Confederates are Victorious at the Battle of Poison Spring, Arkansas

In the spring of 1864, invading Union troops, led by Major General Fred Steele, occupied the town of Camden, Arkansas. Upon learning that the Confederates had stores of corn about twenty miles up the Prairie D’Ane-Camden Road on White Oak Creek, General Steel sent a “foraging party” to take the food supplies from the Southerners. The foragers, 600 strong, took four cannon and 198 wagons with them. Led by Colonel James M. Williams, they sacked and plundered Confederate provisions they found on farms and plantations.

With their wagons groaning under 5000 bushels of corn, plus other contraband they had stolen, the Union raiders regrouped at White Oak Creek. Early the next day they were joined by a 501-man relief force of infantry, cavalry and two additional artillery pieces. But even with reinforcements, the Yankee thieves would prove to be no match for the defending Southerners.

On the morning of April 18, the despoilers were stopped by a roadblock near Poison Spring. There they faced Confederate Brigadier General John Sappington Marmaduke with 3,600 cavalrymen with twelve cannon. The horsemen were from Arkansas, Missouri and Texas, as well as Colonel Tandy Walker’s Choctaw Brigade from the Indian Territory – now Oklahoma.

The entire Yankee force was put to flight, being chased for two and a half miles before the Confederates stopped their pursuit.

The Union lost all of their 198 wagons; the Confederates got back all of their corn. Northern casualties were 301 men killed, wounded and missing. Confederate losses were estimated at 114.

Some the captured Yankee Infantrymen from Kansas did not make it back due to revenge killings by Confederates from the border regions and scalpings by Native Americans in Confederate service whose homes in the Indian Territory had been raided by the Kansas troops.

According to Civil War Historian Dale Cox, "One Confederate participant wrote after the battle that he saw black Union soldiers being killed by Choctaw warriors fighting with the 1st and 2nd Choctaw Regiments of the 2nd Indian Brigade. These warriors were outraged over raids carried out by Union soldiers from Fort Smith, Arkansas, into the Choctaw Nation earlier that year. Homes had been burned, crops destroyed, family possessions looted, women and children harmed or left homeless and men killed...."

Reports of other eyewitnesses of the Battle at Poison Spring tell of Union soldiers of the 1st Kansas Colored desperately clinging to their weapons as they fled the battlefield. These men would still have been considered armed combatants, not prisoners of war. This is reminiscent of reports from Fort Pillow, Tennessee, where black Union POWs were allegedly killed by Confederate troops.

Today, Poison Spring Historic Battlefield near Bragg City, Ouachita County, Arkansas, preserves a small portion of the site.

Photos and story by J. Stephen Conn