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By Root 1753 0

on the drill field they were learning soldiering on the hoof. Lyon had them breaking camp and hitting the road well before sunrise, and the volunteers were not sure that they liked this. Army life had several aspects they had not counted on. The army mule, for instance, had a way of beginning to bray at midnight, and he was likely to keep it up for hours — a habit that (as a diarist asserted) was finally broken by a Mexican War veteran, who said that mules would not bray in the night season if weights were tied to their tails: a trick that was tried and actually seemed to work. The volunteers were awed by the regulars; they detested what they saw of regular army discipline (whose punishments they considered too revolting and brutal for free-born Americans), but they greatly admired the way the regulars looked and marched, and they strove to be like them. In Lyon’s army there was a ninety-day outfit, the 1st Iowa, whose time was due to expire early in August. The Iowans said that they did not want to go home without getting into one good fight, and they offered to stick around for an extra week or so in the hope that maybe there would be one.6

There would be. On August 10, Lyon took his army down to Wilson’s Creek, an unpretentious little stream that meandered cross-country ten miles from Springfield, where twelve thousand Confederates under General Sterling Price and a former Texas Ranger captain named Ben McCulloch were waiting. Lyon had a distinguished subordinate, a former German brigadier named Franz Sigel, who had defied the Prussians in the revolution of 1848, had led troops against them, and had fled for his life to America when the revolution was suppressed. Sigel was told to take his men in a big sweep around the Federal left and get in rear of the Confederate line of battle. When Sigel’s guns were heard the rest of Lyon’s men would make a frontal attack.

It could have worked, but it did not, quite. Sigel got his men where he was supposed to get them, but unhappily it turned out that although he was a devoted and a high-minded man he was almost totally incapable of handling troops in the field. His men opened fire, got Confederate fire in return, and then somehow went all to pieces, tumbling back across dreary woods and stumpy meadows in complete rout, leaving the rest of the army to fight its way out of the battle which their firing had commenced. The rest of the army did its best, but its best was not quite good enough, and the day ended in disaster.

Before the battle began Lyon went through the camps, talking to the men like an undersized red-whiskered father: “Men, we are going to have a fight. We will march out in a short time. Don’t shoot until you get orders. Fire low — don’t aim higher than their knees. Wait until they get close. Don’t get scared — it’s no part of a soldier’s duty to get scared.” Then he swung them out into line of battle and sent them into action.7

The Confederates were banked up four ranks deep, and the firing started with the rival lines no more than fifty yards apart — murderously close range, for the clumsy muzzle-loaders that constituted the infantry weapon in those days were deadly at anything under two hundred and fifty yards. The Iowa boys, who had hoped they could have one good fight before they were paid off, got their wish. They stood next to a battery of regular artillery, six guns commanded by an uncommonly hard-boiled West Pointer, Captain James Totten, who went into action with a canteen of brandy at his hip. Even in the excitement of their first battle the Iowans marveled at the profane fury with which Captain Totten stormed at his lieutenants and his gunners — “Forward that caisson, God damn you, sir!… Swing that piece into line, God damn you, sir!” — as his guns slammed canister and case shot into an advancing Rebel line and blew it apart.

The Rebels withdrew briefly, the smoke lifted from the field, and the volunteers found themselves facing an empty pasture with a snake-rail fence on the far side. A lone Confederate was perched on this fence, defiantly swinging