Race and Irregular Warfare on the Trans-Mississippi Border, 1861–1865

In May 1863, twenty-five African American troops from the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry and a small contingent of white soldiers ordered the Rader family out of their two-story house in southwest Missouri. Following a brief assessment, the Federal foragers found several bushels of corn that had been stored upstairs. The war in the region was about food as much as anything else, and the Yankees had found enough to fill their wagons. Excited by their newfound bounty, the black soldiers leaned their rifles against the fence and went to work tossing the corn out the second-story windows to the wagons below. Suddenly, over sixty Confederate guerrillas emerged on horseback and surrounded the house. A brief fight ensued, and those white Federals who did not perish in the immediate onslaught, fled. Meanwhile, the unarmed black troops inside the house were trapped. The guerrillas set the house on fire. Those caught inside had a choice: burn to death or attempt to flee. They chose the latter. The guerrillas clubbed the black men to death or shot them down. Almost all perished. 1

The vicious little fight at the Rader Farm ended almost as quickly as it had started. Self-proclaimed guerrilla “captain” Thomas Livingston and his men had surprised and killed sixteen Union troops, most of whom were black. He kept only five alive to use as leverage for a prisoner exchange. For Livingston and the Confederate guerrillas, the Rader Farm Massacre had been a resounding success. He boasted to Confederate Gen. Sterling Price that he had soundly defeated the black troops driven by the “hellish passions of their race.” Black soldiers taking corn from a pro-Confederate family seemingly verified everything that Livingston and his irregulars held true: the Federals had freed, armed, and encouraged slaves to fulfill their “hellish” desires upon innocent white Confederate families. This conviction-dubious as it may be-lies at the very core of Livingston’s irregular war. More broadly, it reflects the racial extremism that influenced the nature of irregular warfare on the western Trans-Mississippi border. 2

The region where irregulars like Livingston plied their trade-where Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Indian Territory blended together-represents one of the most racially and ethnically diverse areas in the South during the Civil War. Prior to 1861, this cultural and political borderland had undergone a rapid, complex, and often bloody period of border disputes based on politics and race. Most famously, Bleeding Kansas pitted pro-slave whites against their counterparts in eastern Kansas and western Missouri. Here, intense, racially driven warfare preceded formalized civil war by half a decade. In Indian Territory, the various Indian Nations had been embroiled in internal and external disorder since their arrival in the 1830s. Western Arkansas held a singular,

if tenuous, modicum of political and economic stability in the region during the 1850s. Within this wider border region, racial, cultural, and political boundaries overlapped with remarkable and dangerous fluidity. It was atop this unstable societal foundation that the most brutal, irregular war during the Civil War fully ignited in 1861. Indeed, when viewed in microcosm, the war on the western Trans-Mississippi border represents in concentrate the Civil War’s extremes in race and violence. 3

Although guerrilla warfare is a critically important part of irregular warfare, the war on the border went well beyond guerrilla actions alone. Any style of warfare that defied traditional definitions of “regular” war-a style of war that moved beyond set-piece strategies, campaigns, and battlescan be usefully characterized as irregular. Definitions of irregular war can most closely be tied to what military theorist Carl von Clausewitz called “insurrectionary” or “partisan” warfare-a kind of fighting that went well beyond primary campaigns and battles and that could never be “decided by a single stroke” and nearly always occurred in “rough and inaccessible” terrain. Irregular warfare on the border was civilian-centered and characterized by the widespread and often deadly involvement of combatants and non-combatants. Finally, while this definition for irregular war certainly suited much of the South at different times during the conflict, few regions possessed such racial diversity and animosity than the western Trans-Mississippi border. Here, Indians, African Americans, and whites had become directly or indirectly, willingly or unwillingly engaged in a kind of war that superseded even Clausewitz’s definitions for a people’s war. 4

