Confederate Gen. Sterling Price’s forces were in full retreat from his Missouri Campaign after a series of defeats beginning at West Port on Oct. 23.

The Leavenworth Times of Nov. 3, 1864, published a letter from Union Gen. James Blunt dated Oct. 30, 1864, describing the final battle of the campaign at Newtonia, Mo.

Price’s forces halted south of Newtonia on Oct. 28 to rest from a grueling march with Union forces nipping at their heels. Price halted thinking that Union Gen. Alfred Pleasonton had given up his pursuit following a series of battles along the Kansas-Missouri border. Price’s troops were battle weary and exhausted.

While Pleasonton had halted, Blunt’s movements were unexpected. Blunt wrote that he had marched his command all day and all night to catch up to Price. Col. Charles Jennison’s 15th Kansas and Col. Hobart Ford’s 2nd Colorado Cavalry were in the lead of Blunt’s division when they were discovered by Price’s forces. Two lines of defense were formed by 10,000 Confederates led by Brigadier Gen. Joseph Shelby.

Blunt’s smaller force immediately attacked “with vigor.” Blunt continued, ”The fight lasted from three o’clock until dark, and was the warmest contested field we have had in the campaign. With the two brigades I held the field without support until near sundown, when (Brigadier Gen.) Sanborn came up just in time to form on my left and repulse a flanking column of the enemy. We drove them from the field in confusion.”

Price retreated through the night. Blunt revealed that, “A spy of ours, who has been with them ... reports that Price has 16,000 men armed and 10,000 unarmed.”

The spy reported that Price was so soundly beaten that he “will not fight unless compelled to.”

Price’s Missouri Campaign was miserably finished.

Twenty years later, Capt. E. W. Kingsbury, a Union officer, wrote a letter to John N. Edwards, editor of the St. Joseph Gazette, published in the Aug. 3, 1884 edition. Edwards had been with Gen. Shelby’s opposing Confederate forces.

A photo “of an old friend of yours,” was included in the letter. Kingsbury continued, “You will probably recognize him as the old “Colorado Sam” who helped to escort you and Gen. Marmaduke across Current River, by way of Chalk Bluff, and again met you at Prairie Grove, and was on the “war-path all through the “Price Raid,” and all through Missouri, bushwhacking around against your boys.”

Colorado Sam was Kingsbury’s horse.

“A faithful and obedient servant in war, and a loving and true friend in peace; a target for Confederate bullets; roughing it with the boys; oftentimes half fed and ridden well nigh to death, he never complained. All through the great struggle of the bitterest war that was ever waged, he never failed in the performance of his allotted duty, and now 30 years of age, he has found a home with his old master ...Veteran Sam; long may he live.”

One would think an old enemy from the field of battle would have little to say in complimenting Capt. Kingsbury, Company A, Second Colorado Cavalry. However, Edwards recalled that “If there ever was a finer company or galanter Captain in either army, the war history up to date makes no mention of the fact.”

When “the Coloradoins” struck a trail they stopped at nothing, and “followed it to a funeral.” Edwards noted that Quantrell complained over and over, “will nothing ever stop them?”

Edwards recalled that the Newtonia battle was “one of the quickest, hottest, bloodiest little combats ... on a prairie almost as level as a sea strand.”

Kingsbury’s company “had two or three squadrons of white horses and wherever these were encountered the Confederates knew well always that the Second Colorado was to the front.” The prairie battle was “bloody and pitiless.” White horses went down, as well as a good many that weren’t white. “Most generally where the steed lay, there also lay his rider.”

Capt. Kingsbury was badly wounded that fateful day and so was his brave warhorse.

The opposing forces fought each other desperately. Even so, Edwards noted that since the war whenever the old veterans meet, “there is always a lovefest,” and among those who fought against him, “Capt. Kingsbury’s name is a household word, and many is the story they tell to this day of the daring and prowess of the ‘Colorado Boys.”

And what could unify old soldiers better than the reunion of a gallant Captain with his faithful warhorse. If ever the horrors of war might be tempered, the story of the valiant Veteran Sam and his devoted master should never fade from memory on The Way West.

“The Cowboy,” Jim Gray is author of the book Desperate Seed: Ellsworth Kansas on the Violent Frontier, Ellsworth, KS. Contact Kansas Cowboy, 220 21st Road, Geneseo, Kan. Phone: (785) 531-2058 or kansascowboy@kans.com.