Two Gray Ghosts And An Interstate

Civil War expert talks about guerrillas and Osage Springs

Friday, February 15, 2013

It was a 1950s television show, “The Gray Ghost,” that whetted Paul Dolle’s interest in the Civil War.

The series, which lasted only a year, starred Tod Andrews as Maj. John Singleton Mosby, a Virginian serving in the Confederate Army. Operating as what the Confederates called a “partisan unit,” “Mosby’s Raiders” harassed Union supply lines and Union couriers to such success that Mosby became known as “the Gray Ghost.”

Dolle’s interest in the Civil War outlasted the TV show and was spurred on by a move to Northwest Arkansas in 1978.

“I was driving to Rogers for the first time and passed the Pea Ridge battlefield,” he remembers. “And I thought, ‘Oh boy! I remember this from my Civil War bubblegum cards!

This is where the Indians fought.

“I realized that I had inadvertently moved right into a place where the Civil War really happened.”

Serendipitously, Dolle has become fascinated with another Confederate guerrilla, Maj. William “Buck” Brown, a Northwest Arkansan who became the biggest thorn in the Union’s side after regular troops pulled out of the region.

“You can go into the Union reports for about three years, and he was everywhere,” Dolle says. “His name was there repeatedly.”

Most of Brown’s efforts were directed toward the 1st Arkansas U.S. Cavalry, a Union garrison in Fayetteville.

“His mission was to disrupt their wagon trains, steal their mules and horses and harass them in any way he could,” Dolle says.

Among favorite stops for Union wagon trains in those days was Osage Springs, in thearea that is now Pinnacle Hills in Rogers. Dolle describes it “in our terms as the equivalent of an interstate truck stop. When they traveled in those days, they had to stay on main roads and keep a source of water both for the animals and the men,” he explains. “Osage Springs was a huge supply of water in those days, mentioned in a lot of Union reports.”

At a program titled “Civil War Secrets of Osage Springs,” set for Saturday at the Rogers Historical Museum, Dolle will “be presenting Civil War information that has never been published,” says Monte Harris, education coordinator for the museum, “so we are real excited about this opportunity.”

Dolle, originally from Chicago, is always willing and ready to talk about the war and about reenacting. He was drawn into the hobby by watching the filming of “The North and the South” while he was living in Eureka Springs.

“I was absolutely mesmerized by the troops all in uniform at the train station,” he remembers. “I sat there for days.”

He soon discovered the reenactments that took place at Prairie Grove Battlefield State Park and joined the 9thTexas Infantry, a Confederate company. Since then, he’s traveled to major reenactmentssuch as the 135th anniversary event at Gettysburg where there were 32,000 uniformed“soldiers” on the field.

“In the hobby, we talk about those ‘magic moments,’” he says, when the sights and the sounds transport reenactors back in time. “You come across those moments on a totally random basis,” he adds, but they are in large part what’s kept him coming back for more.

But as a speaker, Dolle wants his audiences to know two things - that there were many Union troops, not just Confederate ones, recruited from Northwest Arkansas, and “I want them to understand how miserable the war was in this part of the country.

“There was no law and order.

It was always a game of kill or be killed between the Federals and the Confederate guerrillas,” he says.

Brown, he adds, was killed about a month before the Civil War was over. He’s buried in Thornsberry Cemetery between Springdale and Siloam Springs.

Whats Up, Pages 12 on 02/15/2013