Ozarks History

President Truman in the Ozarks

2012-01-23T08:54:00.000-08:00

President Obama visited Joplin last spring in the aftermath of the tornado, but presidential visits to the Ozarks, as a rule, have been pretty few and far between. I suppose President Truman visited the Ozarks while in office more than any other president. Perhaps that is to be expected since he was, of course, born at the edge of the Ozarks in Lamar.
I have written previously on this blog about Truman's visit to Bolivar on July 5, 1948, to dedicate the statue of Simon Bolivar. At the time it was called "Bolivar's greatest day," although the most memorable thing about the day to the president himself was apparently the unbearable heat. Truman supposedly was wont to use the expression "hotter than hell," but after his visit to Bolivar he instead used the expression "hotter than Bolivar" anytime he commented on extreme heat.
The heat of the Ozarks, though, was not enough to keep Truman from making at least one other trip to the region in the middle of a summer season during his presidency. On July 2, 1952, he came to northern Arkansas to dedicate both the Norfork Dam and the Bull Shoals Dam. He spoke at the Norfork dedication in the morning, then rode in his motorcade to Bull Shoals, where he helped dedicate the dam there in the afternoon.

Permilla Stephens

2012-01-16T08:14:00.000-08:00

The story of Permilla Stephens is illustrative of how people suffered during the Civil War. She and her husband, John A. Stephens, were Union citizens living in Springfield at the time of the war. During Zagonyi's charge in the fall of 1861, Mr. Stephens, who was a schoolmaster by profession, watched the action west of town (near the present-day 1700 block of West Mt. Vernon Street) from an upstairs room on the public square. Afterwards, he started home on foot and was shot and killed by a Union soldier, who was helping to clear the streets of Rebels, when Mr. Stephens, as he approached the front gate of his yard, did not immediately heed the soldier's call to halt.
Then during the Battle of Springfield in January of 1863, several rental homes that Mrs. Stephens owned in the south part of town and which provided her only source of income, were purposely burned by the Federals in order to give the defenders a clearer view of the attacking Confederates.
Permilla Stephens was not immediately compensated for the loss. Left bereft of any means of support, she also encountered difficulty when she applied later in the year to Federal authorities for relief in the form of food and clothing for her kids and herself.
Although Mrs. Stephens was finally approved for aid, her experience could have easily turned her against the Union, one might think. Instead, she continued to support the Union and, after the war, became Springfield's first postmistress.

The Killing of Mary Willis

2012-01-09T11:20:00.001-08:00

An interesting but tragic incident of the Civil War in Springfield occurred on May 21, 1862, at a house in what was then the east part of town. (probably somewhere around Benton/Kimbrough). An upstanding widow lady named Willis had recently arrived in Springfield as a refugee from northern Arkansas, where she and her family had been subjected to depredations by bushwhackers. Reportedly, the residence in which she and her family were lodged had previously been the domicile of a "squad of accommodating girls," and since many of the soldiers stationed at Springfield did not know about the change in identity or at least the change in character of the house's occupants, two sentries were placed at the home to protect the woman and her daughter, Mary Willis, from unwanted solicitations. However, on the day in question, Captain John R. Clark of the Fifth Kansas Cavalry, who was officer of the day at Springfield, got drunk and, in the company of his orderly, A. J. Rice, called at the home and demanded dinner. When Mrs. Willis refused, Clark grew irate, and he and Rice drew their pistols. When they started to force their way inside, one of the guards shot Clark dead. Rice then fired at the guards but missed, instead killing Miss Mary Willis. The second guard then shot and mortally wounded Rice.
Although Clark, who was buried the next day without military honors, was a member of the Fifth Kansas, he and most of his company were recruited out of Mercer County, Missouri, where he had been a sheriff before the war. Apparently, some of the more rabid Unionists in the regiment had not been keen on the idea of recruiting out of Missouri in the first place. Writing to the NY Times several months after the fatal incident in Springfield, one member of the Fifth who had previously belonged to fervent abolitionist James Montgomery's Third Kansas characterized Clark as a border ruffian who should have joined the rebels.

