Honey Springs, Oklahoma: Historical Archaeology of a Civil War Battlefield

The sectional conflict between North and South was different in Indian Territory (now the state of Oklahoma). There, the Civil War was only a veneer over the competition among the United States, the Confederacy, and sovereign Indian Nations known as the Five Civilized Tribes whose citizens, in turn, had multiple motives that drove divided loyalties.

Historians have long recognized the Battle of Honey Springs on July 17, 1863, for its unusual makeup of Black, Indian, and White combatants and as the most significant battle of the Civil War in Indian Territory. Honey Springs, Oklahoma: Historical Archaeology of a Civil War Battlefield is the first book to focus solely on this event. It is unique in that its discourse and conclusions flow from the convergence of three lines of evidence: written history (memory), scientific archaeological findings, and military terrain analysis of the landscape. This triangulation of sources offers a place for long overlooked perspectives and returns an otherwise missing voice to Native American and Black participants.

One of the synthesizing questions addressed by author William B. Lees is how to explain rebel loss. Given the participants’ cultural diversity, the question has many answers; victory and defeat are, after all, in the eye of the beholder. Honey Springs, Oklahoma makes clear the location of skirmishing, the lopsided attack of Union troops on the right of the Confederate line, and precise locations of fighting during the rebel retreat. This analysis is the fulcrum in the re-envisioning of the agency of Native American participants. This groundbreaking study will provide new insights for students and scholars of historical archaeology, and military historians and general readers with an interest in the Civil War and its archaeological record will also benefit from Lees’s research into this important but heretofore little-studied engagement.