The Battle of Compton's Ferry was a Civil War engagement that occurred along the Grand River in Carroll County, Missouri, from August 10 to August 13, 1862. Colonel John A. Poindexter's Confederate force of recruits found themselves in a vulnerable position at Compton Ferry, where they were intercepted by Union forces under Colonel Odon Guitar during a broader pursuit operation.
The engagement was part of a larger seven-day pursuit in which Guitar's forces tracked Poindexter's Confederate recruits across 250 miles of territory, engaging them in combat at three separate locations: Switzler's mill, Little Compton (Compton's Ferry), and on the Muscle Fork of the Chariton River. At the ferry crossing, Union forces achieved a decisive advantage by catching the Confederate soldiers in the act of crossing the river. Two Union artillery pieces played a crucial tactical role in the engagement, firing a combined total of eight rounds that produced a decisive result.
The battle concluded with a Confederate rout and significant consequences for Poindexter's force. The Union victory resulted in the recovery of a large amount of Confederate materiel and inflicted substantial casualties on the Confederate side. The engagement demonstrated the effectiveness of sustained pursuit operations and artillery support in breaking up Confederate guerrilla movements in Missouri during the Civil War.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
150 Confederate soldiers wounded, killed, or drowned
Content adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Aubrey generates in-depth historical research for any location in the US, drawing on NRHP records, battlefield archives, census history and geological data to tell the full story of a place.