHERSON FELL
Place on the Battlefield of Atlanta, on the right of the battle line of
the Sixteenth Army Corps, where Major-General James B. McPherson,
commanding the Army of the Tennessee, was killed, July 22, 1864. The
wheels are portions of Murray's Second U. S. Battery, which was captured
by the Confederate skirmish-line while passing from the Seventeenth to the
Sixteenth Corps.]