A small cavalry brigade was to distract Blunt at Cane Hill. At 3 A. M. December 7, the Confederate infantry, with Clark's Regiment including Henry and John Powell, was ordered to advance toward Prairie Grove and Herron's forces. Hindman stopped when he reached Prairie Grove Church, on a ridge overlooking Illinois creek. Hindman placed Frost's and Parsons's Missourians (with Clark's regiment under command of B. G. Roan placed behind Frost as reserves), Stand Watie's Indians, his Arkansas and Texas troops, and Marmaduke's cavalry, eight thousand men in all, along a two-mile line on the ridge to await Herron's six thousand weary marchers. Blunt, with at least eight thousand more Federals, was only eight miles away.
As Herron's artillery reached Illinois Creek, Hindman's first shell burst over them. Herron correctly assumed Blunt would hear the bombardment and come running. Private Eli Cooper, our Great-Great-Grandfather, rode with the Eighth Missouri Cavalry in Herron's Army. Now facing the united armies, Hindman was hopelessly out numbered and out gunned. Blunt and Herron inflicted heavy damage with their superior artillery.
The battle raged fiercely with many charges and retreats, but nightfall found the Confederates still in command of the ridge. A few last shells blazed across the night sky catching several haystacks on fire. Wounded men had crept into them for warmth, only to parish in the flames. Hindman reported, "There was no place of shelter upon the field...During five hours, shell, solid shot, grape and canister, and storms of bullets swept the entire ground."
Under cover of darkness, a truce was arranged and, with blankets wrapped around his cannon wheels to muffle the sounds, Hindman retreated. His hungry soldiers had not eaten for a whole day and were almost out of ammunition. Dawn found only a small burial detail of Confederates including Shelby's horsemen on the field while the main army was well down the road to Van Buren. Some of Herron's men, exhausted from their long march, had died of exposure in the December cold, but the worst horror was the burnt bodies in the ashes of the haystacks.
Hindman withdrew to Van Buren with his weary troops. Marmaduke's cavalry was sent one hundred miles east to Lewisburg, near the present site of Morrilton. The starving, ragged and unpaid Confederate troops were deserting in great numbers. The records of Clark's regiment show many who deserted or were captured, some seemly on purpose, during this time.
On December 27, at three o'clock in the morning, General Herron and General Bunt marched on Van Buren. Three steam-boats of Confederate supplies were burned. Hindman's main army camped on the other side of the river at Fort Smith, without rations and ammunition, retreated down the Arkansas River. Clark's unit lists man after man left wounded at the hospital in Fort Smith December 27. Rain soaked the roads and chilled the hungry men. Ten days later the remnant of Hindman's army reached Little Rock.
Henry and John Powell both survived severe hardships to appear on the muster roll of Co. B of Clark's Regiment in Little Rock in March and April 1863. But the war proved too much for Henry. The record states: I certify that I have carefully examined the said Henry Powell of Captain Bond's Co. and found him incapable of performing the duties of a soldier because of extreme old age and impaired vision. The said soldier is now in his sixty-first (61st) year and is of no benefit to the service. Discharged this 25th day of March 1863 at Fort Pleasant Ark. Brig? Clark's Regt. Ark. Signed, W. C. Boon (Surgeon)
On his discharge, Henry drew pay from 23 August 1862 to 26 March 1863 "being 7 months and 3 days at eleven dollars per month" ($78.10), for "traveling from Fort Pleasant Ark. the place of discharge to Scotland County, Mo. the place of enrolment, being six hundred and fifty miles at ten cents per mile" ($65.00), and "for clothing not drawn in kind" ($38.07). He received $181.17 total, but this was likely Confederate Script that would have been worthless after he left Little Rock.
Henry had to travel on foot through Federal lines subsisting off the land the 650 miles back to his family in Schuyler County. Surely by this time he was sick of war. When he returned home, we think he took his family to Nebraska until after the war ended.
While Hindman camped at Little Rock, Marmaduke and Shelby lead a series of raids along the border zone into Missouri, but the Confederacy never again marshalled enough strength to wage a full-scale attack on the Federals in Arkansas and Missouri.
The April muster roll for Clark's Regiment is the last record we have for John Powell. Many soldiers in Clark's unit are listed as deserters, captured, dying of disease including typhoid, cholera and camp fever, wounded and killed. John Powell's record gives no indication of his fate--nothing about desertion, disease, capture or death.
On August 23, 1863, General D. M. Frost, commanding officer of Confederate forces defending Little Rock, Arkansas requested permission of General Sterling Price to move Clark's Brigade to a new location. When Little Rock fell to Federal forces on September 10, Clark and his men were guarding the road by Shoal Ford from Redoubt No. 1. Since there is no mention of the fate of John Powell in his record, I believe he was still with this unit at the fall of Little Rock.
In the ensuing confusion of yet another Confederate retreat, the fate of John Powell is left to speculation. The one certainty is that he did not make it home like his father. Sometime between April 1863 and the end of the war he perished, either as a result of disease or a casualty of war. We have yet to find an official record of his death.
The hardships and cruelties of war that Henry and John Powell endured together help explain the responsibility Henry showed toward Sarah Powell, John's widow after the war.
In May, 1865, Cyrus Powell took the Amnesty Oath. The record states he surrendered May 23, 1865 at Lexington, Missouri. He says he was a Private in Shelby's Brigade and that his residence before the war was Schuyler County, Missouri. There is no record of the date he enlisted, but it is likely he was with Shelby at Prairie Grove. Cyrus survived to tell his children the thrilling tales of the life of a Rebel riding in Shelby's Iron Brigade on raid after raid against Union forces.
When first looking for Civil War records of our Powell family, I expected to find them in the ranks of the Union Army because they lived so far north. When I learned they fought for the Confederacy, I expected to find reluctant soldiers pulled into a fight against their will. The actual Confederate records of Henry, John and Cyrus Powell shattered all those illusions. Henry was sixty years old with eye sight too poor to site a rifle when he and John volunteered. Together they faced the rigors of cold, hunger, and long forced marches, with insufficient clothing and shoes, to fight a horrendous battle over six hundred miles from their home. When Henry asked to be excused from service because of his old age, John fought on --to the death. Cyrus didn't give up until the bitter end, when there was no other choice. These are not the records of casual soldiers drawn into a fight against their will. These are the records of Rebels to the core. However much we today may disagree with their ideas, these are the records of men fighting for a cause they believed in--a cause they were ready to die for. The record speaks--Henry, John, and Cyrus Powell, Rebels heart and soul.
Copyright © 1996 Fleta Aday
