Writing about Island Mound

The commemoration of the 137th anniversary of Island Mound - conducted by the Amen Society in 1999, was really the start of the renewed awareness in this historical event.  Also, as a result of the interview I conducted with Jim Fisher and the article he wrote  several individuals from across the country reached out to me about my research and Island Mound.

I determined that I needed to write about Island Mound.

At first, I thought I would either write an article for publication in a historical journal or one of the magazines dedicated to the American Civil War - or I might write a longer, more in depth book on the subject. However, as my intent was to increase awareness at a grass-roots level in western Missouri and eastern Kansas - I decided to focus my efforts on writing a monograph detailing the results of my research.

Once I completed writing the monograph (and the multiple, necessary revisions/edits) I contacted the Blue and Gray Book Shoppe in Independence, Mo. about self-publishing the manuscript through them. In April 2001, the monograph was finally published.

Consisting of 33 pages that include the results of my research aw well as maps that I created regarding the engagement, the monograph became an important vehicle to "get the word out" as I conducted interviews and gave presentations to organizations across the state of Missouri and eastern Kansas.

From 2000 to 2005,  I gave interviews to newspaper reporters and gave radio interviews (even appeared on Mayor Emmanuel Cleaver's "Under the Clock" radio show). I  also posted to Civil War Message Boards, spoke to various Civil War Roundtables and County Historical Societies. All with the ultimate goal of "getting the word out" and hopefully to someday see a state or federal park on the land that was the Toothman farm and the battle site where people would be able to go and learn about this historic event.

As life will have it, in 2006 my family and I moved to Katy, Texas (in the greater Houston area) and I knew that my ability to remain heavily involved in "getting the word out" and working to get the battlefield preserved would be much more difficult from Texas - some 700 miles away.

As such I decided to donate the "Skirmish at Island Mound" monograph to the Bates County Historical Society and Museum for them to take up the mantle of "getting the word out" and as a possible source of revenue for them.

The monograph is no longer available on Amazon.com, but can still be purchased through the Bates County Historical Society and Museum as well as through Missouri State Parks.

As I've continued my research I've learned even more about Island Mound and the men who fought there on both sides - enough that a 2nd edition of the monograph is long overdue. 

Getting the word out - Jim Fisher, the Kansas City Star and the Amen Society

In October of 1999, the Amen Society of the local AME Church in Butler, Missouri, organized a commemoration to mark the 137th anniversary of Island Mound and to draw awareness to their efforts to recognize the historic battle.I contacted Reverend Larry Coleman and Eleanora Burton of the Amen Society and asked if I could show them the research I had conducted.

Eleanora and her daughters graciously invited me into their home where I was able to show them all of the information I had found and invited me to come speak at their event.  Present at the event was Jim Fisher, a correspondent of the Kansas City Star newspaper, who interviewed me about my research. The article he wrote appeared on the front page of the Sunday edition of the Star....

Man seeks glory for black Civil War soldiers killed in Missouri

By Jim Fisher, Knight Ridder newspapers

November 26, 1999 12:00 AM

BUTLER, Mo. -- Chris Tabor has a dream.

Someday -- perhaps in the not-too-distant future -- what will be akin to an archaeological dig will take place 8 miles southwest of here, and human remains will turn up. Those bones, 137 years old, will belong to the first black combat soldiers killed in the Civil War.

As dreams go, Tabor's is huge. The public perception, cemented by the hit movie "Glory," is that black troops saw their first combat and suffered their first casualties in mid-July 1863 in the storming of Fort Wagner near Charleston, S.C.

Actually, Tabor said, the official record shows that the first black troops killed -- Cpl. Joseph Talbot, and Pvts. Samuel Davis, Thomas Lane, Marion Barber, Allen Rhodes and Henry Gash -- died nine months earlier, on Oct. 29, 1862. They were killed in the fight at what was called Island Mound or Toothman's farm along the old Fort Scott road in Missouri's Bates County.

