Middle Boggy Depot

On February 13, 1864, Union and Confederate forces clashed in a brief engagement known as the Battle of Middle Boggy, one of many small confrontations that marked the American Civil War. The fighting unfolded within Choctaw Indian Territory, roughly 4 miles (6.4 km) south of present-day Allen in Pontotoc County, Oklahoma, though historians still dispute the precise site.

This clash formed one piece of a broader Union offensive across Indian Territory. Colonel William A. Phillips dispatched a detachment of about 350 troops drawn from the 14th Kansas Cavalry, placing Maj. Charles Willetts in command, and supplied them with two howitzers under Captain Solomon Kaufman. Their objective was a Confederate post stationed at a crossing along the Middle Boggy River, situated some 36 miles (58 km) from Boggy Depot. At the time Willetts launched his surprise assault, only 90 poorly equipped Confederate troops defended that position.

Background

Middle Boggy served the Confederacy as a supply station, an outpost, and a point of communication. Although smaller than many other Confederate positions, it carried real weight. Confederate manpower across the region was spread so thin that numerous posts, including this one, ended up poorly guarded despite their importance.

At this stage of the Civil War, exhaustion had set in on both sides. The winter of 1864 was harsh, and Union Colonel William A. Phillips led 1,500 soldiers, supported by howitzer, into Indian Territory to confront Confederate forces there. He advanced along the Dragoon Trail hoping to sever the Confederate units from each other, and Union commanders favored a quick strike to avoid drawing the fight out.

The expedition carried four aims: establishing Union control over Indian Territory; extending amnesty, as promised in Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of December 1863, to the Creek, Seminole, and Chickasaw peoples; breaking the Confederate treaties held with those tribes; and gathering new

Skirmish at the outpost

Close to where the Dragoon Road forded the Middle Boggy stood the Confederate outpost. Accounts differ on its distance from the depot: the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture places the battlefield fifteen miles to the northeast, while the marker at the site gives twelve miles instead. On the night of February 12, Maj. Willetts and his advance force set up camp nearby, using the time to finish planning their assault. When morning came, at 7 A.M. on the following day, Willetts opened the fight with a barrage of artillery fire. The 14th Kansas Cavalry then surged forward, and their charge sent the Confederate defenders into disorder. Though outmanned and lacking equal firepower, the Confederates managed to hold the Union horsemen back for roughly half an hour before falling back toward the larger body of Lt. Col. John Jumper's Seminole Battalion, which had taken no part in the fighting itself. A portion of Capt. Nail's surviving men fled toward Boggy Depot, leaving their wounded comrades behind on the field. Meanwhile, the remainder of the Chickasaw Battalion stayed posted near Cochran, tasked with escorting the family of Chickasaw Governor Winchester Colbert on their journey from Pontotoc to Tishomingo. That same night, General Douglas H. Cooper made his way back to headquarters at Boggy Depot from Fort Washita, having already sent word to Texas asking for additional troops.

Southwest along the Dragoon Trail, the Confederates pulled back a distance of forty five miles, or seventy two kilometers. The following day, Union forces pressed on southward in the direction of Fort Washita, yet without the reinforcements they had counted on, Phillips' campaign into Indian Territory came to a halt on February 15 near the old Cochran's Store. When a Confederate burial party later reached the battlefield, they discovered that every wounded man left behind had been killed, his throat cut. Col. Phillips claimed that his men had killed forty eight Confederate soldiers, taking no prisoners in the process. Cooper, however, put the Confederate death toll at only eleven.

Aftermath

Once the fighting ended, Col. Phillips set up camp for the night at a location called Camp Kansas. When morning came, he realized the rest of the 14th Cavalry would not arrive to reinforce him. He split his force in two, sending Major Willetts along with the cavalrymen southward to chase down Gov. Colbert and the retreating Confederates, while Colonel Wattles took charge of the infantry and headed toward old Fort Holmes.

Phillips himself trailed behind Willetts's southward march, eventually reaching Cochran, the town now known as Stonewall, Oklahoma. By the time he arrived, fleeing Confederate troops had already alerted the townspeople of his approach. There, Phillips gave orders for his men to set fire to shops, homes, and any other structures tied to the Confederacy or the Chickasaw, among them the Pontotoc Court House and the Colbert Institute, a school that had operated before the war and had since been converted into quarters for Confederate soldiers. Amid this destruction, Union troops shot and killed a number of civilians sympathetic to the South. The campaign finally came to a close on February 17, 1864, with Phillips having pushed some 400 miles into hostile territory.

In the end, despite the Confederates suffering defeat in the battle itself, the burning, the harsh treatment of civilians, and the killing of wounded men by Union forces had the opposite of the intended effect, stirring renewed determination among Confederates and their supporters to keep fighting. This pattern of devastation carried out by Union forces was repeated across the South, producing the same backlash and unintentionally deepening loyalty to the Confederate cause.