After Pea Ridge, the stunned survivors of the Confederate Army of the West took two weeks to make their way from here back to rendezvous on the Arkansas River. In late March 1862, General Van Dorn was ordered to take his army east to Mississippi, leaving northern Arkansas in Union hands. Soldiers arrived in straggling squads, tired, hatless, barefooted, hungry, dirty, and ragged after rainstorms, steep mountain climbs on narrow rugged footpaths, wading deep cold mountain streams, starving, and sleeping without tents or blankets on wet frosty ground. Private William Tunnard of the 3rd Louisiana Infantry Regiment called the retreat more disastrous than a dozen battles. Near here Brigadier General Sterling Price, a 52-year-old planter and lawyer born in Virginia who had commanded Missouri state troops at Wilson's Creek and Pea Ridge, tried in vain to rally his battered exhausted division. Many regiments then retreated along this road east toward Huntsville, while other Confederates withdrew to the north and west.