The Battle of Pea Ridge: The Civil War Fight for the Ozarks

After months of reverses, the Union army was going on the offensive in the spring of 1862 as General McClellan prepared for his Peninsula Campaign.

In Tennessee, General Grant had just captured Ft. Henry and Ft. Donelson; and in southwestern Missouri, Gen. Samuel R. Curtis had driven Sterling Price and his Missouri State Guard out of the state and into the arms of General Ben McCulloch's Confederate army in northwestern Arkansas. Using the united armies of Price and McCulloch, the new Confederate department commander, Earl Van Dorn, struck back at Curtis' Federal army which was now outnumbered and two hundred miles from its supply base. For two days in early March 1862, the armies of Van Dorn and Curtis fought in the wilds of the Ozark Mountains at a place called Pea Ridge. Control of northern Arkansas and southern Missouri for the rest of the war hung on the outcome.

James R. Knight is a graduate of Harding University, 1967. He spent five years as a pilot in the United States Air Force, flying the C-130E, and thirty-one years as a pilot for Federal Express, flying the Dassault DA-20 Falcon, the Boeing 727 and the McDonnell Douglass DC-10. In the early '90s, he began researching a historical incident in his hometown and published his first work, an article in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly in 1997. In 2003, Eakin Press published his biography of two Texas outlaws titled Bonnie and Clyde: A 21st Century Update. In 2007, he published the story and correspondence of a Confederate cavalryman from Tennessee titled Letters to Anna. This is his second work in The History Press's Sesquicentennial Series, having written The Battle of Franklin in 2009. Knight retired from Federal Express in 2004 and lives in Franklin, Tennessee, where he works part time as a historical interpreter for the Battle of Franklin Trust. When not encouraging visitor at the Carter House to relive some moments of the Battle of Franklin, he sings on the worship team at church, collects historical documents and artifacts and occasionally drives around in his restored 1934 Ford V-8. He and his wife, Judy, and have three children and six grandchildren.