During the rise of the morning's heat, the eighty-six men of Battery F, Second U.S. Artillery struggled to keep up a steady fire against determined attacks by Southern infantry desperate to drive them from this position. Major Sturgis reported that Captain Totten's battery, supported by the First Iowa and regulars, was the main point of attack, and that the enemy could frequently be seen within twenty or thirty feet of the guns, with the smoke of the opposing lines often so confounded as to seem but one. During lulls between attacks, Totten's gunners fired repeatedly at the flashes of enemy cannons seen through the trees east of the creek or through the haze of battle-smoke downhill. As Lucien J. Barnes, a major in the Southern army, recalled, General Sterling Price said he would gladly have given his life to have taken Totten's battery in that fight and had vainly tried to capture it by three charges from a distance. Captain Totten had briefly commanded the Little Rock Arsenal before Arkansas seceded from the Union, where he assisted Captain William Woodruff and his men with artillery training, and the two later faced each other at Wilson's Creek.