Many African Americans fleeing slavery accompanied Gen. Frederick Steele’s Union army as it retreated to Little Rock. As army wagons became stuck in thick mud, wagons carrying refugee children also became trapped. Some children were abandoned by desperate parents, while others were rescued by Union soldiers carrying “on one shoulder a rifle, on the other a black child.” At least one refugee child remained with the Chapple McElroy family nearby after they found an abandoned youth they named Tom. Tom McElroy lived with them into the 1870s and later owned a farm southwest of Benton. As Steele’s army struggled along the muddy roads between Jenkins’ Ferry and Little Rock, the starving mules hauling its wagons collapsed from exhaustion. Steele ordered many wagons burned after their contents were transferred to other wagons, but additional wagons were destroyed when their teams collapsed. A 33rd Iowa Infantry soldier recalled that “all over the swamp, near the road, were the burning wagons and their scattered contents.” Steele’s army lost 635 wagons and tons of supplies in the Camden Expedition.