Iowa's Ninety Day Men At Wilson's Creek: The First Iowa Infantry

The First Iowa Infantry fought alongside General
Nathaniel Lyon at Wilson's Creek

Wilson’s Creek was chaos from the start. No clean fields. No neat battle lines. Just rolling ridges, brush, tall grass, and narrow ravines that hid entire units. Smoke settled low and stuck there. Men fired at sound and movement. Nobody could see the whole fight. A correspondent said the field was “wrapped in a fog of powder smoke through which figures loomed and vanished like shadows.”

Union commander Nathaniel Lyon knew he was outnumbered. Confederate forces under Sterling Price and Ben McCulloch were camped south of Springfield with nearly twice as many men. Lyon didn’t have supplies, reinforcements, or time. In his official report, he said that he acted because “delay would have given the enemy great advantages.”

 

So he attacked anyway.

 

A correspondent traveling with the Iowa regiment wrote for the Dubuque Herald that Lyon moved “with the desperate determination of a man who knew delay was ruin.” Another Iowa paper said the army marched out “to fight or be destroyed,” with no illusions left about the danger ahead.

The First Iowa Infantry was part of Lyon’s main column. They were a fresh regiment, raised that spring and mustered in at Keokuk. Farmers, clerks, river men, boys who’d never been farther from home than the next county. One editor described them as “citizens in uniform, learning war as they went.”

 

Their colonel, John F. Bates, was sick with fever. Command fell to Lieutenant Colonel William H. Merritt, with Major Asbury Porter close at hand. One company commander, Captain Francis J. Herron, was already standing out—loud, aggressive, impossible to miss. A reporter noted that Herron “seemed to court danger rather than avoid it.”

 

The army moved before dawn, stumbling along dark roads. At one point, Lyon stopped, checked his watch, and realized the column was behind schedule. A correspondent caught the moment. Lyon muttered, “Why, good God—it is three o’clock—I have made a terrible mistake.” Another observer recalled that Lyon’s face “showed the strain of the hour, but not hesitation.”

 

By the time the sun came up, the mistake didn’t matter. The battle had started.

 

General Nathaniel Lyon

Artillery fire cracked across the hills, and the sound rolled back toward Springfield like thunder. An Iowa paper said it sent “a thrill through every heart like a shock of electricity,” while another said the first gun “announced that the war had come in earnest.”

 The First Iowa was pushed toward high ground near the center of the Union line, a rough ridge that would soon earn the name Bloody Hill. At first they were held in reserve, close enough to hear the fighting clearly, close enough to see wounded men being carried back toward nearby springs. A correspondent described the scene as “a stream of bleeding men flowing steadily to the rear.”

 

That didn’t last.

 

As Confederate attacks came in waves, the Union lines bent and re-formed. Units were shifted, pulled back, shoved forward again. The First Iowa was fed into the fight where the pressure was worst. An observer said regiments were “thrown into action as fast as they could be brought up.”

 

Merritt stayed with the men, walking the line, shouting encouragement. A reporter said he kept repeating the same simple command: “Up and at ’em, boys!” Major Porter did the same, moving through smoke and brush, steady where others were rattled. An Iowa paper later said Porter was “cool and self-possessed amid the storm.”

 

The firing was constant. Musket smoke hung low. Men fired until barrels burned their hands. One Iowa soldier said the noise “never stopped long enough to breathe.” It was “one long roar of musketry and cannon.” Another said his ears rang “as though struck by hammers.”

 

Confederate troops surged up the slopes again and again, sometimes breaking through, sometimes falling back. The Union line bent but didn’t snap. Iowa men fired from behind rocks and scrub trees, loading and shooting as fast as they could work. A correspondent wrote that the fighting was “close, deadly, and without pause.”

 

The fight dragged on. Men fell. Officers went down. Command shifted on the fly. At one point, word spread that General Lyon had been killed. It was true. Shot while trying to rally his troops, he died close to where the First Iowa was fighting. One soldier remembered seeing Lyon ride forward “as calm as if on parade.”

 

The news hit hard, but there was no time to dwell on it. The enemy was still coming. As one Iowa paper put it, “There was no room for grief while the battle yet raged.”

 

An Iowa newspaper later said the men “stood to their work with a firmness that would not yield,” even as ammunition ran low and casualties climbed. Another said the regiment “behaved with a steadiness surprising in troops so newly raised,” adding that they fought “like veterans.”

 

Captain Herron’s company took heavy fire. Herron himself was everywhere—pointing, shouting, pushing men forward when instinct said flatten out. An observer said he seemed “utterly reckless of danger,” while another wrote that he “inspired confidence by his own example.”

 

By midday, the Union position was hanging on by stubbornness alone. Confederate commanders believed they had the advantage. Price said his men pressed the fight “with confidence” and believed the Union line near breaking.

 

That confidence didn’t break the Iowa line.

 

Eventually, with the men exhausted and ammunition nearly gone, the Union command made the call to withdraw. The retreat wasn’t a rout. It was slow, bitter, and organized under fire. An Iowa correspondent said that the men fell back “in good order, bringing off their wounded.”

 

The First Iowa pulled back with the rest of Lyon’s army, carrying wounded, dragging guns, refusing to collapse. When it was over, the ridge was littered with the dead from both sides. One newspaper described the ground as “strewn with the evidences of a terrible struggle.”

 

Wilson’s Creek wasn’t a Union victory. The field belonged to the Confederates, but it wasn’t a Confederate triumph either. The Union army wasn’t destroyed. Missouri didn’t fall. As one Iowa editor noted, “The enemy held the ground, but not the advantage.”

 

The First Iowa Infantry took some of the heaviest losses in the battle. For a ninety-day regiment, it was a brutal introduction to war. Back home, Iowa newspapers printed casualty lists alongside editorials that mixed pride with dread.

 

One paper warned readers that the details would bring “both pride and deadly sorrow to our State.”

 

They were right. The regiment’s service technically ended days later when its enlistment expired. The men went home changed. Some reenlisted immediately. Others carried wounds for life. Officers like Herron would return to the war hardened and ambitious, their lessons learned early and at a high price. One editor wrote that Wilson’s Creek had “made soldiers of boys.”

 

Wilson’s Creek taught Iowa what the Civil War was really going to be. Not parades, speeches, or quick victories. It was confusion, noise, fear, and long hours under fire, holding ground when you didn’t know what was happening, and standing fast because running would make things worse.

 

Iowa had sent one regiment to Wilson’s Creek. It came back with a reputation.