Springfield's Growth

2012-01-02T08:27:00.000-08:00

Living in Joplin and not getting to Springfield on as regular a basis as I used to, I am struck by Springfield's growth, when I do visit the town, perhaps as much as or more than many of the people who live there. I recall, for instance, that when I first moved to Joplin in the mid 1970s, the traffic here (along Range Line as an example) was almost as bad as Springfield traffic. That is no longer the case and has not been the case for a long time. Going to Springfield is like going to a big city. Also the pattern of heaviest traffic in Springfield has changed or grown over the years. It used to be along Glenstone and Sunshine. Now streets like Campbell and Battlefield seem to have at least as much traffic as Glenstone and Sunshine.
The increased vehicular traffic, of course, is due to the town's population growth. When I was a kid growing up in Fair Grove during the 1950s, Springfield was a town of about 65,000. The city limits were defined for all practical purposes by Sunshine Street on the south, Glenstone on the east, Kearney on the north, and somewhere around what is now Kansas Expressway on the west. Obviously there were scattered residences beyond these streets, and the city limits signs (and thus the actual city limits) were farther out. However, the large majority of the businesses and homes were within the limits I've mentioned. By 1964 when I moved to Springfield, this had already started changing. The area of southeast Springfield around Glendale High School, for instance, had already been developed and was still being developed. (Although Hillcrest High School, built in the late 1950s, also lay outside the lines I mentioned, the growth of Springfield north of Kearney where Hillcrest was located did not approach the growth in the south part of the town.) By the late sixties, the growth in the southern part of the town had shifted to the southwest, where Kickapoo High School was shortly afterwards built. Somewhere along the line, though, this, too, changed, because nowadays the growth of Springfield seems to be taking place in almost all directions. The population of the place is approximately triple what it was in the 1950s when I first became acquaintd with the town.
If we go back even farther than my memory, the changes in Springfield have been even more dramatic. For instance, at the time of the Civil War, Springfield was a town of about 2,000, and its limits were defined, generally speaking, by Grand on the south, Grant on the west, Chestnut on the north, and Benton on the east. For instance, the area of Phelps Grove Park (where the John S. Phelps farm was located) was well outside town. Today, I would consider it to be in the central part of the city. My, how things have changed!

Zagonyi's Charge

2011-12-26T09:09:00.000-08:00

As someone with an interest in the Civil War in the Ozarks, I had a passing acquaintance with Zagonyi's charge even before I started researching and writing my Civil War Springfield book. However, I knew very few details, and my shallow knowledge about the event contained some misconceptions. I knew that the charge drove the Southerners out of Springfield in the fall of 1861 in advance of Fremont's occupation of the town, but that's about all I knew. I imagined the Federals charging through the streets of Springfield, driving the Rebel soldiers from the public square and chasing them out of town. Such an action did more or less occur but only after the initial action and main charge had already happened on the western outskirts of town at approximately the 1700 or 1800 block of present-day West Mt. Vernon Street (where the monument shown above is located). Only after the Confederate-allied Missouri State Guard troops had been routed in a field west of town did the Federals chase them through the streets as the Rebels scattered in several directions. I also was not previously aware of how far Zagonyi and his Body Guard had to march merely to reach Springfield. I had previously assumed that Fremont and the main body of Federal troops were outside town only a few miles away when Zagonyi undertook his celebrated mission, but, in fact, the march started from Hickory County just a few miles south of Quincy and approximately 50 miles north of Springfield. It was, to say the least, a daring and problematic undertaking, but it turned out all right for Zagonyi and proved the mettle of his Body Guard, helping to dispel the unit's dubious reputation as mere parade soldiers. However, when Fremont was relieved of duty shortly afterwards, the soldiers of the Body Guard were also discharged because of their zealous loyalty to the general.