Fighting a war beyond their cultural comfort zone against people outside their “cultural net,” as one historian calls it, led to a devastating experience for civilians and soldiers alike. Wisconsin farm boys could hardly reconcile their distrust and, at times, sheer loathing of residents in southwest Missouri. Confederate guerrillas terrorized African American soldiers every chance they had. Native Americans imparted their style of war-what some American tacticians called a “skulking way of war”—in the greater military effort and incited suspiciousness and very often hatred from both Union and Confederate soldiers. The nature of the conflict among soldiers and civilians with different cultures and ethnicities was often deadly and always confusing. According to a historian of the Indian Wars in colonial America, combatants “suffered from muddled convictions and uncertainties about the war’s boundaries and divisions.” And so it was on the western frontier of the Trans-Mississippi. The irregular war here was a messy, confusing, and an altogether brutal affair. It blurred the lines of what had been deemed as honorable or civilized warfare. Such was the stuff for regular armies fighting regular battles in regular campaigns. The intense racial and political hatred that helped fuel the war became the conflict’s centerpiece in the western margins of Missouri and Arkansas. 5

Fully defining irregular warfare’s historiographical and ideological underpinnings on the border is impossible without understanding the incredibly cultural and ethnic diversity in the region. Warfare along the western Trans-Mississippi frontier was defined by a wide variety of people, especially Native Americans. Recent scholarship has reflected Indian Territory’s important role in the regular and, more importantly, irregular war. Clarissa Confer, Mary Jane Warde, and others have laid bare the devastating conflict that occurred in Indian Territory by illustrating the violent and destructive war in the conflicted region. Here, unlike anywhere else in the South, Native American combatants and civilians blended with white and African American soldiers and civilians to form an ethnic, cultural, and racial middle ground. No matter their allegiance, Indian civilians suffered immeasurably from the very onset of the war. Thousands died or became refugees. All were exposed to especially harsh environmental extremes, and they all became directly involved in the conflict. Their war was relentless, ubiquitous, and devastating. 6

According to historian Mark Lause, the remarkable racial diversity on the border had created, for the Union, a “mutual interdependence among whites, blacks, and Indians in the face of the

enemy.” This, for Lause, became the very embodiment of what he calls the border war’s “radicalism.” In this radical racial and cultural environment, civilian refugees, guerrillas, and regular Confederate and Union forces interacted, often simultaneously, in what became a racially based and altogether irregular civil war. Most Civil War scholars, however, have focused their work within traditional political boundaries. 7

Situated in the chronological and geographical shadow of Bleeding Kansas, it is little surprise that racial undertones permeated the irregular war on the border. Radical abolitionists had flocked to eastern Kansas, and many quickly volunteered to continue the already bloody fight against the new Confederacy and those who supported it. In John Brown’s wake emerged passionate anti-slave Kansas troops who continued their war against slavery and those who supported it in Missouri, Arkansas, and Indian Territory. Union commanders Jim Lane, James Montgomery, and others quickly set out to fight under the Union banner. Collectively known as “Jayhawkers,” they thrived in the middle ground between regular soldiers and guerrillas and, like Confederate guerrillas, they never drew a clear delineation between civilians and combatants. South of the Kansas-Missouri line, concepts of race shifted to include not only blacks-free and slave-but also, and especially, Native Americans. Like the country as a whole, Union and Confederate sympathies splintered the nations within Indian Territory. Their Civil War had become something of a war within a war, one fueled not only by national issues but persistent internecine tribal conflicts as well. In short, the war on the western Trans-Mississippi border was racially, culturally, and militarily complex. The fighting and suffering that broke out (or continued) in 1861 was by all accounts the very antithesis of the “regular” war further east. 8

Racial and cultural struggles therefore emerged as an integral part of the conflict. Union Indians, blacks, and whites often fought together in a unified front against Confederate whites and Indians. Confederate guerrillas sought especially savage retribution against black troops, and white federal commanders increasingly came to question whether to grant guerrillas even the smallest level of mercy. Native American civilians suffered immeasurably within the first months of the war. The conflict had nullified their control over the environment. Such racial diversity on the frontier exemplified the radical nature of the conflict. The war in the region had soon become one influenced largely by what Lause has called the “heirs of John Brown.” Indeed, the racial tension and violence that had so indelibly marked the pre-war Kansas-Missouri border grew into a complex, terror-driven conflict that spilled over into Indian Territory and Arkansas. 9

