to improve foraging, particularly for the animals, and that these two wings were about 15 miles apart. one was in cross hollows. the other was, approximately, where the northwest arkansas airport is today. a little bit southwest of modern bentonville. right there, then and there, on the spot, galvanized by this amazing information, vandorn practically leapt off the bed and announced that the next morning, the army of the west would march north and drive the federals out of the way and return to missouri. the next morning. okay. the plan to the degree that he had a plan was that the confederates would march straight north and reach the

town square in bentonville. precisely where sam walton has his wal-mart memorial museum today. complete with pickup truck. why? the only east-west road that linked the two wings of the union army passed through the town square of bentonville. if vandorn could march north, seize bentonville, the town square, and the road, the two halves of the union army would be separated, he could swing west, crush one half commanded by general franz siegel, the non-english speaking half, and then swing back and crush general curtis' half at cross hollows. see, nothing to it. easy. you can almost imagine vandorn bubbling over with enthusiasm. facesand mcculluck sitting thinking "it's not going to be

that simple." okay. from vandorn's perspective, everything was suddenly clarified. with the union army out of the way, the road to missouri would be wide open. and with the road to missouri wide open, it was only a matter of time before st. louis and then haza. vandorn was a cavalry man in the antebellum army.uc ss depended on speed and surprise. on dash, on boldness. he stipulated that the army of the west would travel light and fast. each soldier would carry only a weapon. 40 rounds of ammunition. a blanket.

and three days rations. an ammunition train would follow the army. everything else, tents, bedding, camp equipment, food, medical supplies, would be left behind. the central flaw in all of this, of course, is the assumption that everything would go exactly as planned. vandorn expected to subsist his men and animals after three days of food ran out on captured union army supplies. he gave no thought whatsoever to alternate sources of supply in case something went awry. his overconfidence was matched by his impulsiveness. he was without a staff of his own. he was unfamiliar with his subordinates. some of whom had very little military training or experience. he knew almost nothing of the two very different armies, awkwardly joined together under his command.

nor did he know anything about the rather undeveloped supply systems that kept him in the field. he was ignorant of the primitive roads he must use. he was ignorant of the rugged terrain. he must traverse. he ignored the fairly obvious fact that winter weather still gripped the ozark plateau. march 1862 was not at all like march 2012. yeah. finally, vandorn was tired, and really seriously unwell. he hadn't recovered yet from whatever disease, bronchitis, perhaps, that was, that was, that was wearing him down. had he spent a few days preparing himself and his men for the ordeal had. who knows how things might have turned out.

but they probably would have turned out differently. the confederate counter offensive that was intended to liberate missouri and turn the tide of the civil war in the trans-mississippi began on march 4th. the 16,000 men of the army ol the of the west comprised the largest private military force ever assembled west of the great river. vandorn had a 3 to 2 advantage in manpower, and a 4 to 3 advantage in artillery fire power. no confederate army in the civil war ever marched off to battle with greater numerical superiority. if ever there was -- if ever there was an open/shut case for confederate victory this was it. i bet you knew the very next word out of my mouth was going

to be -- but or unfortunately, okay. unfortunately for the confederates, the march north to bentonville and ultimately to pea ridge was a complete disaster. march 4th started out sunny and mild. by mid afternoon, a furious winter storm swept over the ozark plateau and literally smashed the army and froze it in its tracks. the dash north became an excruciatingly painful crawl. men suffered grievously without tents or add bedding. if that were not bad enough, the food distributed in the boston mountains turned out to be two days worth of rations rather than three. and long before bentonville came into sight, the confederates

were marching with empty, haversacks and empty pockets. such a worn out set of men i never saw, wrote a louisiana infantry men, on the evening of the third day. they had not one single mouthful of food to eat since yesterday. it was awful. word cannot describe how we felt. on top of everything else, while the army crawled, inch by inch through this snow and ice-covered terrain with the wind of course and the snow and the sleet blowing in their faces. while awful this was happening, the element of surprise was lost. unionist citizens in fayetteville. and there were many, struggle north across the snow covered countryside on back roads and lanes. and they reached cross hollows. there they warned curtis that

