Two Mounted Armies Collide

As Union soldiers approached from the north near Mine Creek, Captain Richard Hinton saw Confederate forces in great strength drawn up in line of battle on the north side of the stream, across ground that sloped gently downward from the Federal front. Near a farmhouse, fences, a slight swale, timber, the creek, a rising cornfield, and a log cabin, Colonel John F. Philips formed his brigade of Missouri State Militia for attack, while Colonel Benteen commanded a brigade of Iowa, Missouri, and Indiana cavalry regiments on the left. The Union force numbered about 2,500 well-armed soldiers, battle-hardened and confident after a victory a couple of days earlier at the Battle of Westport. At about 11 o'clock in the morning, the mounted Union force struck the Confederate line in a furious charge, with sabers drawn, and Philips' troops hit the Confederate left flank first. Philips recalled that the fighting quickly became general and terrific, and that the force of the onset surprised and shook the enemy until they gave way. Benteen's Tenth Missouri initially stalled against Marmaduke's position, but Major A. R. Pierce and the Fourth Iowa smashed through the Confederate line, then turned back and rolled up the defensive position. Major General Samuel R. Curtis remembered the armies spread across the open prairie in full view, moving in columns, double lines, and as skirmishers in a vast, shifting spectacle of mounted battle. The clash between these two mounted armies lasted only thirty minutes, but it was bloody. Colonel Charles W. Blair of the Fourteenth Kansas Cavalry called it a rush and a scramble that was quickly over, while Philips wrote that the scene of death was as terrible as the victory was speedy and glorious. Union losses in Philips' command were eight dead and fewer than 100 wounded, while the routed Confederates suffered heavily, with well over 1,000 dead, wounded, or captured, and at least 300 killed or badly wounded horses left on the battlefield.

Kansas · United States