Pea Ridge - A Special Post for Stew

When I posted recently about my twelve year blogiversary, Stew very rightly pointed out that I had not included a single ACW post in my list of featured posts. I have to admit that this was a serious omission because as we all know (as Stew has reminded us from time to time) that the ACW is the best civil war. So this special post looks to address that error.

Over the past twelve years we have played many ACW games, but the one that stands out best in my memory is one that precedes the birth of this blog. It took place in July 2005 at our annual Tarawera gaming event and there is a bit of a back story to it.

I have told stories of our Tarawera event many times on this blog. The event started back in 1985 and ran right through without a break until 2020. For a variety of reasons the event has sadly fallen away and is unlikely to resume. I had attended every event up until 1995, but around that time I had a general weariness of the hobby (I was working in the industry 6 or 7 days a week and needed time away from it), I got married, bought a house, changed careers, and did not attend for the next eight years. In early 2004 a chance encounter with one of the group saw me invited back to the 2004 event and I was hooked back in again, attending every event from there on to 2020. I volunteered to do one of the games for the 2005 event.

Just prior to this I had read the book "Pea Ridge: Civil War Campaign in the West" and this provided the inspiration for the game. To give the players some historical background I decided to create a pre-battle web game that would lead each player through the campaign that lead up to the battle. At each stage of the game players would be able to make choices that could affect the set up of the battle - well so they thought. In reality while their decision might have taken them down a different road it was carefully engineered to get them to the same place and we would still be fighting the Battle of Pea Ridge...but they believed that they had a degree of control and they better understood the background to the battle.

The armies already existed as we had thousands of ACW figures between us all, but the terrain was a slightly different story. The big thing about the Pea Ridge (or Elkhorn Tavern) battlefield is that it was heavily wooded. Now we have plenty of trees in the collection of the group, but the battle was fought in the depth of winter and images of the area in winter showed that the majority of trees were deciduous whereas all our trees have full foliage. There was a need then for bare trees. I bought a pack of 20 Woodlands Scenic tree armatures but it soon became apparent that I was going to need as many as 200 trees to cover the wooded parts of the table and that to do them with the Woodland Scenic pieces would be cost prohibitive. So I started to make trees using wire armatures coated with toilet paper (a tutorial for which I have posted some months ago). I made around 130 of these trees and another member of the group made about 50 more. 

The next consideration was the buildings, of which there were only a few: Elkhorn Tavern, two small farms, a store and a few rough clapboard buildings to represent the hamlet of Leetown. The Tavern and some of the Leetown buildings were custom built while those from existing collections filled out the rest.

As an interesting aside, a couple of months before the game I had to attend a conference in Atlanta. On the way home my flight took me to Denver and onto LA. I had a window seat on a clear day and as we flew the first leg I saw us approach the Mississippi and could identify Memphis. Since I had studied the campaign carefully for my pre-game I was very familiar with the geography of the area and was then able to pick out the city of Springfield, Missouri, and then southwest of there Bentonville (which was a small town at the time of the battle, before it became the headquarters of Walmart) and I suddenly realised that I was looking down on the battlefield as though I was looking at it on Google Earth.

On the day of the game the players were presented with some deployment options resulting from their pre-battle manoeuvring that either would lead them to the historical deployment or a couple of alternate scenarios. To my surprise they all opted for the historical options, the armies were deployed accordingly and the battle was fought along more or less historical lines. 

And so to the few pictures I have of the event.

Above and below - the Union troops in camp around Elkhorn Tavern at the start of the game

Looking from Leetown towards the Tavern (top left)

The start of the Battle of Leetown

A Union battery heading for the Tavern

The Union supply train clearing out as the Confederates  (top of the image) approach the Tavern

The Tavern

The Confederate advance on Leetown

The Confederate take Leetown

The Union forces consolidate

The Confederates surge through the woods

Above and below, the Union troops push back

Confederate troops march through the winter gloom

Here is where things get hazy for me because (the game was played twenty years ago), but I seem to recall that the result was pretty much as happened historically and the Confederate attack was repulsed.  What will be remembered by all who played is those wire trees. Because the ends of the wire (and hence the end of each 'bough') was simply cut with a pair of side cutters, they were sharp and everyone was speared at least once. Cries of "those bloody trees" were heard all day!

Well so much for a bit of gaming nostalgia on my part and I hope it makes up for my omission Stew.