Battle of Fort Donelson Was Grant's Coming-Out Party

Begun in the East, the war was spreading to the West, even beyond the Mississippi where the fate of the important border state of Missouri and the chief city of the West in those days, St. Louis, hung in the balance between slaveholding and non -slaveholding elements. This, from the days of the Kansas-Nebraska troubles in the fifties, had been "dark and bloody ground" Both sides claimed Missouri and both sides needed her. In August 1861, a Union army was defeated at Wilson's Creek in southwestern Missouri and the casualties amounted to over 23 per cent of all engaged, among them the stalwart Unionist General Nathaniel Lyon. The following March came the Battle of Pea Ridge in northwestern Arkansas. This was the first clear and decisive victory gained by the North in a pitched battle west of the Mississippi River, and until 1864 the last effort of the South to carry the war into Missouri except by abortive raids. More importantly perhaps, its result made it possible for veterans of a long series of minor engagements west of the Mississippi to reinforce the armies in the mid South under Buell, Rosecrans, Sherman, and Grant.