Robbie Camden: The Ridge Runnin' Romeo

2011-12-17T08:54:00.000-08:00

The last chapter in my Desperadoes book is about Robert Camden, a diminutive outlaw from Reynolds County (Mo.) who terrorized south central Missouri during the 1920s and 1930s but cut enough of a romantic swath to earn the nicknames "Robin Hood of the Ozarks" and "Ridge Runnin' Romeo" along the way. Usually called Robbie or Bobby, Camden was born near the eastern Dent County community of Boss but grew up mostly in neighboring Reynolds County. He first ran afoul of the law in 1918, at the age of 17, when he and a couple of older cousins teamed up to burglarize a store in the Reynolds County community of Oakes. He and his sidekicks broke out of jail while being held at Ironton and committed another burglary while on the run, after which Camden was sent to the state reformatory at Jeff City. He was released after a year and a half but soon got in trouble again when he partipated in a holdup at Thayer, Missouri, in December of 1921. Sent to Jeff City again, this time to the big house, he was released in early 1925 and quickly resumed his criminal career, graduating to violence along the way. He and cousin Burley Barton (younger brother of the two cousins with whom Camden had gotten in trouble a few years earlier) went on a robbing spree through Pulaski and Dent County and got in a shootout with law officers in Dent that left young Barton dead. Camden, however, escaped to Arkansas, where he was finally wounded and captured in another shootout with authorities in August of 1925. He was sent to the Arkansas penitentiary but paroled after a few years. He committed some petty crimes in Kansas in 1930, spending time, for example, in the Wichita city jail, before going on another burglary binge with another cousin, Mac Camden, in St. Clair County, Missouri, in early 1931. Both men gave fake names when they were caught and were sent to Jeff City under their aliases before their real identities were discovered. Camden was released in June of 1933 but, as he had already proved several times, could not stay out of trouble. He promptly set out on a string of burglaries and holdups in his home territory of south central Missouri and finally killed a country preacher in Reynolds County in a murder for hire in August of 1933. It was during the intense manhunt for Camden over the next several months that the legend of the "Robin Hood of the Ozarks" sprang up. Hiding out in his familiar hills, Camden reportedly let it be known that he would provide for any poor family that lacked food during the Depression winter of 1933-34. Finally captured in April of 1934, Camden was sent back to Jeff City for a 30-year stretch on a robbery charge. He later confessed to and was convicted of killing the preacher and had his sentence extended to life in prison. He escaped in April of 1951 but was recaptured a few months later and sent back to the state pen. He was paroled for a year in the late 1950s but had the parole revoked. He was paroled again in 1966 and released altogether in 1971. He died three years later in Ironton, Mo., just short of his 73rd birthday. Thus ended the lengthy outlaw saga of Bobby Camden.

Roscoe "Red" Jackson

2011-12-12T08:23:00.000-08:00

Another chapter in my Desperadoes book is about Roscoe Jackson's murder of traveling salesman Pearl Bozarth in early August of 1934 near Brownbranch in northeast Taney County and the subsequent hanging of Jackson at Galena in Stone County in the spring of 1937. Originally from the Howard's Ridge area, Jackson, after having lived in Oklahoma for ten years, was trying to get home to Ozark County when he was picked up by Bozarth south of Springfield on August 1 and taken on to Forsyth. The next day, as the trip continued toward Ava, Jackson killed the man who had befriended him, apparently for his money. Jackson stole Bozarth's car and made a run for it but was captured in Oklahoma and brought back to Taney County. His trial was moved to Stone County, where he was tried and convicted and eventually hanged (over the protests of Stone County citizens, who felt the execution should occur where the murder had taken place) in May of '37. The execution, the last legal hanging in Missouri, became a public spectacle that drew a big crowd. It has been called the last public hanging in the U. S., but the validity of that claim depends on one's definition of "public."

Wilbur Underhill

2011-12-05T11:18:00.000-08:00

My Desperadoes book contains a chapter about Wilbur Underhill, whose escapades during the 1920s in southwest Missouri, southeast Kansas, and northeast Oklahoma earned him the nickname the "Tri State Terror." By the early 1930s, as his crimes escalated, he was also known as the "Mad Dog of the Underworld," and he rose to the top of America's most wanted list. When he was finally gunned down by lawmen in Oklahoma in late 1933 and died a few days later, he became the first criminal killed by officers of the fledgling agency that would become known as the FBI. (Photo above is Underhill's headstone at Ozark Memorial Park Cemetery in Joplin.)
Yet, Underhill is not nearly as well known as gangsters of the 1920s and 1930s such as Bonnie and Clyde or the Barkers, because he was never romanticized in the press. And no one ever made a movie about Wilbur Underhill (at least not a commercially successful one). Maybe Underhill was just too mean. But as I say in the book, that, too, is little more than a caricature. For the real story of Wilbur Underhill, you have to go back to where he got his start--growing up on the streets of the rough and tumble mining town of Joplin in the early 1900s.

Bonnie and Clyde Again

2011-11-28T13:22:00.000-08:00

One chapter of Ozarks Gunfights and Other Notorious Incidents was about Bonnie and Clyde's infamous shootout with police in Joplin that left two lawmen dead. I've devoted a chapter in Desperadoes of the Ozarks, followup to the Gunfights book, to the notorious duo's other misadventures throughout the Ozarks. For instance, in November of 1932, several months before the April 1933 Joplin shootout, the Barrow gang held up a bank at Oronogo, about 15 miles north of Joplin. In January of 1933, they kidnapped a Springfield motorcycle cop near the Shrine Mosque and took him on a pell-mell journey along the back roads of southwest Missouri before releasing him north of Joplin near present-day Stone's Corner. In February 1934, the gang stole a car in Springfield and took off to the south, roaring through Hurley and Galena, before kidnapping a local man (whom they later released) and having a gunfight with law officers near Reeds Spring. Less than two months later, in April of 1934, Bonnie and Clyde killed a lawman at the edge of the Ozarks near Commerce, Oklahoma. Another month later, the desperate duo were themselves finally killed by a police ambush in rural Louisiana.

