Time Period: Civil War through Reconstruction (1861 - 1874) - Starting with I

The I Go was a small steamboat often chartered by the Union military during the Civil War. It was attacked by guerrillas and ultimately captured and destroyed on the Arkansas River by Confederate cavalry on June 12, 1864. The I Go was a 104-ton sternwheel paddleboat built at Antiquity, Ohio, in 1861; the vessel was rebuilt after a boiler explosion at Parkersburg, West Virginia. Union forces first chartered the I Go in August 1862 and used it again in October 1863. The vessel was chartered from December 12, 1863, to March 19, 1864, then from April 10 to April 25, 1864 “for operations on the Arkansas River.” The I Go was again chartered from April 25 to May 8, 1864, …

On January 15, 1875, a Native American man named McClish Impson was executed at Fort Smith (Sebastian County). According to court records, Impson had murdered an unidentified man in Indian Country in 1873. While Impson does not appear in public records, there is some information available about his history. Historian Jerry Akins reports that his mother died when he was an infant, and he was adopted by a Christian family and given a Christian name and education. When he was fourteen, his adoptive father died, and his biological father took him in. His father, part of a gang of horse thieves, introduced Impson “to his drinking, gambling, horse-stealing, murderous, vagabond way of life.” His father was killed around 1872. In …

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. …