Skirmish near Gaines' Landing (February 22, 1864)

The Skirmish near Gaines’ Landing, in which Confederate cavalrymen ambushed a detachment of the Mississippi Marine Brigade, was fought on February 22, 1864.

Gaines’ Landing in Chicot County was one of several places along the Mississippi River where Confederate troops would fire on steamboats and then race across narrow necks of land to attack them again as the boats traversed large loops of the river. There had already been skirmishes at Gaines’ Landing on July 20, 1862, and June 28, 1863.

The Union four-gun ram USS Baltic was steaming down the Mississippi River off Chicot County on the morning of February 22, 1864, when it was fired on by “what was thought to be a small squad of the enemy.” The vessel pulled ashore near Gaines’ Landing, and Captain J. P. Harper of the Mississippi Marine Brigade led a detachment of seventeen men in pursuit.

As they passed a large plantation, Sergeant Alonzo Allis was leading five men in advance through a gate when they “received a terrible volley, from about one hundred Texans,” the brigade’s historians wrote. All five men were wounded in the fusillade, with Allis’s injuries proving fatal.

Sergeant Philip Stevens’s horse was killed under him, while he was shot in the knee. Rising to fire on his attackers, Stevens had his head grazed by a bullet, leading him to play dead. Confederate soldiers then “stripped him, taking his boots, revolvers and equipments, clothing, and forty dollars in greenbacks” before giving him a “parting shot” in the arm. The Confederates fled when Union reinforcements arrived.

While the Federals thought their attackers were Texans, they were actually troopers in the First (Crawford’s) Arkansas Cavalry (CS), who were operating in the area. Colonel William Ayers Crawford noted in a letter to his wife that “I had an engagement with the Federals from the Marine fleet, near Gaines Landing….Killing & wounding fifteen of the enemy and several horses. I had drawn them into an ambush. I did not lose a man.” (The number of casualties mentioned in this letter is at variance with the official report.)

The Gaines’ Landing area would again be a center of Confederate operations in late May and early June 1864 as Colonel Colton Greene’s men conducted a series of attacks that culminated in the Engagement at Ditch Bayou (a.k.a. Engagement at Old River Lake) on June 6.

For additional information:
Crandall, Warren D., and Isaac D. Newell. History of the Ram Fleet and the Mississippi Marine Brigade in the War for the Union on the Mississippi and its Tributaries: The Story of the Ellets and Their Men. St. Louis, MO: 1907.

Simons, Don R. In Their Words: A Chronology of the Civil War in Chicot County, Arkansas and Adjacent Waters of the Mississippi River. Lake Village, AR: D. R. Simons, 1999.

Mark K. Christ
Central Arkansas Library System