Entries - Entry Category: Individuals and Units - Starting with I

As states began to secede from the Union and form the Confederacy, the Native American tribal nations in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) closely watched the growing conflict. In January 1861, Arkansas’s governor, Henry M. Rector, wrote Cherokee chief John Ross, asking the Cherokee Nation to support the Confederacy. Rector felt that if the Cherokee supported the Confederacy, then the rest of the tribal nations would follow. Ross replied to Rector that the Cherokee would remain neutral. All the Indian nations expressed desires to remain neutral, but soon they were forced to review their decisions and choose sides in the Civil War. Their decisions brought them to fighting on Arkansas soil, sometimes on different sides of the conflict. Albert Pike was …

James M. Ingram was a Confederate guerrilla chieftain during the Civil War who, like William “Buck” Brown, operated in northwestern Arkansas. Ingram survived the war only to be assassinated five years after its end by the son of a man he killed. James Ingram was born in Illinois in 1826 to Pleasant and Belinda Ingram. By 1848, he was living in Benton County, Arkansas, where he married Amanda Graham; they had four children. After she died around 1855, he married Sara Elizabeth Easley, with whom he would have five children. Ingram was farming in Benton County when the Civil War began, and he formed a home guard company at some point before the Battle of Pea Ridge in March 1862. …