In the first months of the war, as both sides struggled to come to terms with the conflict, a deadly crisis had already unfolded on the border. Unionist Creek Indians-and a mixture of others-prepared to flee north from the Creek Nation in south central Indian Territory. Their leader, Creek Chief Opothleyahola, had assembled nearly eight thousand people, the vast majority of whom were civilians from a variety of Indian Nations. Nearly a thousand were slaves who had flocked to the refugee ranks in one of the first significant war-induced slave movements toward freedom. For Confederate authorities, Opothleyahola had committed something akin to theft by welcoming runaway slaves and hundreds of livestock to his ranks. In the fall of 1861, this army of Indians and slave refugees-mostly civilians-crossed the Arkansas River and moved north. They sought assistance from both the Cherokee Nation and Union authorities in southeastern Kansas. The Cherokee, uneasy about Opothleyahola’s inclusion of runaway slaves, kept clear, but Federal outposts in Kansas passively awaited the fugitives. 10

Armed warriors and soldiers protecting Opothleyahola’s remarkably diverse and poorly supplied refugees numbered, by one estimate, between eight hundred and twelve hundred Creek and Seminole Indians and nearly three hundred armed African Americans. As they moved north toward Union territory, Confederate Gen. Douglas H. Cooper’s fourteen hundred man army gave chase. Cooper’s force consisted of an equally diverse group of Chickasaw, Choctaw,

Muscogee, Seminole, and Texas troops. The Confederates attacked the unwieldy army of refugees several times as they attempted their escape. At the Battle of Chustenahlah on December 26, part of Cooper’s army led by Col. James McIntosh engaged Opothleyahola’s force in the hills of northeast Indian Territory. The fight at Chustenahlah reflected not only the nature of most engagements endured by the fleeing Creeks, but also the new and brutal irregular style of war on the western Trans-Mississippi border. Regular soldiers engaged militia tasked not with waging a regular campaign but rather to protect thousands of civilians as they retreated toward relative safety. The vicious little fight was intense and confusing. It ran counter to most regular battles. The refugees split into small bands, attacked rapidly, and quickly melted back into the rugged terrain. McIntosh’s men had little choice but to reorient their tactics. According to one Confederate officer, Opothleyahola’s warriors had fought so desperately and asymmetrically that it compelled his men to “abandon strict military discipline and make use of somewhat similar movements in order to be successful.” In the end, McIntosh reported that his victorious Confederates had killed more than two hundred Indians and captured over a hundred women, children, and former slaves. He made clear, Opothleyahola’s refugees had been “scattered in every direction, destitute of the simplest elements of subsistence.” 11

While Opothleyahola’s fighters had succeeded in slowing their Confederate pursuers, gaining precious time for the civilians they sought to protect, the last leg of their exodus became the hardest. Winter was well underway, and snow covered much of the rough ground as the weary refugees trudged north. Confederate forces under Cooper kept pressure on the increasingly weak army of refugees, capturing or killing hundreds between Chustenahlah and the Kansas border. By most accounts, women and children had become targets and “were not spared” by the Confederate Indians and Texans in pursuit. Many perished from freezing temperatures and malnourishment. 12

Those who finally made it to southeastern Kansas were in shambles. Frostbitten, hungry, and exhausted, the Indian refugees found little aid from Union authorities who had been quickly overwhelmed by the flood of desperate people. Men, women, and children, already sick, suffered through the rest of the winter. Housed in crude tents, they huddled around small fires in an attempt to stay warm. With dwindling amounts of wood for the fire, most suffered from cold-induced illnesses, including severe frostbite. Hundreds more died by spring. In the end, although the survivors had made it to Union territory, they continued to suffer not only throughout the winter of 1861-1862, but for the remainder of the conflict. 13

The complexity and brutality of Opothleyahola’s trek north and its aftermath reflect the especially intense role race played in shaping irregular warfare on the western Trans-Mississippi border. Over eight thousand Native Americans and former slaves had fled north. Hundreds were captured by Confederate forces and hundreds more had been killed. Race fueled their crucible. It was exacting and brutal. Moreover, the Native Americans and African Americans’ plight had occurred in the first year of the war, well before any major battles. As they suffered and died on the western Trans-Mississippi border, politicians, commanders, and civilians on both sides were still contemplating the meaning and severity of the conflict. During the Civil War, nowhere else in the South had such a deadly exodus occurred. Although countless white civilians soon fled north or south and suffered in refugee camps, they rarely faced the daunting prospect of capture, pursuit, and death. 14

