Lifeline for Two Armies

Elkhorn Tavern overlooks a highway of vital importance for Arkansas and Missouri during the Civil War, and both Union and Confederate leaders wanted this twenty-foot-wide dirt road to move men and supplies while three-year-old telegraph wires alongside it carried information quickly. In the week before battle broke out here, both armies hurriedly marched southward past this crossroads and tavern, and the night before the shooting started Union troops from Missouri established a small rearguard outpost here, stockpiling food in the barn and tavern while provost guards watched a handful of captured Confederates nearby. First built in the 1820s as a military road linking St. Louis, Missouri, to Fort Smith, Arkansas, this highway later served as the northern route of the Trail of Tears during the Indian removals from 1837 to 1839, was known as the Butterfield Overland Stage Route from 1858 to 1861, and during the Civil War was called the Wire Road or the Telegraph Road.

Arkansas · United States