"The Thermopylae of the West" Topic

"In the fall of 1862, Confederate armies under Robert E. Lee and Braxton Bragg invaded the slaveholding states of Maryland and Kentucky, but their ambition to conquer the border South was famously quashed at the battles of Antietam and Perryville. Two years later, in September 1864, a Confederate army under Sterling Price invaded another slave state, Missouri, likewise intending to wrest it from Union control. This, too, ended in failure. But while nothing in Price's campaign reached the scale or importance of those previous battles, the pivotal engagement, at Pilot Knob, Mo., was noteworthy for the odds overcome by the vastly outnumbered Union – indeed, some called it "Thermopylae of the West," recalling that ancient battle in which a small band of Spartan warriors held off an overwhelmingly larger Persian force.
Having moved to Missouri as a young man, Sterling Price farmed tobacco, served in the State Legislature and was elected to Congress, although he gave up his seat to serve in the war against Mexico. His regiment occupied New Mexico, where it suppressed the Taos Rebellion, and later invaded Chihuahua. After the war, Missourians elected him governor. When the secession crisis erupted, Price, then out of office, was chosen to head the pro-Confederate Missouri State Guard, which would fight in the Confederate force that defeated the Union at Wilson's Creek in August 1861.
Despite this victory, the Confederates lost control of the state and were forced to retreat into Arkansas. Price was transferred to different theaters, but he and other Confederate Missourians kept up pressure on the Confederate government for a major invasion of their home state to join up with the pro-Confederate guerrillas that operated in Missouri, also called "bushwhackers," because they often exploited wooded areas to conceal their camps and movements…"
Full article here
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Amicalement
Armand

I'm from that area and love studying about that battle. They just had their annual reenactment there a couple of weeks ago.

Roughly 1,000 union soldiers holding against somewhere between 8,000 – 14,000 confederates! That was quite a fight! The final charge was proportionately as bloody as any of the fights in the east, just on a smaller scale.

Price's raid didn't end there, but it did stop them from their goal of capturing St. Louis.

it was a doomed effort from the start, thanks mainly to the conflicting political and military aims of the campaign …not to mention the wide gulf between what was attempted and what was actually possible (at least for the confederates)