| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Wilson's Creek: The Second Battle of the Civil War and the Men Who Fought It. By William Garrett Piston and Richard W. Hatcher III. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xx, 408 pp. $37.50, ISBN 0-8078-2515-8.)

The seemingly endless parade of books about Civil War battles has somehow failed to include the battle of Wilson's Creek. The biggest reason for this neglect lies in the fact that Wilson's Creek took place in southern Missouri, where most Civil War scholars and buffs would rather not venture; the trans-Mississippi war seems remote and much too messy. The authors of Wilson's Creek intend to rectify this not only by rescuing their battle from obscurity but also by proving that trans-Mississippi subjects can yield good history. 1

The battle of Wilson's Creek was the culmination of a struggle for control of Missouri in the early stages of the war. On the Union side was Gen. Nathaniel Lyon, a hard-driving abolitionist fanatic who seized control of much of the state in the spring of 1861. Facing him were the combined forces of the Confederate generals Sterling Price and Ben McCulloch, which greatly outnumbered Lyon's little army. The two sides met in battle along the banks ofWilson Creek (later misnamed "Wilson's" Creek) on August 9, 1861. In a nasty fight Lyon was killed—the first Union general to die in combat—and the Confederate army prevailed, throwing the state into disarray and setting the stage for Missouri's protracted and bloody guerrilla war. . . .

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