PRAIRIE GROVE -- It wasn't so long ago, on Dec. 7, 1862, Americans killed and maimed each other on this ridge, in this orchard. Rebel Gen. Thomas Hindman brought his 11,000 poorly equipped men and 22 cannon up from Fort Smith and across the Boston Mountains in an ambitious effort to retake northwest Arkansas territory and invade Missouri.
Hindman thought he could take advantage of the fact that Gen. James Blunt's Union Army of the Frontier was divided. About 5,000 federal troops remained in Arkansas after the Union victory at the Battle of Pea Ridge; the rest of them had returned to Springfield. Hindman meant to overwhelm Blunt's force but, on the eve of the planned attack, scouts reported reinforcements were on their way to Blunt. In one of the most audacious maneuvers of the entire war, Gen. Francis Herron was force marching 7,000 troops 110 miles to come to Blunt's aid.
So Hindman decided to skirt around Blunt's flank and attack Herron's footsore reinforcements.
At dawn, Confederate horsemen harassed Herron's cavalry, sending them running back to their following infantry. There they rallied--some say after Herron himself shot a rebel from his horse--and turned on their pursuers. Hindman's soldiers took up defensive positions here on this ridge. Yankees came charging across those fields and up through these trees. When Blunt heard the battle raging some two miles away, he ordered his men to attack. They ignored roads and cut through forests and fields toward the sound of the fighting.
Prairie Grove is considered a tactical standoff because both sides took heavy casualties--there were 339 bodies found dead on the field immediately after the battle; hundreds more died in the following days and weeks--and neither side defeated the other. But after dark, Hindman slipped back to Van Buren, ceding control of northwest Arkansas to Union forces.
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It seems remote when you read about it. But when you walk these grounds, it gets inside you. If you've been to Vicksburg or Normandy, you probably know the solemn hum of once bloody places.
It would have been possible to have witnessed both the Battle of Prairie Grove and the bombing of Pearl Harbor 79 years to the day later. There were Civil War veterans alive in the 1950s.
The man celebrated as the last Confederate veteran died in December 1959. "Celebrated as" because Walter G. Williams was almost certainly a fraud. Still, a few months before his death, Congress voted him a special pension and a gold medal. President Eisenhower bestowed on him the honorary title "General" and declared the day of his death would be a national day of mourning.
Williams claimed that as a 19-year-old, he joined Gen. John Bell Hood's Texas Brigade. But in September 1959, UPI correspondent Lowell K. Bridwell reported on records suggesting Williams was too young to have served as he claimed. He was not 116 years old, merely 104. The National Archives showed no trace of a Walter Williams ever serving in the Texas Brigade. Williams was listed in the 1860 census as a 5-year-old and in the 1870 census as a 15-year-old.
Williams was adamant; he had served in Hood's Brigade and ridden with Quantrill's guerrillas. And he had defenders who pointed out Confederate records were incomplete and often inaccurate. So if you visit the Mount Pleasant Cemetery about 40 miles north of College Station, Texas, you will see not only Williams' tombstone listing his date of birth as Nov. 14, 1842, but a Texas Historical Marker that in part reads: "Born in Itawamba County, Miss., Williams during the war was a forage master for the celebrated Hood's Texas Brigade ... He had lived very quietly until in extreme old age he gained fame as one of a very few remaining veterans."
Williams is also mentioned on a sculpture at Gettysburg, though the sculptor, Donald De Lue, legalistically notes he "was recognized by the government of the United States as the last surviving Confederate veteran."
Maybe in 1959 we needed a surviving Civil War veteran. Maybe the nation didn't suffer by offering a little kindness to Gen. Williams, who might have genuinely believed the fantasy he proffered. Even The New York Times only went so far as to suggest that his "memory may not be accurate."
He wasn't the only suspect claimant to Civil War glory. Claims of another pretender, John Salling, who died in March 1959, were debunked in 1991, when a writer for historical magazine Blue & Gray determined he was born in 1856, not 1846. (That writer, William Marvel, also poked a few more holes in Williams' case.) Like Williams, Salling's grave has a marker designating him "Virginia's Last Confederate Veteran."
Actually, the last verifiable veteran of the Civil War was Albert Woolson, who died at the age of 106 in 1956. Woolson enlisted as a drummer boy for Company C of the 1st Minnesota Heavy Artillery Regiment when he was 14 years old, but he never saw combat action.
The oldest soldier to have fought in the war was James Hard, reportedly with the 37th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment at the battles of First Bull Run, Antietam and Fredericksburg. Hard, who died at the age of 111 in 1953, is also said to have met Abraham Lincoln at a White House reception.
For the record, the oldest verifiable Confederate veteran was Pleasant Riggs Crump, who as a private in Company A, 10th Alabama Infantry, was present at Appomattox Court House when Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia in April 1865.
In 1949, when Little Rock hosted the 1949 national reunion of the United Confederate Veterans, it was estimated that fewer than 30 veterans remained alive. Reunion officials planned on eight or so attending. There were only four: 100-year-old W.W. Alexander from North Carolina, Gen. James W. Moore, a (verifiable) 98-year-old graduate of Virginia Military Institute who attended the funeral of Robert E. Lee in 1870; 97-year-old James Thrasher of Mississippi, and Thomas E. Riddle of Wichita Falls, Texas, who claimed to be 103 years old. (But wasn't, according to debunker Marvel, who demonstrated that Riddle was born in 1862, not 1846.)
In their 2006 book Remembering Arkansas Confederates and the 1911 Little Rock Veterans Reunion, brothers Steven G. and Ray Hanley reported Wade Sikes was the oldest attendee at the 1928 reunion of Civil War veterans (also held in Little Rock). He was 99 years old at the time. Sikes died in January 1929, and his obituary in the Benton County Record & Democrat & Sun noted there were only four members of his original company still alive.
I fell down a rabbit hole wondering who might have been Arkansas' last surviving Civil War veteran. I haven't found an answer. If you know, tell me. Chances are it hasn't been that long since he was walking around.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 10/07/2018