West Plains Under Attack One Hundred Sixty Years Ago

The weather had turned winter-like, typical for mid-February today and one hundred sixty years ago. A windy front streaming down from the north brought steady sleet that pelted the backs of the Union troopers as they approached West Plains on horseback. Their line of march had also been from the north as they split into four groups surrounding town at three p.m. on the afternoon of February 19, 1862. They had been in the saddle for four days to get there, and on this leg of the journey, the men had been riding almost fourteen hours.

The journey had started on a Sunday, February 15, at Rolla, the Union line, for the duration of the war in this part of the country. Southward was no man's land to the Arkansas line. A day's ride took the Yankee cavalry to eight miles south of Salem, camping for the night. The morning of the 16th, the task force, unsure of whether they were going to Thomasville or West Plains, made it eight miles to Harlow's Mill on the Jack's Fork and halted to question the natives where the rebels might be found. The after-action reports stated that Harlow's Mill, owned by Greenberry Harlow, was "a notorious rebel rendevous." The Union commander also reported, "A cold sleet had fallen all morning. My men were completely saturated and almost frozen. We were compelled to halt and build fires to keep from freezing."

While at Harlow's Mill, they extracted information that the Confederates were not to be found at Thomasville but were in West Plains. The force stopped its southeasterly ride and swung southwestward for West Plains, some thirty miles distant. They passed the southern end of what is today Willow Springs and stopped at the home of Ben Alsup, a county commissioner, and Union sympathizer. Alsup sold the troops several pounds of bacon and some corn and agreed to guide the soldiers to West Plains. A short time later, in retaliation, a group of rebels arrived at his home near the south junction of today's US Highways 60 and 63 and kidnapped Alsup, taking him to prison in Arkansas for the duration of the war. 

The march continued through the early morning hours of February 19th, down the "Rolla Road," or a course close to today's Highway 63, arriving on the north end of West Plains around three in the afternoon.

The cold had driven the inhabitants of sleepy little West Plains inside their log cabins and a few frame houses, some fifty in number. The war had substantially reduced the 1860 population of 150 souls to around one hundred. The Howell County courthouse, a wooden frame building rare for this part of the Ozarks, had been newly built just four years previous. The plat for the town drawn up by John R. Woodside was created the same year, in 1858. Woodside chose a "Lancaster" plan for the town square, one of only seven in Missouri, named after a pattern used in the 18th century in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Only four streets feed into the middle of each of the four city blocks surrounding the central square instead of the typical entry at their corners. Thus the town was and is oriented to the four compass points on a north-south axis, and the Union Army had all egress from West Plains covered and prepared to charge the square.

The courthouse had ceased to function as the seat of government at the beginning of the Civil War when Circuit Judge James H. McBride shut it down and joined the Missouri State Guard as a Brigadier General. In February 1862, the building functioned as a recruiting station and local headquarters for the Confederate Army under the control of Confederate Colonel William S. Coleman. Citizens of West Plains and surrounding communities openly loyal to the United States Government had been driven out or killed since the summer of 1861. 

At the time of the battle of the West Plains Courthouse, Colonel Coleman was not there. He had left with the bulk of his men on a recruiting mission in Texas County. This timing coincided with the Union troops hunting him so that while they were a short distance east deciding whether to go to Thomasville or West Plains, they missed Coleman going north on the Rolla Road a few miles west of him. There would have been a much larger battle had the two forces met. Coleman left a forty-man guard at the Howell County Courthouse, and around twenty other men were in the vicinity when the attack occurred.

The command of the Union forces arriving the afternoon of February 19, 1862, was shared, with a certain amount of friction. The ranking officer, Colonel Samuel N. Wood, did not share authority or glory. His military career was checkered with disputes with superiors and subordinates, eventually leading to his court-martial and dismissal from the United States service. Before the war, Wood was a radical Unionist involved in the Kansas-Missouri border disputes. When the war was declared, he raised a company of men and fought at the Battle of Wilson's Creek in August 1861. There he earned a bit of a Jayhawker reputation; it is said, he and his men walked into the battle and rode out on horseback. He was an aggressive officer to the point of recklessness and insubordination. He was known in Howell County early in the war when he led a patrol into Hutton Valley that surprised a group of men working in a field west of Hutton Valley. A twenty-one-year-old non-combatant named John Hood ran from Wood's mounted patrol, and they rode him down and shot and killed him. The incident led to many men in Howell County joining the rebel side.