Lamar's Lynching of Lynch

2011-11-21T16:40:00.000-08:00

One chapter in my Desperadoes book is about the murder of Barton County (Mo.) sheriff John Harlow by Jay Lynch in early March of 1919 and the subsequent lynching of Lynch in late May of 1919 on the grounds of the courthouse at Lamar. A career criminal, Lynch was arrested on March 2 in northern Barton County as a fugitive from St. Louis and taken to Lamar, where he was turned over to Sheriff Harlow. The sheriff, who had a reputation as being kind and indulgent toward prisoners, allowed Lynch's wife and mother to visit the jailbird in his cell the next day, and later that evening he allowed Lynch to make a phone call as he was getting ready to escort him to St. Louis. Suddenly, Lynch whipped out a pistol that his mother or wife had apparently slipped to him and fatally shot Harlow. He also shot and mortally wounded the sheriff's 18-year-old son when the lad promptly appeared on the scene.
Lynch made his escape but was recaptured in Colorado in late May and brought back to Lamar to stand trial for the murder of Sheriff Harlow. He was quickly convicted but sentenced only to life in prison because the Missouri legislature had recently passed a law banning the death penalty. Furious over Harlow's murder and the new law, a mob quickly gathered outside the courthouse where the sentence had been pronounced and soon broke in, took the prisoner from his guards, and strung him up to a tree on the courthouse grounds. Later in 1919, the law banning capital punishment was rescinded.
This incident had at least a couple of ironic twists to it. The obvious one was that the victim of the lynching was himself named Lynch. (The word "lynch," by the way, comes from a Revolutionary War colonel named Lynch who organized a group of vigilantes in Virginia after the war and went about the countryside meting out punishment to former Tories. At first, the term meant any extralegal punishment and only later came to refer specifically to vigilante execution, especially by hanging.) The other ironic twist to this episode was the fact that Lynch was hanged from a tree that his victim had planted on the courthouse grounds about twenty years earlier during his first term as sheriff.

Pleasant Hill Shootout and Lynching

2011-11-14T11:20:00.000-08:00

Another chapter in my Desperadoes book is about a shootout that occurred at the Pleasant Hill (Mo.) train depot (at left) on February 20, 1915, between city marshal Joseph Adams and nightwatchman Clarence Poindexter on one side and two tramps named Williams and Ryan on the other. The gunfight ensued when Marshal Adams tried to arrest and search the two men on suspicion of having committed a robbery at Richards, Missouri, sixty miles south of Pleasant Hill, the night before. The shootout left Poindexter dead, Ryan mortally wounded, and Williams less severely wounded but under arrest for the killing of Poindexter. In the wee hours of the next morning, February 21, Williams was dragged out of his cell by a determined mob and hanged from a water tower just a block or two from the jail. Later evidence showed that Williams and Ryan had not been the Richards robbers, but the feeling around Pleasant Hill was that they must have been guilty of something or they wouldn't have resisted arrest.

