America's Byways, Road Trip 2019, Part 5

July 28, 2019

Sunday was another good day, but I'm going to keep this post relatively short because my entire day was spent driving and visiting two Civil War battlegrounds in Arkansas that I was seeing for the first time - and I know that doesn't appeal to everyone. 

The Crossroads View Outside the Elkhorn Tavern

My first stop was at the Pea Ridge National Military Park in northern Arkansas to see what I could learn from a self-guided tour about the battle fought there between the North and the South on March 7-8, 1862.  Pea Ridge did not become a National Military Park until the 1950s, so it is another of those parks with few monuments or surviving structures in sight. One of the most interesting stops on the tour is the Elkhorn Tavern, a longtime rest stop for travelers on the Telegraph Road. The tavern sits on what in its day was the equivalent of an intersection of two major state highways. During the battle, the Union army used the tavern as a supply base before it was captured by the Confederates and turned into a field hospital treating the wounded of both armies. Confederate raiders returned to the tavern a year later to burn it to the ground because the Union army was using it as a telegraph office. The building pictured here is a reconstruction of the original.

The Reconstructed Elkhorn Tavern at Pea Ridge

I left the Pea Ridge battle site and took a fifty-minute drive southward to the Prairie Grove Battlefield, site of the last major campaign in northwest Arkansas. The battle was officially labeled a draw, but in reality it was a great strategic win for the North because the Confederates never really contested this part of the state again, allowing the Union to move troops and supplies to where they were more strategically important to the Union cause.

Wax Dummy Representations of the Opposing Generals

It was Confederate General Hindman's job to defend Arkansas from any attempt by the North to retake the state for the Union, and it was Union General Blunt's job to make sure that General Hindman's efforts to do so failed. That's exactly what Blunt did, even though the two armies pretty much shared equally the approximately 2700 casualties produced by the Prairie Grove fighting.  

On the Prairie Grove Battlefield

(Note: General Thomas C. Hindman was not a popular man. His behavior during the war was, in fact, so unnecessarily harsh that Hindman was hated equally by civilians and his own troops. He was relieved of duty in Arkansas in 1863, and fled to Mexico for a time after the war because he feared that the U.S. government would want to punish him because of that brutish behavior.  Apparently, the man's enemies had a long memory because he was murdered through an open window of his house only three years after the war ended. That murder was never solved.)

 I will spend the night in Mena, Arkansas, where I hope to catch up on some much anticipated reading. I've started Us Against You, Fredrik Backman's sequel to Beartown, his novel about a Swedish youth-hockey team that takes the whole town down with it after one of its members is accused of rape. I loved that book, and the sequel picks up right from where that one left off, so I have high hopes for it, too. And now, it looks like my TBR stack is taking advantage of my absence in order to multiply at a previously unheard of rate. I just checked my library hold list, only to find that they are rather suddenly holding SIX new books for me that all have to be picked up by August 5 if I want them.  I think I need to go home and read.