One Drop in a Sea of Blue: The Liberators of the Ninth Minnesota

Chapter Three: The Outrage at Otterville

Guarding the Lamine Bridge On October , two and a half weeks before the election, General Brown directed Colonel Wilkin to furnish two companies of the Ninth Minnesota to guard the railroad bridge over the Lamine River near Otterville, forty-five miles west of Jefferson City. The bridge was one of the most vulnerable points along the Pacific Railroad that supplied strategic Sedalia, the cornerstone of the Union position in west-central Missouri. Shelby’s raiders had burned the span nine days before, but it was being speedily rebuilt. Wilkin selected Companies C and K,  officers and  enlisted men under Capt. David W. Wellman , commander of Company K. They were to relieve a ragtag body of  convalescents, artillerymen, and state militia under Maj. Richard H. Brown who had been protecting the site since shortly after the bridge was destroyed. Provided “garrison and camp equipage” and ten days’ rations, Wellman proceeded on the twentieth to the bridge by train.1 Flowing north, the Lamine (pronounced luh-meen) River joined the Missouri River near Boonville. The railroad bridge was located near the Lamine’s headwaters in southwestern Cooper County, where its scenic banks were heavily wooded, steep, and rocky, with higher, open terrain to the east. Just southwest of the bridge on ground rising from the river sat the remains of the massive Lamine Cantonment, a relic of the heady days of autumn  when armies contended for western Missouri. Union soldiers had burned the first Lamine Bridge that September after the fall of Lexington, fifty-five miles northwest. Colonel Josiah W. Bissell’s Engineer Regiment of the West rebuilt it and constructed the cantonment to protect Sedalia. “We were right in the midst of the very worst ‘secesh’ region in the State,” Bissell would recall, “from chapter three ‫ﱸﱷﱶ‬ The Outrage at Otterville  which nearly every young man had gone into the rebel army, while the old men were sending them supplies and information.” In early  after the Rebel army withdrew to Arkansas, Union forces swiftly vacated the Lamine position. Since only sporadic outbreaks of irregular warfare erupted, a simple blockhouse on the west bank of the Lamine sufficed to protect the bridge and its associated water tank for refilling thirsty locomotives.2 That minimal defense proved unequal to the task. On the “dark and murky” night of October , Shelby sent one hundred men under Capt. James C. Wood to “destroy the La Mine Bridge at all hazards.” Captain Milton Berry and twenty-eight men of Company D, Fifth Provisional Regiment, Enrolled Missouri Militia, manned the blockhouse. Shelby’s report described how Wood’s raiders, who with a “wild yell, charged headlong upon the fort,” surprised and defeated the garrison after a “bloody” but “brief fight.” Thereafter , the second Lamine Bridge, a “magnificent structure, reared at the cost of , [!], stood tenable against the midnight sky, one mass of hissing , seething, liquid fire” before “the last blackened timber plunge[d] into the gulf below.” In fact, after ten defenders took to their heels, Berry’s garrison surrendered without firing a shot. Wood’s men seized “everything of value they possessed, even their clothing.” The prisoners had to stack all their tents, camp gear, wagons, and supplies—whatever their captors could not carry away—onto the bridge before it was torched along with the blockhouse and water tank. After paroling the prisoners, the Rebels “stole what movable property they could lay their hands on in the neighborhood, and left.” Wellman ’s Minnesotans heard the whole ignominious story of the pitiful defense of the bridge, to which James Woodbury remarked, “I guess that they would just as soon be taken prisoners as not, so they sent our company and Co. K to guard it.”3 Lamenting the loss of its “expensive bridge” (valued at merely ,), the Pacific Railroad griped that it had been burned “for mere wantonness,” as if it were not a vital military objective. The railroad had to “concentrate its energies upon rebuilding that section.” Major Brown’s force camped on the east bank of the Lamine River upon slightly higher ground within a loop just south of the crossing, and apparently Wellman established his bivouac there. He set a strong picket guard around all the bridge approaches. Spanning  feet and rising  feet above the water, the new bridge was the usual ricketylooking wooden trestle with, as President Lincoln once described another such structure in Virginia, “nothing in it but beanpoles and cornstalks.” Vital train service soon resumed...