Arthur Tillman and Mandy Stephens

2011-11-09T10:35:00.001-08:00

Another chapter in Desperadoes of the Ozarks is about 22-year-old Arthur Tillman's murder of his lover, 20-year-old Amanda Stephens, in March of 1913 in Logan County, Arkansas, near the small community of Delaware. Perhaps I should just say that the chapter is about the murder case involving Arthur Tillman and Amanda Stephens, because there are people, even today, who question whether Tillman really killed Mandy and suggest that he was wrongly convicted. I think that such a claim is nonsense, because the circumstantial evidence against Tillman was overwhelming.
Briefly, the facts of the case were as follows: Tillman, as he freely admitted at trial, was having regular sexual relations with Mandy and she turned up pregnant. She had also gotten pregnant and miscarried three years earlier, and Tillman had been one of several young men who had had sex with her prior to her first pregnancy. This time she was pressing Tillman to marry her, but he had another girlfriend and did not want to marry Mandy. The couple, though, were seen together on the day Mandy disappeared. Confronted, Tillman claimed not to know where Mandy was and then left town. A few days later he came back and was seen looking into an abandoned well on a neighbor's property adjoining the Tillman family farm. The next day, Mandy's body was found at the bottom of the same well, with a rock tied to her body with telephone wire. By the time the body was retrieved, Tillman had again skpped town but was tracked down at Fort Smith a couple of days later and brought back to face murder charges.
At his trial, it was revealed that telephone wire exactly matching that used on Mandy went missing from a general store in the Tillman neighborhood on the same day Mandy went missing and that Tillman was seen by witnesses in the vicinity of the store. Mandy had been killed with shots from a .22 rifle, and testimony further revealed that Tillman's father had given away a .22 rifle a day or two after Mandy went missing. A doctor testified that on the day before Mandy's disappearance, young Tillman had come to him seeking a potion or medicine that would abort her pregnancy but that he told Arthur he had no such medicine. The defense, of course, attempted to explain all these circumstances as mere coincidence. The defense also tried to suggest that Mandy's father had killed his own daughter or that perhaps Tillman's father had done the deed. However, the prosecution in turn rebutted the defense's rebuttal.
Tillman's first trial ended in a hung jury, with eleven voting for conviction and one for acquittal. He was retried, convicted with a unanimous verdict, and hanged in July 1914.
This, of course, is just a bare-bones accounting of the case. For full details, you need to read the book. By the way, I'm having a book signing for Desperadoes at Half Price Books of the Ozarks on the Plaza Shopping Center in Springfield on Saturday, November 19, from 1-3 p.m.

Jodie Hamilton and the Parsons Family Murders

2011-11-03T09:01:00.000-07:00

Another chapter in my Desperadoes of the Ozarks book is about Jodie Hamilton's murder of the Parsons family in Texas County, Missouri, in the fall of 1906. Jodie worked for sharecropper Carney Parsons, but in October Parsons prepared to return with his wife and three kids to Miller County, where the family had formerly lived. Parsons sold his crop to Hamilton, but the two men got into an argument as Jodie was seeing the family off.
Reports vary as to whether the argument was over the price of the crop or involved a saddle Hamilton had apparently sold to Parsons, but all agree that it involved some sort of business deal. After Parsons and his family set out, Hamilton became more and more convinced that he had been cheated, and he started in pursuit of Parsons to try to make things right. The argument escalated when Jodie caught up with the family north of Houston on the Success Road just west of the Big Piney River, and Jodie ended up shooting Parsons with a shotgun blast and finishing him off by beating him with the barrel of the gun. Parsons's wife came to her husband's aid as he was struggling for his life, and Jodie also bludgeoned her to death with the gun barrel. He slit the throats of the Parsonses' six-year-old and three-year-old sons before finishing them off with the gun barrel to keep them from identifying him and finally beat in the brains of their one-year-old child to stop it from crying.
Hamilton was readily captured, convicted of murder, and sentenced to hang in late December of 1906. Although the killings of the five members of the Parsons family was one of the largest and most gruesome mass murders in Missouri history, Jodie elicited sympathy from some observers when he started professing religion from his jail cell and issuing statements exhorting young people not to follow his wayward example but instead to follow the straight and narrow path. Jodie started receiving letters of support, and some folks even composed poems about him. The convict went to the scaffold on December 21 with a sure-footed step, a song on his lips, and a friendly attitude toward the people gathered to witness his execution, cementing the legend of Jodie Hamilton that persists even today among longtime residents of Texas County. But, as I say in my book, who sang for the Parsons family?

Ozarks Lynchings

2011-10-26T12:16:00.000-07:00

A chapter in my Desperadoes of the Ozarks book deals with lynchings in the Ozarks. The last couple of decades of the 19th century and the first two or three decades of the 20th century have been called the "lynching era" in America because of the large number of extralegal executions that occurred during that time. In particular there were a lot of lynchings of blacks by white mobs.
The racial violence was not quite as prominent in the Ozarks as it was in the Deep South, primarily because there were fewer blacks to begin with. Also, the frontier Ozarks had a history, dating back to the region's settlement in the early 1800s, of resorting to vigilante mobs or "rough justice" in dealing with heinous crimes not only by blacks but by whites as well.
So, the chapter in my book doesn't deal specifically with black lynchings, although the area's three most noted racial lynchings (i.e. Pierce City in 1901, Joplin in 1903, and Springfield in 1906) do receive particular focus. The chapter is just an overview of the subject of lynchings in the Ozarks, both black and white. If you want to read an in-depth account of racially motivated lynchings in the Ozarks, I would recommend Kimberly Harper's White Man's Heaven.

