Photos

Today, the Arcadia Valley in Iron County is a peaceful setting in one of Missouri's most scenic areas. But in 1864, the valley was the scene of one of the largest and most hard-fought battles waged on the state's soil - the Battle of Pilot Knob.

Confederate Maj. Gen. Sterling Price invaded Missouri from Arkansas, leading an army of 12,000 men. On Sept. 26-27, 1864, while en route to the St. Louis area, Price attacked the weakly defended Union post of Fort Davidson at Pilot Knob.

This proved to be a mistake. Fort Davidson was defended by a garrison of 1,450 men led by Gen. Thomas Ewing Jr., the brother-in-law of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. The Confederates lost nearly 1,000 men in attacking the small earthen fort and its 11 cannons.

Low on ammunition, the Union troops escaped almost certain death and loss by sneaking out of the fort at night, leaving a timed fuse on the powder magazine in the center of the earthen fort. The ground shook for 20 miles in all directions when it exploded.

This photograph is what remains of that powder magazine. It is a big, muddy water filled hole, although it was much deeper over 40 years ago when I first visited this site. It dries up in the summer, as well - good thing, too, as the mosquitoes would carry you away...

This shot is sort of a continuation of yesterday's post, chronicling more of the Arcadia Valley in Southeast Missouri. I took a day a while back and got down there early in the morning so I could get some sunrise photos on Elephant Rocks State Park and visit my father's last resting place - which is directly in front of us in this photograph. Well, actually, all around us, as several of us delivered his ashes here and surreptitiously spread them inside Fort Davidson, as were his wishes.

This was where my father's life changed forever, back in about 1967. He'd had a heart attack at an early age (38) and the doctor told him he had better get a hobby and get away from the stress of work or he wasn't going to live much longer. His job was incredibly stressful - he lived with the threat of going to jail at any time - not because he was a criminal, but because a company called Bell Telephone did not want him and his partners to show folks how to save money for their business phone systems.

I'm sort of digressing here, but it might be important to know why he almost died so young. Bell Telephone controlled all phone systems back before about 1975 or so. It was actually illegal to own your own phone equipment - it had to be rented from Bell. My father and his partners, mostly all Bell Telephone ex-employees, balanced a fine line between the legal methods and illegal equipment. Several of his business partners did go to prison, the rest were under a constant threat of lawsuit and arrest. To make a long story short, he continued with this endeavor and eventually was partly responsible for the break up of the monopoly that Bell Telephone had become.

So in a quest for a hobby, he tried many things, finally settling on metal detectors. We hunted many places but never really hit the jackpot until we got to this fort. We found buckets of minie balls and cannon balls and other relics. We were always sure to cover our tracks, we didn't want to be told we could not metal detect there because we left holes everywhere. This was before the state or national park service made it illegal to do this. He also donated a large amount of the things he found to the Fort Davidson museum, when it finally opened about 25 years later, so it all came out in the wash. Anyway, at that point, he started on a 35 year trek of American Civil War research and collecting. He was well known as a preeminent Missouri Civil War expert and lived his life in search of knowledge and things related. You can see many of the things he collected and wrote about if you click here. The web pages at this link are what remains of a web site I built for him many years ago. You can see a color version of this in the workshop, along with a complementary image of the front of the fort.

Anyway, if you are still with me, I have probably wasted a good portion of your day and taken time and attention away from other TE photographers, so I must say thank you for looking at this.

I dedicate this upload and the workshops to the memory of my father, David Victor Radcliffe (the first).