Camp Wildcat

This engagement, called by some Wildcat Mountain and by others Camp Wild Cat, ranks among the conflict's earliest clashes. Union forces met Confederate troops on October 21, 1861, in the northern part of Laurel County, Kentucky, amid the push historians label the Kentucky Confederate Offensive, or alternatively, Operations in Eastern Kentucky (1861). Historians count the fight as an early Union triumph, and it stands as the second time armies had clashed within the Commonwealth of Kentucky since the war began.

Background

Kentucky found itself pulled toward war on April 15, 1861, when Lincoln, facing the outbreak of rebellion, asked loyal states to furnish volunteers against the seven states already out of the Union. Governor Beriah Magoffin, sympathetic to the Confederate cause, would not comply, yet because most lawmakers in the Kentucky General Assembly favored the Union, the state did not follow the seceded states out. A legislative committee urged neutrality on May 16, and Magoffin made that neutrality official five days later, on May 20.

That stance grew harder to maintain as pro-Union sentiment surged. The August 5, 1861 elections gave Unionist candidates a veto-proof hold on both legislative chambers. A Union encampment, Camp Dick Robinson, went up near Lexington on August 6, and by September 2 the General Assembly had raised the federal flag over the capitol building in Frankfort.

Neutrality collapsed entirely on September 3, when Confederate Maj. Gen. Leonidas Polk directed Brig. Gen. Gideon Pillow to occupy Columbus, a town on the Mississippi River, ahead of any Union move there. Grant answered within days, taking Paducah on September 6, and from that point forward both armies pushed men and operations into Kentucky.

Meanwhile Brig. Gen. Felix Zollicoffer had brought his Confederate command out of Tennessee, aiming to pass through the Cumberland Gap and establish a foothold in the central part of the state. Ten days after setting out with 5,400 men, on September 14, he took the Gap itself and posted his force at Cumberland Ford, close to what is now Pineville, to check Unionist organizing nearby. That activity centered on Camp Andrew Johnson near Barbourville, where recruits from Kentucky and eastern Tennessee had been drilling.

Five days later, on September 19, Zollicoffer dispatched roughly 800 troops under Col. Joel A. Battle toward that camp, though its recruits had already relocated to Camp Dick Robinson, where Brig. Gen. George H. Thomas commanded several thousand Federal soldiers. Nearing the site, Battle's column ran into 300 Home Guard troops loyal to the Union under Capt. Isaac J. Black, who tore up the bridge planking to block their advance. Fighting flared briefly, but Battle's numbers told, and the defenders were pushed back, losing one killed, one wounded, and thirteen taken prisoner, against seven Confederate dead. The victors then razed the camp's structures and made off with whatever weapons and gear the fleeing recruits had abandoned.

Zollicoffer pulled back for a time to Cumberland Ford, roughly eleven miles above the Gap near modern Pineville, but soon afterward sent men to scatter another Home Guard unit posted at Laurel Bridge in Laurel County. On September 28 a separate detachment struck the Goose Creek Salt Works in Clay County, wrecking it and hauling off 200 barrels of salt before returning to Cumberland Ford on the 30th. By October 16 Zollicoffer had resumed his push toward central Kentucky.

Thomas countered by ordering Col. Theophilus T. Garrard to establish Camp Wildcat in the Rockcastle Hills near London, at the foot of Wildcat Mountain, some thirty miles north of the ruined salt works, so as to hold the Rockcastle River ford and block the Wilderness Road running through that ground.

Garrard warned Thomas that without reinforcement he would be forced to withdraw, claiming the Confederates outnumbered him seven to one. Thomas responded by sending Brig. Gen. Albin F. Schoepf with a force equal to a brigade, swelling the Union total at the position to about 7,000 men. Schoepf reached the camp on October 20, a single day ahead of Zollicoffer's advance.

The reinforced Union garrison waited at Camp Wildcat, a position Zollicoffer's men would have to clear before reaching central Kentucky. He had no idea the camp's strength had grown, and when a column of Union reinforcements appeared that same afternoon, he mistakenly took it for the Union's full complement readying for combat. That evening, pickets from both sides traded fire, and the Federal scouts hurried back to report a substantial Confederate force close at hand.

Battlefield

The battlefield sits roughly nine miles northwest of what is now London, Kentucky, with the ground split between the Daniel Boone National Forest and private ownership. West of the site, the Confederate Monument at Crab Orchard honors some of the Confederate dead from the fighting there.

In 1979 nearly 130 acres (53 ha) of the site earned a place on the National Register of Historic Places. That original listing grew in 2006, when officials added roughly 440 more acres (180 ha) covering two areas already recognized as historical archaeological sites. By mid-2023, the American Battlefield Trust, working alongside its partners, had managed to acquire and safeguard 264 acres of the ground where the battle took place.

Aftermath

Losses on the Union side numbered 5 dead and 20 injured, while the Confederate side counted 11 dead along with 42 injured or unaccounted for. Given the string of setbacks the Union Army had faced that year, most notably at Big Bethel and the First Battle of Bull Run, plus the loss at Ball's Bluff occurring that very day, news of this triumph was greeted with enthusiasm across the North. By November, Union troops had brought the Big Sandy Expedition to a close, an achievement that paved the way for the Battle of Mill Springs and, on January 19, 1862, the death of Gen. Zollicoffer.