the rebels were on the move. curtis responded promptly. he sent an urgent message to siegel, they are coming sure. get ready. within hours, the two wings of the union army were on the move. moving towards the fortifications at little sugar creek. once there, they began cutting down trees to create fields of fire. they began digging trenches, filing up earth, and rocks, in the semi frozen ground, and pretty soon they had created essentially, an impregnable south-facing position. an enormous barrier. time does not permit a detailed account of the battle of pea ridge. fortunately for you, i could go on for hours here. so, we'll have to make do with a brief overview. when, after three-and-a-half days, vandorn finally passes through bentonville, the federals are long gone, struggles on to pea ridge.

and in the fading light, he sees this daunting wall of fortifications. even vandorn paused to think about this. even vandorn thought, huh-uh. a head-on attack will be, will be suicide. it will be the end of my army. l be suicide. it will be the end of my army. and then he learned that there was a country lane that passed around the right flank of the union army. and once again, vandorn impulsively said, that's what we will do. we'll take that lane around the right flank of the union army. get in their rear. and we'll cut them off. but his men and animals have not rest ford three nights. they have been without food now for a day and a half.

what, what little energy men and animals had left was barely enough to shuffle forward through the ice and snow at a crawl. vandorn did not care. forward he said. he is still riding in his ambulance. one disgusted arkansas soldier said, as vandorn clattered by, that man doesn't understand he is riding. but we are walking. the passage behind the union army while successful was slow, it was -- it was costly. thousand of men made it. but thousand of others simply collapsed into the ditches alongside the roads. unable to keep up. and hundred of them died of exposure. frozen where they fell. nobody remained behind to look after them. so what this meant was -- all through that night and early the

next morning, with every yard of ground that the confederate army gained on their enveloping movement, the hitting power, combat effectiveness of the confederate army began to erode. okay. now when the battle opened on the morning of march 7, 1862, curtis was astonished to discover that the confederates had got any round his flank and now were on his rear in his line of communications effectively cutting him off from missouri. his army was facing the wrong way. it was facing south. the confederates were now north of him. but curtis recovered amazingly quickly. and he immediately initiated a remarkable 180-degree change in

front so that his army would face north instead of south. the rear would be the front. the front would be the rear. the supply wagons. the prisoners, the refugees, the spare mounts everything would move this way. the combat troops would move that way. immensely complicated undertaking on the tiny little one-lane roads that laced the pea ridge plateau. but he did it in a matter of hours. this was by the way, the only time in the history of the civil war that an army carried out a radical maneuver of this sort.i army, completely turned around now faced north and was ready to receive the confederate attack. this meant, of course, the confederates, the federals had to abandon fortifications and fight in the open. but they adjusted very quickly. there was no panic. no disorganization.

in fact, the smoothly functioning nature of the union army on the first day of the battle, having been taken by surprise, caught off guard, so forth, is very remarkable. and also, curtis noticed something else. if vandorn's army was in the union rear, cutting the union off from missouri, didn't that mean that curtis' army was in the confederate rear and was now cutting the confederates off from arkansas? indeed it did. with disastrous consequences as so while this change of front was in progress, curtis, spoiling attacks, they broke up the confederate movements. threw the confederates into confusion, caused the confederates to fall behind schedule. vandorn organized counter attacks that forced the federals back only slowly and at great cost in lives. mcculluck was killed.

as was his successor, brigadier general james mcintyre of arkansas. price was wounded. sel commanders were lost, as well. when night came after the first day, the confederates gained a few hundred yards of meaningless terrain. but they were in complete disarray. and they also were desperately hungry. most had not eaten now for two full days. and this in subfreezing temperatures. but worst of all they were nearly out of ammunition. and wouldn't you know it, the ammunition train had fallen behind during the advance and now was far out of reach. in fact, no one in the confederate high command knew where it was. it was only a few miles away,