The story is riveting. Enough so that 150 people piled into the civic auditorium at the Butler City Hall one recent Sunday to hear it, ignoring a gloriously warm autumn day and not bothering with the Kansas City Chiefs' whomping of the San Diego Chargers.

There were church services and a big dinner, and even re-enactors of the ninth and 10th Horse Cavalry Association of Leavenworth and Kansas City. The Rev. Larry Coleman, pastor of the Brooks Chapel A.M.E. Church, which along with the Mount Zion Methodist Church sponsored the event, was adamant 

"This is something that has to be told."

It is a story basically unfamiliar in western Missouri, said Tabor, probably for several reasons Vestiges of the Civil War still linger; the engagement was relatively small, being a bloody skirmish rather than a full-fledged battle; and the fact that the black contribution to the Union and the 180,000 blacks who wore blue had been largely forgotten until the mid-1950s, when Dudley Cornish, then a professor of history at Pittsburg State University, wrote a seminal work called "The Sable Arm."

"One old black man came up to me and said, 'Why couldn't this have been in my schoolbooks?' " Tabor said. "It touches something in people."

Tabor is white and a former combat Marine who served in Operation Desert Storm and Somalia. He was discharged after 10 years of service when he injured his knees on his 82nd parachute jump. He has a degree in geography and is finishing a graduate degree at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Tabor said there was a strange duality in Missouri about what happened here in the early days of the Civil War, which were particularly vicious along the Missouri-Kansas border.

"Go over to Jefferson City, and right there in the state Capitol is a diorama of the Island Mound fight," said Tabor. "It explains the whole thing," but few people in Butler know about it.

The story of Island Mound is straightforward, said Tabor, a native of Scranton, Pa.

In October 1862 about 200 black recruits, almost all of them escaped slaves from Missouri and Arkansas, were training at Fort Lincoln, a ramshackle post west of Fulton, Kan. President Abraham Lincoln had not yet authorized black troop levies, but that meant nothing to Kansas Sen. Jim Lane. He welcomed any man willing to fight and kill "secesh," a common term used for secessionists.

On Oct. 26, reinforced by other black troops from Fort Leavenworth, what eventually would become the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry -- about 240 enlisted men, 10 white officers, and six white scouts -- tramped eastward into Bates County to "clean out a bunch of bushwhackers" in the vicinity of the Marais de Cygnes river.

Oddly enough, the Union recruits wore gray uniforms. Most carried surplus Austrian muskets.

Once at the farm of Enoch Toothman, the troops used the heavy fence rails to throw up a bastion they dubbed "Fort Africa."

On Oct. 28 there were brief contacts between the guerrillas and the troops. On the 29th the real fight started when a foraging party was sent outside the Union position.

Soon the rebels had set the surrounding prairie on fire. Running fights broke out, and a group of black troops soon was engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the mounted bushwhackers near the prominent mounds just south of the Toothman farm.

At that point a large number of the 1st Kansas came running and fired volleys into the enemy, thus driving them into another volley of fire from a blocking force.

The Confederates skedaddled.

Bill Turman, one of the rebel commanders, reportedly complained a few days later that the black soldiers "fought like tigers and the white officers had got them so trained that no one would surrender."

"Not that it would have mattered," said Tabor. "This was like most fights between black troops and rebels. It was fought 'under the black flag,' meaning that no quarter was given on either side. There were no prisoners."

Tabor said two other Union soldiers died in the fight, Capt. A.G. Crew and Pvt. John Six-Killer, a Cherokee. Eleven other Union soldiers were wounded. Casualties on the other side probably will remain unknown, said Tabor, since irregular Confederate forces in Missouri left almost no records.

"I think the bodies may still be out there," said Tabor, referring to the black troops and Six-Killer. The officer's body was returned and might have been buried in Lawrence.

Finding Fort Africa and the battle site

With most of the key locations associated with Island Mound identified and located - I turned my attention to finding the location of the Toothman home and the actual site of the climactic fight of the engagement.