In addition to an ever-increasing stream of Indian, black, and white refugees, intense combat along forested rivers and rugged hills came to typify the irregular war on the border. Confederate guerrillas had become adept at evading Federal patrols by melting quickly into the landscape before their victims could mount any serious counterattack. In light of these tactical difficulties, Union commanders found the “skulking” abilities of their Indian allies ideally suited for

combating Confederate guerrillas. Union Major E.C. Ellithorpe put such able scouts to good use in the Indian Territory’s harsh terrain. During the Union’s ill-fated 1862 “Indian Expedition” into the territory, Ellithorpe’s Native American soldiers repeatedly proved themselves to be outstanding irregular fighters. In one case, he had located a small force of Confederate guerrillas in a “thickly timbered bottom” near the Verdigris River in the Cherokee Nation. “The brush was so thick that I dared not undertake to penetrate without first learning the strength of the enemy,” Ellithorpe wrote, “and to do this was a difficult task not having any cannon to shell the woods.” He resorted to his Indian scouts. They crept silently through the brush to gauge the enemy’s strength, and thanks to their valuable intelligence, he ordered a successful attack the following morning. “Here I saw the value of the Indian as a daring scout,” he later wrote. 15 For most Union soldiers, experiences in the brush were far different. Even on horseback, Federal cavalryman Chester L. White suffered directly from the difficult terrain. Soon after an engagement with Gen. Stand Watie’s Confederate Indians, White got lost in the dense undergrowth. “I got entangled in the d-dst place I ever got into nothing but Grapevines-rattlesnakes and wood-ticks,” White lamented, “after trying for about an hour to get out I finally succeeded in doing so by jumping my horse down a perpendicular bank 15 feet into a swampy creek where I was not much better off than before.” 16

As the Indian Expedition continued, Union authorities hoped to move Native American civilian refugees back to their homes in the Cherokee Nation. In July, Gen. James Blunt told Col. William Weer to survey the land through northeastern Indian Territory. “As it is desirable to return the refugee Indians now in Kansas to their homes as soon as practicable,” Blunt ordered, “you will therefore take measures to ascertain if the corn crop in the Indian Territory of the present season will be sufficient to subsist them.” He also ordered Weer to pressure Cherokee Chief John Ross to reconsider his position with the Confederacy. Part of Ross’s concerns reflected those of Native American civilians throughout eastern Indian Territory. According to a Union officer who conducted talks directly with the embattled Cherokee chief, he was “very much concerned about the people of his nation, and anxious that the United States Government should send sufficient force . . . to protect them from lawless bands that are daily threatening them, committing robberies and murders.” Ross also showed considerable fear for “his own personal safety and the safety of his family.” In the end, though, with the Union army’s strong show of force in the territory, Blunt would gain the chief ’s careful cooperation and that of over fifteen hundred Cherokee civilians. 17

But regaining Ross’s tepid loyalty was the expedition’s only success. As Weer’s motley army of Native Americans, German immigrants, and Midwestern farm boys moved south through northeastern Indian Territory, they met stubborn resistance from both regular and irregular Confederates. Guerrilla bands from southwest Missouri, most notably the group led by Thomas R. Livingston, teamed with Gen. Stand Watie’s regular forces to frustrate Federal progress. Trudging through thick brush and across numerous creeks and rivers while being constantly harassed by guerrilla bands and Confederate pickets, the Union expedition slowed considerably. Moreover, by the time Weer’s Yankees had reached the outskirts of Fort Gibson in mid-July, they found desolation. Anticipating the Union assault, Confederate Gen. Albert Pike had ordered his troops to set fire to a four-mile radius of prairie and brush surrounding the fort. The especially hot and dry conditions (one soldier reported a likely exaggerated 125 degrees) only added to the miserable conditions. 18

The Confederates, meanwhile, took full advantage of the adverse environmental conditions. In a letter to Confederate Secretary of War George W. Randolph, Gen. Albert Pike made clear the harassing actions taken against the Union expedition and carefully noted what, in the end, would prove decisive in thwarting any further Union advance. “The excessive drought, the utter

destruction of corn and grass, the intense heat, and the scarcity of water may prove our best allies,” Pike reported. Indeed, he continued, thanks to the environment, “no large force of the enemy can march now any distance into this country.” 19

Col. William Weer’s proclivity for whiskey, his habit of staying where none but “putrid, stinking water” was available to his men, and the subsequent discontent among his troops led second-in-command Col. Frederick Salomon to take action. Salomon, a German immigrant, had seen enough. “I have stood by with arms folded and seen my men fade and fall away from me like the leaves in autumn because I thought myself powerless to save them,” Salomon explained, “I will look upon this scene no longer.” He removed his superior officer, took command of the expedition, and promptly ordered an evacuation of the Cherokee Nation. 20