Colonel Wood was accompanied in the attack on West Plains by Major William C. Drake and one hundred ten men of the Third Iowa Cavalry. Wood had one hundred fifty-two men of the Sixth Missouri Cavalry, making the combined Union force two hundred sixty-two men versus the forty rebels at the courthouse. Colonel Wood sent Major Drake and his men to the south and east ends of town, marching up what is today Aid Avenue, and East Main Street, in the direction of the Courthouse Square. Three of Wood's own companies marched toward the square from the west on what is today West Main Street, and Colonel Wood, with two of his companies, attacked from the north on what is today Washington Avenue with a mountain howitzer. The mountain howitzer is a short-barrelled large caliber (12-pound ball) cannon. 

In his report to superiors in Rolla, Wood described what happened next. "We advanced and entered the place, a brisk firing having commenced on our part. Not over half a dozen shots were fired by the rebels, they breaking and running in every direction. Supposing them posted in force in the courthouse, Sergeant Moody opened fire upon the building with the howitzer. One shot with canister (A shell filled with lead balls) covered the entire front with bullet holes. A shell (solid case filled with gunpowder ) passed through both walls and three partitions and then exploded.”

This paragraph tells us this was a firefight at close range and brief. Local lore placed the mountain howitzer fired by Company A on Vinegar Hill, several blocks from the courthouse, but it was likely fired within a block of the building. Canister fired from a mountain howitzer is only effective at distances under four hundred yards. The balls would have spread out at a greater range and could not have created the pattern described on the front of the building. Next, the solid shell fired went through the building so quickly the fuse inside did not have time to ignite the powder inside before it passed through three walls and exited the building, again indicating a close range. 

Colonel Wood continued, "The contest was brief. None killed or wounded on our side. Their (the rebels) loss was five killed, one mortally wounded (died before leaving the place), eight slightly wounded, and sixty taken prisoners. We remained in town, which is only ten miles from the Arkansas line, until the next day (20th) at 2 p.m. Of the prisoners taken, about twenty were released, as there was no evidence connecting them with the rebel army. We also captured about forty horses and sixty stand of arms, together with several wagons."

While Wood and his men remained in town that next day they scoured the countryside for suspected Confederates or sympathizers. State Representative Thomas Howell was among those arrested and taken north. The prisoners' journey included a night in the Shannon County Courthouse, a brief stay in the Rolla stockade, and incarceration in Gratiot Street Prison in St. Louis. Some of the prisoners were transferred to a prison in Alton, Illinois, during a smallpox outbreak and died there.

The only eyewitness account on the Confederate side I've found was written many years later. Samuel A. Harrison of Dent County told a reporter for the Houston Herald in 1939 that, "In a battle at West Plains, his friend, Pat Ellis, was shot dead at his side. Harrison turned to pick Ellis up, and a bullet went through his own right shoulder." In fact, the bullet that struck Harrison lodged in his shoulder and was visible as a lump under his skin until he died at the age of ninety-eight. Harrison managed to escape after the battle but was captured in another fight later in the war. Prison records list sixteen men arrested at the Battle of West Plains with home addresses in Dent, Reynolds, Texas, and Wright counties. Who the other men were and where they were from is not known. None of the six men killed in the battle have been identified, and there is no local tradition as to where they were buried, though it is likely because they were not local, they were quickly interred near the battle on the outskirts of town and promptly forgotten. 

Following the battle and the exit of Union forces, West Plains returned to Confederate control until the arrival of the Union Army of the Southwest later in 1862 and the Army of the Southeast at the end of 1862 and January 1863. These two armies had a combined force of nearly ten thousand men and stripped the countryside bare. Because of the push and pull of invading troops, West Plains was utterly abandoned by Summer 1863 and burned to the ground in the Fall of that year. The courthouse square grew up in brush and was not restored until the Civil War ended.