The Missouri Kid

2011-10-17T17:55:00.000-07:00

Another chapter in my Desperadoes of the Ozarks book is about William Rudolph, the so-called "Missouri Kid," who, along with sidekick George Collins (shown at left) robbed a bank at Union, Missouri, in late December of 1902 and a month later killed a Pinkerton detective who was on the trail of the robbers. Rudolph and Collins were arrested at Hartford, Connecticut, in early March of 1903 and brought back to Missouri, where they were greeted by a group of admiring fans, including several young women, almost like returning heroes. Given the nickname the "Missouri Kid" by a sensationalist newspaperman, Rudolph escaped in July of '03 and went on the lam. He was apprehended again in January of '04 in Kansas, brought back to Missouri, and convicted in March of '04 of first-degree murder in the killing of the detective. While his trial was going on, Collins, who had already been convicted of the same crime, was hanged from a scaffold in the courtyard next to where Rudolph's trial was taking place. Despite several appeals, Rudolph himself was launched into eternity a year later using the same rope that had been used to hang Collins. I received my author copies of the Desperadoes book less than a week ago, and just a day or two afterwards there was already at least one review of the book posted on the internet at the following URL (the same review was also later posted on the Amazon website): http://dadofdivas-reviews.blogspot.com/2011/10/book-review-desperadoes-of-ozarks.html

Meadows-Bilyeu Feud

2011-10-13T09:22:00.000-07:00

Another chapter in my Desperadoes book is about the Meadows-Bilyeu feud that culminated in the killing of Steve Bilyeu and two of his sons by Bud Meadows and his cohorts in late November of 1898 south of Ozark near the Christian-Taney county line. One newspaper called the feud, which had been building for months, a neighborhood feud, but it was really more like a family feud, because both Bud Meadows and his brother Bob had married into the Bilyeu family. Steve Bilyeu's land and Bud Meadows's land adjoined, and the source of the dispute was a fence separating their properties. The two men had put up the fence together, but Meadows apparently felt that Bilyeu was not contributing his fair share to the upkeep of the fence. The argument came to a head on Nov. 28, 1898, when Meadows and his pals started taking down the fence, and Bilyeu and his associates showed up armed to try to stop them. The confrontation left three Bilyeus dead and Meadows and four of his sidekicks indicted for murder. Meadows was convicted of 1st degree murder but later had the conviction overturned and was granted a new trial. However, the second trial never took place, as the charges were basically dropped.

Olyphant Train Robbery

2011-10-06T07:34:00.000-07:00

One of the chapters in my upcoming Desperadoes book is about the train robbery that occurred at Olyphant, Arkansas,in early November of 1893. It's sometimes called the last great Arkansas train robbery, although that title seems a little misleading, because it suggests that there were a number of other great train robberies in Arkansas when, in fact, there were very few others, if any, as far as I know. At any rate, the train robbery in question happened when Train No. 51 of the St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railway stopped during its run from Poplar Bluff, Missouri, to Little Rock about ten o'clock on the night of the 3rd to let off a passenger at Olyphant, a small community a few miles south of the Jackson County seat of Newport. During the holdup, the train's conductor fired shots at the bandits and was killed when they returned fire. The bandit gang was composed of eight men, all of whom were captured over the next few weeks. Most of them had previously been law-abiding farmers from the Siloam Springs (Benton County) area of Arkansas, and they had hatched the robbery plan as a get-rich-quick scheme. Three of the desperadoes paid with their lives for their greed when they were executed the following spring in the only triple hanging in Jackson County history.

Double Killing in Butler

2011-09-28T08:20:00.001-07:00

I said a few weeks ago that my next several posts would deal with subjects covered in my upcoming book Desperadoes of the Ozarks. I've begun to realize, however, that many of the subjects in the book I've already touched on in previous posts. Two more examples are Pink Fagg and the Hudspeth-Watkins murder case. Each of these subjects constititues a chapter in my upcoming book, but I've already mentioned both in previous posts on this blog. So, I'll skip over them, as I have a couple of other chapters, and move on to the next. It concerns the incident in Butler, Missouri, in December of 1889 in which city marshal J. H. Morgan and deputy U. S. marshal John P. Willis killed each other in a shootout. In fact, this is an incident that I've also mentioned in a previous post but only in passing. I don't believe I've given the particulars of the incident. It occurred when Willis tried to arrest Morgan on what was basically a trumped-up charge motivated by a personal grudge. The previous day, Morgan had arrested Willis for disorderly conduct when the latter appeared on the streets of Butler in a state of intoxication and started verbally abusing citizens. Willis was released after only a couple of hours, and he promptly boarded a train for Kansas City, where he obtained a warrant for Morgan's arrest on a dubious charge of interfering with a deputy U. S. marshal during the legal performance of his duty. Willis got back to Butler late at night and went almost directly to Morgan's home, rapped on the door, and stated his business when Morgan came to the door. When Morgan asked to see the warrant, Willis whipped out a gun instead, and the two lawmen exchanged fire, mortally wounding each other.

