As Yankee cavalrymen, battered from a sharp fight with 7,000 Confederates, raced back across Samuel Oberson's cornfield from a distant belt of trees, some shouted warnings to infantrymen moving into line of battle to turn back because the enemy would give them hell. Here, two predominately German-speaking regiments, one from Missouri and one from Illinois, had to stand and fight without flinching. If they broke and ran, Pea Ridge would become as infamous as the Union disaster at Bull Run near Washington, D.C., in July 1861. Two full divisions, half of the Union soldiers who fought here, were immigrants from central Europe and Germany, and these so-called Dutch regiments had volunteered in St. Louis and other towns along the Mississippi.