In the spring of 1864, the Union's ambition to take Texas ran out of road in the red clay of DeSoto Parish. On April 8, Confederate forces stopped the Red River Campaign cold at Mansfield — the most significant Civil War engagement in Louisiana west of the Mississippi. The next day at Pleasant Hill, Banks held the field and retreated anyway, abandoning his plans to reach Shreveport. The Confederacy's last Louisiana capital never fell. What the fighting left behind is still readable on the land: 455 acres of preserved battlefield at Mansfield, the markers at Pleasant Hill, and Oakland Cemetery — open since 1847 — where the Civil War officers who defended this ground were eventually buried under Victorian ironwork that has stood for more than a century and a half. By 1868 Holy Trinity Catholic Church was rising on Spring Street, its cornerstone sealed with documents from the war that had just ended. The city that survived is still standing around them.
