Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 38.djvu/380

366 the Atlantic coast reached the Ozark mountaineers very slowly. But meagre reports of the great Southern victory at Bull Run had been received by the people of Southwest Missouri when the Battle of Wilson's Creek brought the realities of war to their very doors.

General Nathaniel Lyon, at the head of the Army of the Southwest, occupied Springfield. General Franz Sigel, a soldier of foreign birth and education, was the second officer in the Union army. The Federal forces were well equipped and drilled for that stage of the war. Some of General Lyon's men were soldiers of the regular army. General Sigel's troops were German volunteers, and some of these had done service in the Fatherland.

General Ben. McCulloch, a Texas veteran who had helped avenge the butchery of the heroes of the Alamo, at San Jacinto, was the senior officer of the Confederate forces advancing on Springfield from the Arkansas border. General Sterling Price, affectionately called "Old Pap Price" by his men later on in the war, commanded the Missouri State Guards, at the Battle of Wilson Creek. In General Price's command were many raw recruits from Arkansas and the mountains of Missouri, who had no other weapons than the flintlock rifles and shotguns they had brought from their cabin homes in the Ozark wilderness when the signal of war called them away to fight for "Southern rights" against "Northern invaders," as Union soldiers were called by the adherents of the young Confederacy. All kinds of weapons known in the ante-bellum days were used at Wilson's Creek. Flintlock pistols picked up on the battlefield thirty-five years ago are now kept as prized souvenirs by some of the farmers who owned the ground where the two armies struggled. General McCulloch was moving to attack General Lyon, and bivouacked on the 9th of August near the mouth of Wilson's Creek, to rest his men and allow them to kill some beeves and roast green corn for rations. It would have been but an easy half day's march to Springfield, and the plan was to reach the town by night, and give battle to the Union army early on the morning of the 10th. The order to break camp at Wilson's Creek had already been given, and the Southern Army was astir for