parked on the side of a road, its mystified commanding officer waiting for orders from somebody, anybody, to tell him where to go with his hundreds of thousand of rounds of -- rifle ammunition, his thousands of rounds of artillery ammunition, but no messenger from vandorn ever arrived. curtis planned far better. he kept his troops close, compact formations. he kept his wagons even closer. all during the night, his men received food, and ammunition, and pretty good sleep. they had tents and blankets. when dawn came for the second day, they were ready. march 8th dawned, curtis waited for vandorn to make a move, any move. but nothing happened. at that moment, curtis realized confederates had given up the initiative, the battle was his to win or lose. he ordered all artillery forward, 44 guns. for two hours on march 8th, northwest arkansas was rocked by the greatest artillery bombardment ever to have taken

place on the north american continent up to that time. the crashing waves of sound could be heard more than 50 miles away. people in springfield to the north, and fayetteville to the south, remembered their windows rattling and their chickens, huddling in their coops, afraid to venture out. it was a continual thunder, wrote a union infantryman, and a fellow might have thought the day of judgment had come. and it was the grandest, greatest, most remarkable thing i ever witnessed during my four years of military service. 4,000 or more artillery rounds plowed into the confederate formations. those who were not killed or wounded by the hail of fire, began slipping away to the rear. when curtis sensed the confederate army was breaking up under the impact of his

massed artillery fire, he ordered an infantry assault. 8,000 union soldiers, who had been lying down to avoid the very occasional instance of confederate counter battery fire. they stood up. they addressed their ranks. they uncased and unfurled their flags. bands broke into music. in fact, the mass bands of siegel's two divisions played dixie. very popular, northern song during the civil war. written by two free black musicians in ohio. i just mention this. not until 1939 with the appearance of "gone with the wind" did "dixie" magically become a song identified with the confederacy. anyway, to this stirring beat, as dick clark would have said in the 1950s. it has a nice beat.

you can dance to it. the union troops surged forward. that beautiful charge, i shall never forget, wrote an illinois soldier, with banners streaming, with drums beating, with bayonets sparkling, were every officer and man cheering and yelling and screaming at the top of his lungs and our long blue line trotting forward at the double clip, it was amazing what a sight, what a sound. the rebel yell was nothing in comparison. under the impact of this spectacular charge which was visible from start to finish across the open fields, the confederate army of the west simply melted away. vandorn and price were among the first to flee, leaving thousand of their men on the field. by noon, the confederates were in full retreat and the battle was over just like that. as the final shots died away, curtis rode among his celebrating soldiers, waving his hat, and shouting over and over

again, "victory. victory." alas, victory did not come cheap. pea ridge cost the federals over 1,400 casualties, about 200 killed, 200 missing, and over 1,000 wounded. say 13% of the 10,000 or so union troops in the battle. confederate casualties are far less certain. because vandorn submitted completely inconsistent and implausible reports of his losses. every time he filed an official communique or a report, he made up a different number. but by going through regimenal as carefully as we can, the best guess is that the confederatest beginning of the campaign consisted of about 16,000 men, maybe more. but, of course, it suffered very, very serious attrition on

the way to pea ridge. conservative estimate is that perhaps 12,000 to 13,000 confederates actually were on the battlefield, though not all of them got into the fight. possibly -- well, let me sound a little more confident than that. probably about 2,000, about 2,000 confederates were killed, wounds or missing, but we'll never know for sure. this is the best we can do. a casualty rate using those numbers would be of about 15%. so in terms of the two armies were not far apart in size. the confederate was larger. slightly heavier casualties on the confederate sight. so basically the two armies did about as much damage to each other as they could under the circumstances, and it came out roughly even. the key point is not numbers.

the key point is who failed and who succeeded. that brings us to the confederate retreat from pea ridge, which was more disastrous than the advance. the three-day supply of rations in boston issued a week earlier had long since run out. men and animals devoured everything in sight, but unfortunately the sparsely populated ozark quarterside east and south of fayetteville provided only a fraction of the feed necessary for hungry men and animals. a texas calvaryman wrote in his diary, i fear i am in much greater danger of dying from starvations in the mountains of arkansas than i am by being killed by the enemies' bullets.

