Wilson's Creek National Battlefield

Nothing here was worth a battle in itself: no railroad, no river port, no town. On August 9, 1861, Benjamin McCulloch's Southern army, Confederate troops together with Sterling Price's Missouri State Guard, was camped along Wilson Creek for its water and crops, on the main road to Springfield. McCulloch meant to march on Springfield that night, but rain threatened and he waited. Nathaniel Lyon, holding Springfield with about 5,400 Union troops against some 12,000 Southerners, marched out first in two columns, and at about 5 a.m. on August 10 he struck the camps.

Franz Sigel's guns scattered Southern cavalry from a farm field until a counterattack broke his brigade. On Bloody Hill, Lyon's line held through three assaults, and during the second, at about 9:30 a.m., Lyon was mortally wounded. Short of ammunition, the Union army fell back to Springfield and then to Rolla. Lyon's body was left on the field. Southern soldiers carried it to John Ray's farmhouse, a field hospital by then, where the family laid it out on their best bed, and in Springfield Mary Phelps buried him on her family's farm until relatives took him home to Connecticut.

The South held the field, but its commanders disagreed about what to do next, and the loss pushed the Union to put more troops into Missouri. A five-mile tour road loops past eight stops, among them Bloody Hill, with its 1928 Lyon marker, and the Ray House of 1852. The visitor center holds a museum and the Hulston Civil War research library.