Nearly three thousand Native American refugees followed Salomon’s retreating army north where they joined those who had fled to Kansas with Opothleyahola’s band in the winter of 1861. “They had been robbed of all their means of subsistence,” Indian leaders noted in a letter to Cherokee Chief John Ross, and following the Union army into southeast Kansas was the only option. Although large armies were mostly absent from the Cherokee Nation by late 1862, the area was, once again, “overrun by guerrilla bands; committing every conceivable depredation.” Most able-bodied Indian men mustered into Union regiments, while their wives and children remained in a poorly supplied refugee camp along a wooded creek near Fort Scott, Kansas, where they subsisted on what little food and shelter the federal fort could provide. Their condition remained both pitiable and deadly, especially as winter set in. The refugees suffered immeasurably due to poor shelter and bad weather. Although Gen. James Blunt took temporary charge of supplying the growing number of refugees camped near the fort, he was unable to secure appropriate shelter. “When the fall rains came on and the winter frosts,” lamented Cherokee leadership, “these women and children were thus exposed and were most miserably clad.” Hundreds died. The fields surrounding the refugee camp became a vast unmarked graveyard filled with men, women, and children. Intense guerrilla war had again kept them from rebuilding their homes in the Cherokee Nation while harsh environmental conditions killed them. 21

That fall, the Fort Scott Bulletin published an editorial titled “Lo! The Poor Indians,” in which the editor lamented, “These women and children, squatted down in the timber, in our vicinity, have selected this locality as a place of safety, and security, against the marauders of their own nationality in the rebel army.” The Indians were still not safe, though better off than if these “suffering creatures [had remained] in their own country.” The situation was bleak. “Unless something is done for them very soon,” he worried, “these poor people will before the winter is over, make one move more, to the country where they will be troubled no longer by the wicked, and where the weary rest forever.” They needed better shelter and new clothes to survive the winter, but such materials had to come from civilian donors who were themselves starving and freezing. Hundreds of refugees continued to trickle in throughout the winter, sometimes in groups as large as six hundred people. 22

While Union commanders struggled to reconcile the Indian refugee problem, they came to a radical solution to help combat the persistent and increasingly frustrating guerrilla problem on the border: turn some of the hundreds of escaped Missouri slaves into soldiers. Operating under such a mindset, Kansas Senator, and sometimes general, James H. Lane created without permission the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Regiment, which operated informally outside of Union authorities until the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863. This radical and extralegal regiment of former slaves had been ordered to hunt Confederate guerrillas just inside the Missouri border. Working from reports they had received from locals that a large guerrilla force was in the area, the counter-guerrilla patrol of over two hundred men discovered over a hundred guerrillas accompanying a small Confederate contingent moving just inside the Missouri state line. The

intense fight that followed at Island Mound, Missouri, on October 29, reflected not only African American aptitude in combat but also the integral role race played in irregular warfare. It was also the first significant engagement between black troops and the Confederacy. 23

The 1st Kansas quickly made contact with the guerrilla force. Most of the ensuing battle happened in the brush and included especially hard fighting at very close proximity. In what had become typical for Union anti-guerrilla patrols, the first day proved to be, as one Federal officer quipped, full of “desultory skirmishes.” The Confederate irregulars had employed their chief strategy of hiding in the brush just out of range or sight of Union muskets. By the next morning, the frustrated 1st Kansas took the offensive. A brutal chase followed as guerrillas yelled above the ruckus of battle “come on, you damned niggers.” The irony of the moment was lost on neither Union soldiers nor officers for, just as guerrillas issued such challenges, they were riding on horseback to escape from the marching black troops. By afternoon, the deadly cat and mouse game had gone over four miles through thick brush, but the chase finally stagnated and many of the irregulars had escaped. As the Union troops returned to camp, the guerrillas launched a counterattack. More intense fighting ensued. Union commanders quickly sought to control a nearby mound and sent twenty-five 1st Kansas troops to hold the hill. Upon seeing the high ground compromised, the bulk of the mounted guerrilla force then rapidly turned toward the small band of Union troops and charged the hill. “Nothing dismayed, the little band turned upon their foes,” a Union officer reported, “and as their guns cracked many a riderless [horse] swung off to one side.” The guerrillas soon demanded the small band of black soldiers surrender, but to do so would mean certain death. According to a Union officer who witnessed the ordeal, “I never saw a braver sight than that handful of brave men fighting 117 men who were all around and in amongst them. Not one surrendered or gave up a weapon.” 24

