Casualties of Civil War battle laid to rest at Springfield

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. -- No one knows their names, nor even their precise number. But this much was certain to those who gathered at Springfield National Cemetery: These fallen Union soldiers deserved a proper resting place.

Drums beat and Civil War re-enactors fired muskets during Saturday's ceremonial interment of the soldiers -- believed to have been seven in all -- who died more than 142 years ago in the Battle of Wilson's Creek near Republic.

The battle, on Aug. 10, 1861, cost the Confederacy 277 soldiers. The Union lost 285 soldiers that day, with 186 missing and presumed dead, said William Piston, a history professor at Southwest Missouri State University.

"The scale of the disaster really was great," Piston said. "Wilson's Creek does not loom as large in our collective history as Gettysburg or Vicksburg or some of the larger battles, but for those who fought here, they had every reason to believe they were participating in something on an unprecedented scale."

Men dressed as Union troops carried the remains, kept in a small vault atop a ceremonial gurney, to a small plot among graves of soldiers who helped fight America's wars.

The bones, discovered in the mid-1960s, were kept in Columbia until officials sent them to an anthropologist in California for analysis a couple years ago, said Jeff Patrick, librarian at the historic site. He said park officials got the bones back about a year ago and timed Saturday's burial ceremony with the dedication of a monument to Union soldiers.

Carole Petty, a Springfield writer and treasurer of the Civil War Round Table of the Ozarks, was among the officials and history enthusiasts on hand for Saturday's ceremony.

"These were lives cut short. And it wasn't just them. It was their families that paid a price, their friends," she said. "I'd like to think that we can learn from that, learn other ways to manage conflict, unlike what's going on today."