Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 38.djvu/379

Rh in excavating, unearthed many of the bones of the Confederate soldiers. This caused the question of a cemetery site to be discussed, and the Southern people of Springfield selected the present grounds for that purpose and began to gather up the remains of all the Confederate dead around Springfield and inter them there.

The battlefield of Wilson's Creek, eight miles west of the cemetery, had not been protected during the seven years, and some graves were, of course, never found. The little valley of Wilson's Creek had often been flooded by heavy rains, and now and then the skeleton of a Southern soldier was washed down into the James River and lost.

All possible care was used in searching the battlefield for the remains of the dead, and, considering the impoverished condition of the Southern people in and around Springfield at that time, this work was done with remarkable faithfulness.

The struggles of the Confederate Cemetery Association to get money to protect their dead now seem almost as pathetic as some of the events of the war, and form a part of that great tragedy of the Lost Cause, whose complete history will never be written. Jefferson Davis gave the monument his personal aid, and General Robert E. Lee sent a lock of his hair to be sold as a souvenir at an entertainment gotten up to raise funds for the cemetery. Mrs. D. C. Kennedy, of Springfield, wife of an ex-Confederate soldier, who was the founder of the first Democratic newspaper published here after the war, and Consul-General at Malta under President Cleveland's last administration, has now that braid of the great Southern Chieftain's hair which he would have contributed to no other cause in the world.

The Battle of Wilson's Creek, or Oak Hills, as it is called in the Confederate reports of the engagement, was a hard and bloody struggle of seven hours' duration, fought in an open field by troops most of whom had never before been under fire. The war was then just opening in the West, and on the ioth of August, 1861, the sound of hostile cannon had never been heard by the people of Springfield and the inhabitants of the surrounding country. It was more than 100 miles from the battlefield to the nearest railroad, and news of the progress of the war on