Peeking Into Pea Ridge, Arkansas: My First Real Look Into the Civil War
Peeking Into Pea Ridge, Arkansas: My First Real Look Into the Civil War
by a.d. elliott | Take the Back Roads – Art & Other Odd Adventures
.png "Peering Into Pea Ridge: Arkansas Civil War Battlefield")
Dear Henry,
I’ve officially visited my first Civil War battlefield.
That feels like something a person living in this part of the country ought to have done long ago, yet I came to it late and unsure of what I was even looking for. I know very little about the American Civil War, which is its own kind of failure, one that depends heavily on where you were raised. In Northern Utah, history classes emphasized westward expansion, railroads, and pioneer settlement. The Civil War existed mostly as a chapter running parallel to the stories I was told, not something I ever had to sit with.
That changed at Pea Ridge.
The Battle of Pea Ridge took place from March 6–8, 1862, in the rolling hills of northwestern Arkansas. It marked a decisive early engagement in the Trans-Mississippi Theater of the war. After Union forces under General Samuel Curtis pushed Confederate troops out of Missouri, Confederate General Earl Van Dorn attempted a bold counteroffensive along a ridgeline near Sugar Creek, hoping to regain control of the state.
The battle is also known as the Battle of Elkhorn Tavern, because much of the fiercest fighting centered around that small roadside inn. The original tavern was destroyed during the conflict; what stands today is a careful reconstruction, quietly marking a place where men fought and died over terrain that otherwise looks deceptively peaceful.
Despite fierce fighting and several tactical surprises, including Confederate troops attacking from unexpected directions, the battle ultimately ended in a Union victory. Confederate forces withdrew south, effectively securing Missouri for the Union for the remainder of the war. The cost, however, was staggering. Union casualties totaled over 1,100 killed, wounded, or missing. Confederate losses were higher still, estimated at around 2,000, though exact numbers will never be known.
Walking the battlefield, those figures felt almost incomprehensible. The landscape isn’t vast. It’s gentle. Rolling. Quiet. Trying to imagine thousands of wounded men scattered across that space, hearing cannon fire where birds now sing, felt deeply unsettling. Numbers lose their abstraction very quickly when you stand where they were earned.
What I did not come away with was any greater understanding of how anyone could ever justify owning another human being. I didn’t leave with clarity, only grief. The prevailing estimates now place Civil War deaths at over 600,000, but historians like Drew Gilpin Faust remind us that even that figure is incomplete. We will never know how many soldiers died anonymously, nor how many civilians were lost in the wake of the fighting.
And perhaps what makes the Civil War uniquely difficult to sit with is this: the enemy was also American.
That reality feels heavier the further south I travel. This history is everywhere here, etched into landscapes, monuments, town names, and silences. It isn’t distant. It isn’t abstract. It demands reckoning.
Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “Never think that war, no matter how necessary nor how justified, is not a crime.” Standing at Pea Ridge, that truth felt unavoidable. If war is always a crime, then a war fought to preserve enslavement carries a particular weight, a moral wound that still hasn’t entirely healed.
I hope these battlegrounds remain protected and open. Not to glorify anything, but because forgetting would be far worse. We don’t get to move forward without remembering what happened here.
I’ll keep reading. I’ll keep walking these places. And I’ll tell you what I learn.
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About the Author
a.d. elliott is a wanderer, photographer, and storyteller traveling through life
She shares her journeys at Take the Back Roads, explores new reads at Rite of Fancy, and highlights U.S. military biographies at Everyday Patriot.
You can also browse her online photography gallery at shop.takethebackroads.com.
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