Howard N. Monnett Memorial
Battle of Westport
Civil War Round Table of Kansas City
Marker #22 of a
series of 23 tour sites memorialized by the Civil War Round Table
Located at the site of New Santa Fe at Santa Fe Trail and State Line Road
The year 1864 was a landmark year on the central plains from Missouri to the Colorado Territory. The autumn witnessed the largest Civil War engagement fought west of the Mississippi River at the Battle of Westport.
The cavalry action around Westport, Missouri, during the autumn of 1864, was part of a Confederate raid that exceeded any Civil War cavalry raid. The climax of a last-ditch Confederate invasion of Missouri, the battle forever ended the bitter fighting that had devastated the Missouri-Kansas border.
Major General Sterling Price led a Confederate cavalry raid of 12,000 troopers into Missouri that culminated in the Battle of Westport on October 23, 1864. After the battle, General Price and his troops in retreat followed the military road south from Westport to the sleepy little village of Little Santa Fe, Missouri. Here the newly formed but exhausted Union forces ceased their pursuit at dark and went into bivouac. (In pursuit were the Yankee columns of General Pleasonton's provisional cavalry division and General Blunt's division of the Army of the Border.)
General Sterling Price was determined above all else to save the immense wagon train of the Confederate Army of Missouri that was moving toward Little Santa Fe and the military road to Fort Scott. The 600 wagons were heavily laden with the "fruits" of the expedition and were accompanied by a herd of 3,000 cattle. General Sterling Price did not want to give up any part of his enormous wagon train, which included numerous loads not to be accounted for on the basis of military necessity. Many of the fleeing Rebel soldiers came to hate the plunder that they had so gleefully gathered during the halcyon days of the expedition. Now it had become an oppressive burden, threatening to destroy them completely as it slowed the retreat mileage of the cavalry column.
"Battered and bruised, and with its ranks decimated, the army emerged from the trap in which it had been caught with a feeling of personal hostility on the part of the men to the enormous and useless wagon train which had been the principal cause of their discomfiture and losses, but with the idea that now they had started southward in retreat and had the enemy behind them, the column would be stripped of all superfluities and incumbrances and would move forty or fifty miles a day. With them retreat meant hard, rapid marching...They were, therefore, surprised and disgusted when it became evident there was to be no decrease in the number of wagons that incumbered the march and which they had to guard at the hazard of their lives, and that the column was moving leisurely and at a speed that would not have been rapid infantry."* (p. 128)
*Richard J. Hinton, Rebel Invasion of Missouri and Kansas, and the Campaign of the Army of the Border Against Sterling Price, in October and November 1864, (Chicago, Illinois, 1865).
For further information, see Howard N. Monnett, ACTION BEFORE WESTPORT 1864, (University Press of Colorado, 1995)
Associated Historical Trail Sites