In July 1862, Confederate Brigadier General Adam Rankin "Stovepipe" Johnson, a Henderson native, led a small force across the river into Newburgh, Indiana, in a daring raid launched from the William Soaper farm east of town. Johnson later wrote that he fashioned dummy artillery from charred logs, stovepipes, and wagon axles and placed them on a bluff overlooking Newburgh before crossing with twenty-six men to seize the unguarded arsenal. He recounted entering the hotel behind the arsenal and confronting eighty armed men, then ordering them not to fire lest they be slaughtered by his troops, causing them to lower their guns. As he withdrew, he used the fake artillery again to intimidate Col. Bethel and the Home Guards, and he and his men escaped unharmed with captured weapons. Other accounts differed sharply, saying the seized building was a hotel being used as a hospital, that the eighty men were sick and wounded soldiers restrained by a surgeon, and that Johnson's party looted the town for hours with help from two pro-Southern townsmen and demanded a partly paid twenty-thousand-dollar ransom from the bank to spare Newburgh from being burned. Those two local assistants were later seized and killed by fellow citizens. Exactly what happened remains uncertain, but Johnson's capture of Newburgh with only a handful of men became part of local legend.