Nearly as soon as the nasty little skirmish had started, more Union soldiers charged the hill to relieve their besieged comrades. At this, the now outnumbered guerrilla force abandoned their attack and set fire to the dry brush to thwart the Federal counterattack. As they retreated, the guerrillas tried to finish off any wounded Union soldiers. One Federal lieutenant, hit in the leg by buckshot, fell awkwardly into their path. According to a witness, “one of the cowardly demons dismounted, and making the remark that he would finish the damned son of a bitch, placed his revolver to his head and fired.” The guerrilla’s bullet glanced off the Union officer’s head and ripped open a cavity between his skull and scalp until it exited from behind. Although grievously wounded, the man had survived. In the end, as was nearly always the case, the vast majority of guerrillas made their escape. 25

The fight at Island Mound illustrates the tactical and racial nature of irregular warfare on the Trans-Mississippi border. Within just over a year after Fort Sumter, white officers and black soldiers at Island Mound had fought side-by-side against Confederate guerrillas. Moreover, the engagement in western Missouri occurred before any formal declaration of emancipation. In his official report concerning the skirmish, white Union Capt. R. G. Ward exclaimed that those wounded and killed African American troops “deserve the lasting gratitude of all the friends of the cause and race.” Island Mound had been a fitting baptism into war for the 1st Kansas. For the next year, they continued to chase guerrillas in western Missouri where they remained enmeshed in the violent irregular war that had inundated the region. The regiment’s experience only worsened as the war progressed. 26

Four years of intense, racially fueled irregular warfare proved especially destructive along Indian Territory’s eastern edge. According to a Bureau of Ethnology report, the Cherokee Nation in northeast Indian Territory suffered “more desolation and ruin than perhaps any other community.” Regular and irregular warfare perpetuated by both Union and Confederate forces had reduced the countryside to a “blackened and desolate waste” where civilians suffered “want,

misery, and the elements.” Indeed, the Cherokee Nation alone lost nearly seven thousand people. Most of the remaining fourteen thousand became refugees after they lost their homes and livestock during the bloody episode in eastern Indian Territory. Their former home, continued the report, “was distinguishable from the virgin prairie only by the scorched and blackened chimneys and the . . . now neglected fields.” According to historian Clarissa Confer, the Cherokee Nation had “suffered almost total destruction . . . and the entire social fabric had disintegrated.” 27

With depopulation and destruction came the fall of slavery on much of the border. Even toward the end, slaveholders scrambled to preserve their institution by fleeing south. “Though slaves had become a very uncertain kind of property,” one Arkansas Unionist noted during the war, “men would abandon home, kindred, friends, every thing, in fact, to save their negroes.” But in the end, thousands of slaves had secured their own freedom. The border’s increasingly anarchic atmosphere played no small role in providing them opportunities to escape. Some would join the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteers and other Union regiments, while still more crowded into Union refugee camps along the border. A common factor for each remained the brutal irregular war that ravaged the border. For former slaves who took up arms against the Confederacy and for those who fled from its confines, irregular war defined their Civil War experience. 28

The Civil War on the western Trans-Mississippi border is exemplified by race and irregular warfare. Soldiers, guerrillas, and civilians together engaged in a difficult conflict that made everyone a combatant. Whites, blacks, and Indians struggled to both kill and survive. Unlike anywhere else during the Civil War, a complex mixture of races and cultures clashed in what had devolved into one of the most brutal regions of the war. As reflected by Opothleyahola’s exodus to southeast Kansas, the style of fighting in Indian Territory, and the 1st Kansas Volunteers’ counterinsurgency fights at Island Mound, the Rader Farm, and elsewhere, war on the border persisted in a racially charged, exacting, and altogether irregular fashion. The thousands of men, women, and children of all races and cultures who poured into refugee camps further complicated the already complex military situation. This pocket of the Civil War on the western margins of the Trans-Mississippi reveals a kind of conflict reminiscent of the ruthless Indian Wars that came before and after the conflict, and it foreshadows especially complicated and deadly wars defined by civilian, racial, and irregular contours in the twentieth century.