Randolph County was a no-man's land throughout the Civil War, with Pocahontas and Pitman's Ferry serving as strategic crossings and road junctions occupied at different times by Union and Confederate forces. In Arkansas and Missouri, many citizens and families were divided over secession, and Union patrols, bushwhackers, and guerilla bands confiscated food and livestock, burned homes and barns, and killed local people, including women and children. In the summer of 1864, as the Confederacy suffered defeats on all fronts, Lt. General E. Kirby Smith ordered Major General Sterling Price to invade Missouri and retake the state. Price organized 12,000 men in southwest Arkansas in August 1864, left Camden on August 28, and met at Pocahontas on September 13 with three Confederate divisions commanded by Generals James F. Fagan, John S. Marmaduke, and Joseph O. Shelby. On September 17, after more than 300 wagons were repaired and cavalry horses were reshod in war-torn Pocahontas, the invasion began. Marmaduke entered Missouri at Pitman's Ferry on the Military Road and reached Poplar Bluff on September 19, Price's headquarters and Fagan's division moved in the center column through Indian Ford on Current River on September 19, and Shelby's cavalry division advanced by the Pocahontas to Doniphan road, arriving at Doniphan on the afternoon of September 17, 1864, to find the town in flames after Union scouts had set it on fire that morning upon learning of the approaching Confederate force; a number of citizens were killed trying to defend their homes. Price and his army pushed deep into Missouri, fought at Westport in Kansas City, then moved into Kansas, where most of the army was captured. He retreated through Indian Territory into Texas and reentered Arkansas at Laynesport. Along the Arkansas-Missouri border, the Civil War brought extraordinary brutality, captured in Colonel T.J. Oliphant's recollection of passing into Missouri and seeing miles of smoking ruins, with women and children standing in the frosty morning beside the embers of homes destroyed the day before.