Retreat from McKisick's Farm (March 6, 1862)

German native Brigadier General Franz Sigel led a desperate rear-guard action on March 6, 1862, action to protect his divisions as they moved from positions east of Bentonville (Benton County) to join the rest of Major General Samuel R. Curtis’s Army of the Southwest at Pea Ridge (Benton County).

Curtis sent messages to Sigel on March 5, 1862, warning of Confederate forces in the area and ordering him to rejoin the main army. Around dawn on March 6, the German general’s First Division under Brigadier General Alexander Asboth and Second Division led by Colonel Peter J. Osterhaus left their camps on McKissick’s Creek and began marching east toward Pea Ridge.

Sigel remained behind with the rear-guard troops comprised of eight companies of the Twelfth Missouri Infantry (US), part of the Fifth Missouri Cavalry (US), two companies of the Thirty-sixth Illinois Cavalry, and the six guns of the First Missouri Flying Battery, a total force of around 600 men. Sigel tarried over breakfast at the Eagle House hotel in Bentonville until around 10:00 a.m., when he learned that several hundred Confederate cavalry were about two miles away.

Those troops were Brigadier General James M. McIntosh’s brigade of cavalry and Colonel Elisha Gates’s First Missouri Cavalry (CS). McIntosh led his brigade north of Bentonville, intending to get behind Sigel’s command and cut him off from Curtis’s army while Gates attacked them from the west across Osage Prairie.

Sigel set up a defensive position on a small knoll east of Bentonville with two cannon of the First Missouri Flying Battery and his cavalry to hold off Gates’s Missourians while the rest of his small force continued marching east. After firing a dozen rounds and scattering the Confederates, the Federals raced to rejoin their comrades.

Gates had sent several hundred of his men to get behind Sigel’s troops, and the Missourians captured a company of the Thirty-sixth Illinois Infantry from Osterhaus’s First Division who had stopped to guard a broken ammunition wagon as it was repaired. The Twelfth Missouri Infantry (US) from Sigel’s rear guard arrived soon after, freeing some of the Illinois troops as Gates’s men rode back toward Osage Prairie.

Gates continued to press Sigel, forming a line on the high ground above a gorge through which the Federals were retreating. Sigel sent the Twelfth Missouri and a howitzer up a ravine to the top of the bluff to confront Gates, allowing time for the rest of his artillery to get through the gorge and open fire on the Confederate Missourians, leading them to break off the engagement.

As Sigel continued toward Pea Ridge, McIntosh’s Texas cavalry finally arrived, having failed to cut off the Union troops’ retreat. Sigel deployed his men across the road as the Texans charged, killing ten and wounding twenty before the Confederate horsemen fell back. Their attempt to then flank the Federals failed when reinforcements from the First and Second Divisions arrived to reinforce Sigel’s small command around 3:30 p.m.

Sigel reported that “from the moment we left the town, at 10:30 in the morning, until 3:30 o’clock in the afternoon, when we met the first re-enforcements…we sustained three regular attacks, and were uninterruptedly in sight and under the fire of the enemy. When the first re-enforcement had arrived I knew that we were safe.” Sigel’s troops reached Pea Ridge and would participate in the next two days of fighting.

Historians William Shea and Earl Hess wrote of Sigel’s actions that “all things considered…the little German general handled himself and his troops well on March 6. The fighting retreat from Bentonville was one of the few bright moments in his military career.”

For additional information:
Shea, William, and Earl Hess. Pea Ridge: Civil War Campaign in the West. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Vol. 8, pp. 209–210. Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1883.

Mark K. Christ
Little Rock, Arkansas