Our Arklahoma Heritage: A Civil War border battle in 1862 decided control of the Cherokee Nation
- Dennis McCaslin
- Jul 27
- 4 min read
On the morning of October 22, 1862, Union Brigadier General James G. Blunt struck a Confederate force camped on Beattie’s Prairie near the abandoned site of Old Fort Wayne, just north of present-day Watts in what is now Adair County,
The engagement, also known as the Battle of Maysville, lasted little more than half an hour and ended in a clear Union victory that pushed Confederate troops south of the Arkansas River and left most of the Cherokee Nation under Federal control for the remainder of the year.
Blunt commanded elements of the First Division of the Army of the Frontier. His force included the 2nd and 6th Kansas Cavalry, the 10th and 11th Kansas Infantry, the 1st and 3rd Cherokee Regiments (also called Indian Home Guard units), the 1st Kansas Battery, the 2nd Indiana Battery, and a section of mountain howitzers.
After a long night march from the Pea Ridge area, Blunt pushed the 2nd Kansas Cavalry forward at roughly 5 a.m.
The Kansas troopers drove Confederate pickets through Maysville, Arkansas, and across the line into Indian Territory, where they found Colonel Douglas H. Cooper’s main line drawn up along an east-west road with timber at its back.
Cooper, a former U.S. Indian agent who had been commissioned a Confederate colonel, had far fewer men present than Union reports claimed. Early Federal estimates placed his strength at five to seven thousand
In reality he had roughly fifteen hundred troops available that morning, primarily elements of his First Indian Brigade, including Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee soldiers, supported by Howell’s Texas Battery of four guns.
Stand Watie’s Cherokee Mounted Rifles were operating in the vicinity and helped cover the Confederate flank. Many local Cherokees from the Going Snake and Flint districts, the area that later became Adair County, served on both sides of the fight. Some rode with Watie and Cooper; others had enlisted in the Union Indian Home Guard regiments that marched with Blunt.
Blunt brought up his howitzers and opened on the Confederate artillery. The 2nd Kansas pushed the skirmishers off a low ridge, and when the rest of the division arrived he concentrated his attack on the thinly held center of Cooper’s line. The Confederate guns were silenced, the center gave way, and within thirty minutes Cooper’s command was in retreat, abandoning its artillery and much of its equipment.
Blunt pursued for nearly seven miles before calling a halt.
Union casualties numbered approximately fourteen killed, wounded, and missing. One detailed secondary account narrows the Federal losses to four killed and three wounded, nearly all from the 2nd Kansas Cavalry.
Confederate losses reached about one hundred fifty. Of those, roughly fifty were reported killed and were buried on the battlefield itself.
No individual names of the dead from either side have survived in published records, and no marked mass grave or formal cemetery associated with the battle has been identified. The ground remains private agricultural land, and the exact resting places of the Confederate dead are unmarked and unknown.
The battle formed part of the larger 1862 Confederate effort to regain ground north of the Boston Mountains and threaten southwest Missouri and Kansas
. After earlier setbacks, Cooper’s command had been attempting to reorganize near the Arkansas-Indian Territory border. Blunt’s rapid night march and early morning attack caught the Confederates before they could fully concentrate.
The result forced Cooper and Watie south of the Arkansas River, opened the northern Cherokee Nation to Union occupation, and disrupted Confederate plans for further operations in the region that autumn.
The original Fort Wayne had been established by the U.S. Army between 1838 and 1842 on Spavinaw Creek near the Arkansas line. It was abandoned because of disease, turned over to the Cherokee Nation, and later used by Stand Watie as a gathering point for his regiment early in the war.
By October 1862 the post itself was largely gone, but the name remained attached to the nearby prairie where the fighting occurred.
Today an Oklahoma state historical marker stands along U.S. Highway 59 just north of Watts, placed in the 1970s at the request of local residents. A granite marker later replaced the original highway sign.
Across the state line in Benton County, a marker at the northwest corner of State Routes 43 and 72 in Maysville also commemorates the battle under its alternate name.
No large formal memorial or preserved battlefield park exists on the Oklahoma side,.
The fight at Old Fort Wayne was one of several sharp actions that decided control of the Cherokee Nation in 1862. It demonstrated the effectiveness of Blunt’s aggressive use of Kansas and Indian troops and exposed the difficulty Cooper faced in coordinating poorly supplied and sometimes reluctant Indian units.
For the Cherokees of the future Adair County, it was another episode in a civil war that split families and communities along lines that had first formed during the removal era and the Treaty Party conflicts of the 1830s..