Lane Britton

2011-09-21T13:01:00.001-07:00

Another chapter in my upcoming Desperadoes of the Ozarks concerns the Alsups of Douglas County, Mo., especially the gunfight between sheriff Hardin Vickery and ex-sheriff Shelt Alsup in March of 1879 that left both men dead. However, since I've already discussed the Alsups in a previous post less than a year ago, I'm going to skip over this chapter and go to the next chapter, which deals with a desperado named Lane Britton, who hailed from Neosho, Mo.
The younger brother of Wiley Britton (who later gained fame as a Civil War author), Lane Britton first gained notoriety in 1875 when he was just a lad of 17 years. A night or two before Christmas, he was lounging at a "disreputable house" near the tracks in Neosho kept by Lizzie Sanford when a gentleman caller named Huffaker rapped on the door and demanded admittance. Both Lizzie and Britton told the man to leave, and when he kept banging on the door, Britton shot him through the door, killing him almost instantly.
The killing was eventually ruled justifiable homicide, and Britton settled in the booming mining town of Blende City (near present-day Carl Junction) in the early 1880s. He somehow got himself appointed city marshal but got in trouble in early 1883 for supposedly terrorizing the town instead of upholding the law. Soon afterwards, he killed two deputies who tried to arrest him on a warrant from Newton County on a felonious assault charge resulting from an incident a couple of years earlier. He fled west and turned up in Phoenix in the summer of 1885. He was captured but broke jail, eluded an intensive manhunt, and was never heard from again.

Granby Outlaws Revisited

2011-09-15T08:21:00.000-07:00

I said a couple of weeks ago that, in my next several posts, I would be discussing some of the chapters of my upcoming book entitled Desperadoes of the Ozarks. One of those chapters is about George Hudson and another is about Bob Layton, two of Granby's notorious outlaws. However, since I've discussed both of these men in previous posts, I'll lump them together here rather than devote a separate post to each man, and I'll be brief. Suffice it to say about George Hudson that, during the post-Civil War era, Granby was home to a lot of desperate characters, and he was the most desperate of the bunch. Based on the number of crimes he committed, what amazes me most about him is that he wasn't gunned down or brought to justice much sooner than he was. Layton, on the other hand, was probably a victim of circumstances to a certain extent. Growing up in Granby, he fell in with the Blount-Hudson gang, and the association quickly led to his downfall. He was never one of the leaders of the gang, but he paid with his life for his allegiance to the group, in particular his allegiance to Hudson.

Bud Blount

2011-09-08T12:46:00.000-07:00

I've previously mentioned all the desperadoes who came out of the rough and tumble mining town of Granby, Missouri, and I think I've specifically talked at least a little about Allen "Bud" Blount (often spelled Blunt). One of the chapters in my Desperadoes book will be about Blount. In fact, it will be one of the longer chapters in the book, because, to say the least, Bud Blount led an eventful life. So, to condense his life to a few lines here will be difficult, but I'll give it a try.
Born near Poplar Bluff, Missouri, around 1850, Bud moved west with his family about ten years later and eventually settled in Granby, where he grew up among the rough characters who populated the mining town. Bud, also called Newt, first got in serious trouble in 1871 when he was implicated as a possible accessory in the murder of a man on the streets of Granby. A few months later he was charged with felonious assault in Newton County. In the mid 1870s the whole Blount family moved to Arizona but came back to Mo. and settled at Carterville. Shortly afterward, Bud and his sidekicks terrorized Webb City in what became known as the "Webb City Riot" or the "Blunt Raid."
Not long after this, Blount went west again, committed several crimes in Colorado, and killed a man in Arizona.
Back in this territory in the mid 1880s after a hitch in the Arizona prison, he was sent to the Kansas State Prison for stealing horses or cattle in Mongomery County. When he got out around 1890, he came back to Carterville, and, on a visit to his old hometown of Granby, killed a railroad brakeman. He was sentenced to death but the sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. Still later, he was paroled and still later pardoned altogether. Around 1900 or shortly after, he came back to his hometown area and became a bartender at Joplin. In his old age, he went to the State Hospital at Nevada, where he died in the 1920s.