Per the accounts of the engagement, the 1st KCV marched from Fort Lincoln, Kansas to clear out  a gang of bushwhackers on Hog Island. They commandeered the Toothman house, tore down the farm's split-rail fences to erect a barricade around the house. Raising a Union flag they dubbed their defenses "Fort Africa."
 
Per the deed of sale, we knew where the 80 acres that was the Toothman farm was located - but where on those 80 acres was the farm house (Fort Africa) that figured so prominently in accounts of Island Mound?

At the time I was conducting my initial research (late 1990s) the land that was the Toothman farm was divided between two separate land owners - with the north 40 acres under one owner and the south 40 under another. I made contact with both - told them about my research and requested permission to access their land to try and find the Toothman home. The owner of the south 40 acres had no interest and denied my request, but the owners of the northern part of the Toothman farm were very interested and granted me full access to that portion of their land.The boundaries of the Toothman farm are outlined in red on the map below. (The black, dashed line shows the demarcation of ownership of the farm when I was conducting my research.)

Modern Topographic Map

 Armed with the Island Mound accounts, topographical maps, binoculars and a compass, I began my search.  

The earliest map of the area showing land ownership and buildings, the  1877 Atlas of Cass and Bates Counties indicated that the  the Toothman farm was then owned by J. Cowgill. The boundaries of the Toothman farm are outlined in red on the map below.

1877 Cass and Bates Counties Atlas

 Per the map, a Methodist Episcopal Church was located in the northwest corner of the former Toothman farm and another structure, presumably the Cowgill house, was located in the southeast corner.  Could one of these have been the Toothman home? 

As I only had access to the northern portion of the Toothman farm, I focused my efforts on the former church site. Nothing remained of the church, but a clump of trees. (I had learned that as farmers encountered obstructions on their land, as they farmed, they would simply work around those obstructions. Over time, trees would grow up around the obstruction - leading to such clumps of trees in otherwise cleared land.) 

Perhaps this was the site of the Toothman house, but I was skeptical that an existing structure would have been converted to a church.  There was another clump of trees to the southeast from the former church site, but still on the northern 40 acres of the Toothman farm.

Suspected site of Toothman house

Within this clump of trees there was no evidence of any house, but there was an old well that had been capped by a large field stone as well as iris flowers and a rose of sharon bush. Although these flowers do occur in nature - their proximity to the well was very intriguing.

Capped well at suspected Toothman house site

Also, the view to the south (towards Hog Island) from this site was commanding.

View to south from suspected site of Toothman farm house

On the photo above, the treeline immediately to the south is the boundary line between the northern and southern sections of the Toothman farm.

Although I did not have access to the southern portion of the Toothman farm to investigate the building site indicated on the 1877 map, I was able to view that portion of the property from the north 40 acres and from the township and range road that bordered the western edge of the property. Based on these observations and studying the topographical map, the southern structure was located at a lower elevation than the suspected site in the northern section that would not have provided  much in the way of a view shed - nor have been very defensible by the 1st KCV.

Based on information in the accounts of the engagement, the climactic fight between the 1st KCV and the bushwhackers occurred about 1 mile south of the the Toothman home (Fort Africa) and involved a mound and a ravine. The topographic map indicated the existence of both of these features almost exactly 1 mile to the south of the suspected site of the Toothman house - in the clump of trees with the well on the northern portion of the property.

View from top of mound looking southwest (direction that the 1KCV detachment would have retreated)

 

View of mound looking north (from the south)

After many days walking the ground - maps and accounts in hand I was confident that I had located Fort Africa and the battle site. It was time to get the word out.

Relating the findings of my research from the top of the mound with Arnold Schofield.

Showing Arnold the site of the Toothman home (Fort Africa)

At the site of the Toothman farm (Fort Africa) with Arnold - The battle site on the mound is in the distance, between Arnold and myself.