hundreds of rebels wandered away in search of food, and as far as we can tell, never returned to the ranks. the trail of the defeated army for months afterwards could be followed because it was marked littered with the discarded clothing, weapons, and even flags. now, while his troops recuperated in the general vicinity of van buren, van doran received a telegraph from general pierre boo regard. i love saying that. when i was a kid growing up in new orleans, there was a -- there is a gigantic equestrian statue of bother guard at the entrance of city park a block and a half from our house. the kids in the neighborhood would usually in the evenings when it was dark and hard to see, we would sneak out to the traffic circle where the statue was located usually with

somebody's stepladder and climb up to the top and then get up on the horse with general booregard. it was one of the highlights of my eighth or ninth year on this planet, was being up there. by the way, when pierre gustav booregard was at west point, he preferred to be called gus. who would have thought it? okay. booregard sends this message from van doran. he knows nothing of pea ridge. he's completely out of the loop, and he encourages van doran to move his command to the east side of the mississippi river, in fact, to mississippi to be part of a concentration of all confederate armies in the west against u.s. grant's army at pittsburgh landing, a place better known as shiloh. van doran needed a little encouragement. he was determined to salvage his

reputation on another perhaps larger stage. but it took weeks for the shattered army of the west to recover. heavy spring rains caused additional delays, and so it was that van doran's army did not reach the rendezvous point in corinth, mississippi, until after the battle of shiloh had been fought. in fact, they arrived at corinth about the same time the demoralized, defeated confederate army fell back from shiloh. the troops van doran brought to mississippi were certainly welcomed at the blood-letting at at shiloh, but to give you an t shiloh was, van doran's entire army did not even come close to making up for the losses incurred in that battle. as they say on tv, but wait,

there's more. van dorn did not merely transfer himself in the army of the west from one side of the mississippi river to the other side of the mississippi river. he abandoned arkansas, missouri, northern louisiana, and the indian territory. he abandoned all of that to the enemy. he acted entirely on his own without permission from anyone in richmond. in fact, he did not even inform the confederate government in richmond about what he was going to do. he not only took his army across the river -- you have to think of it in larger terms. he took the entire confederate war effort in the trans mississippi with him. took all the troops, all the animals he could lay his hands

on, all the wagons and carts, all the weapons, all the equipment, stores, machinery, anything of military value. miles and miles of rope, empty barrels, enormous amounts of canvas, anything that could be used for packing or storing. even the most ordinary things, all of it was packed up, put on steam boats and sent down the white and the arkansas to mississippi and up to memphis and from memphis to corinth. he denew ted the upper trans-mississippi. only in south louisiana and texas where he could not -- the tentacles of his command did not quite reach that far. only these portions of the trans-mississippi were unaffected by this -- what do

you call this anyway? this -- it's almost like a hit and run burglary, except that van dorn was burglarizing his own war effort. okay? no surprise, a few months later, when thomas heimann is named commander of arkansas, he arrives in little rock in may and sends this telegram to president davis. i found here, little rock, almost nothing, nothing. nearly everything of value was taken away by general van dorn. what am i supposed to do? this is the legacy of van dorn. not just the defeat at pea ridge, but the abandonment of the trans-mississippi to the enemy. the federals and other officers could not believe it. for a few months, they thought this was some sort of a ploy. finally, in late spring, it dawned on them that the

confederates were gone. not only was there no more threat to st. louis. there was no threat no missouri and arkansas was defenseless. and so curtis, having refit, resupplied his troops, moved eastward, dipping back into missouri and then turning sharply south through say legal and batesville and jackson port, s searcy, came within 40 miles of little rock and meeting nothing but local guerrilla resistance.

it could not be stretched any farther. curtis men with all his officers and everyone agreed. sure, we can sprint to little rock and capture it without firing a shot, but it's better to march the union army to a river port that was available year round and just wait for better conditions. so curtis turns around and marches eventually across the delta through clarendon and so forth to helena. just a few days after the union army arrives there, as we'll see, a relief convoy appears. so to make a little more -- to flesh out that narrative a little bit more, with no necessity now of shielding missouri from a confederate army that has disappeared, curtis