Pea Ridge National Military Park

On March 7 and 8, 1862, about 10,250 Union soldiers under Samuel Curtis met about 16,000 Confederates under Earl Van Dorn on the fields around Leetown and Elkhorn Tavern. Two Confederate generals, Benjamin McCulloch and James McIntosh, were killed at Leetown. On the second day Van Dorn learned his supply trains were still at Bentonville, and his men withdrew east. The Union lost 1,384 men and the Confederates about 2,000, and the result kept Missouri in the Union. The 2nd Cherokee Mounted Rifles, led by Stand Watie, fought here on the Confederate side.

The tavern sits on the old road from Springfield to Fayetteville, called Telegraph Road. William Ruddick built it in the 1830s as a log dogtrot house, and Jesse and Polly Cox bought it with 313 acres in 1858. Butterfield stagecoaches stopped there, Union officers made it a headquarters, and the Confederates used it as a field hospital. Guerrillas burned it in 1863. In the winter of 1838 and 1839, thousands of Cherokee passed it on the way to Indian Territory and camped in the fields to the south. Park records count 10,370 Cherokee on this stretch of the Trail of Tears, and a short mowed path leads north from the tavern. The journal of the B.B. Cannon contingent, one of the few kept, carries limited information about enslaved people who went west with the Cherokee in 1837.

The park is at 15930 E. Highway 62 in Garfield, established in 1956 and dedicated in 1963. A film at the visitor center and a signed tour road introduce the field.