Baxter Springs Again

2011-09-02T09:58:00.000-07:00

I've written on this blog a couple of times before about Baxter Springs, but because a chapter in my upcoming book, Desperadoes of the Ozarks, deals with the early history of the town, I'm going to briefly mention it again. The chapter in my book concentrates on the town's early cow town days and especially on the killing of two of the town's early marshals.
The first Baxter marshal to lose his life in the line of duty was H. C. Seaman, who was killed by Texas cow poke Thomas Good in the fall of 1870 when he tried to arrest Good's carousing partner, a sporting lady named Nellie Starr, for disturbing the peace.
Seaman's successor, Cassisus M. Taylor, was appointed by Baxter mayor J. R. Boyd, but the two men soon became political enemies. Boyd killed Taylor in the summer of 1872 when the marshal tried to arrest him for assaulting a local lumber dealer over a disputed debt.

Carney Murders

2011-08-26T12:48:00.000-07:00

My book entitled Desperadoes of the Ozarks , which is more or less a followup to my Ozarks Gunfights book, will soon be released by Pelican Publishing. In fact, I think it's already available for pre-purchase on sites like Amazon. Each chapter in the book, as was the case with the gunfights book, is devoted to a different notorious character or incident. So, for the next several posts, I'll briefly describe some of the chapters.
The first chapter is about the killing of Jackson Carney and his wife, Cordelia Carney, by Carney's cousin George Moore at Shell Knob in December of 1869. Moore had grown up in the Carney home almost like a brother to Jackson, but he had left home about a year earlier and had apparently led a wayward life during the intervening year. He showed back up in Barry County in December and on the fateful day hung around Carney's store all day apparently just waiting to enact his murderous design. After the store closed, he killed both Carney and his wife, stole a couple of hundred dollars, and took off. He was captured a day or two later and taken to the Barry County jail at Cassville. A day or two after that, he was strung up on a corner of the Cassville square by an indignant mob bent on vengeance for the foul murders. Carney and his wife were buried at the Carney Cemetery, now called the Old Carney Cemetery, which is located about ten or fifteen miles south of Aurora just a few miles off Highway 39.

Wild Bill in Springfield

2011-08-22T08:53:00.000-07:00

I have written on this blog before about Wild Bill Hickok's shootout on the Springfield square with Dave Tutt shortly after the close of the Civil War, and one chapter in my book entitled Ozarks Gunfights and Other Notorious Incidents is about this episode. However, as many people know but others may not, Wild Bill also spent considerable time in and around Springfield while the war was still going on. He served as a Union scout and spy during the latter part of the war, and General John Sanborn, commanding the Southwest District of Missouri, sent him on missions of reconnaissance and espionage throughout southwest Missouri and northwest Arkansas. When he was in Springfield, he helped the provost marshal enforce martial law, serving more or less as an MP (although I don't think the abbreviation "MP" was a commonly used term back then). For instance, I know that he testified or gave depositions against the defendants and for the military in at least one or two cases involving minor infractions like illegal liquor sales and was identified as a lawman in at least one of those cases.

Wilson's Creek

2011-08-14T18:01:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, I went to the 150th anniversary re-enactment of the Battle of Wilson's Creek. I guess the thing that struck me most about the occasion was the number of people in attendance. I couldn't venture a guess as to the number who were there during Saturday morning while I was there, but it was a lot. It seems there has been a renewed interest in the Civil War over the past ten to fifteen years (or maybe it's just that my own interest has increased during that time frame), and the interest seems to have increased even more during the past year or two with the approach of the sesquicentennial of the war. Now that the first events of the sesquicentennial are actually occurring, the interest is really peaking.
I've been working on a book about Springfield during the Civil War, and one thing I learned in researching the book was that there was almost a second battle of Wilson's Creek. At least the Union thought for a while that there might be such a battle. It was during the fall of 1861 while Gen. John C. Fremont and his forces were occupying Springfield. Rumors that Southern forces under Gen. McCulloch and Gen. Price (the same officers who defeated Lyon at the Wilson's Creek battle two and a half months earlier) were amassing in the Cassville area and marching toward Wilson's Creek kept filtering in to Springfield, but the rumors proved to be just that--rumors. The Southern force in the Wilson Creek area was actually rather small, and before Fremont could act against even that force, he was removed from command at Springfield and his army withdrawn to Rolla and Sedalia.

Joplin and Marshfield Tornadoes

2011-08-07T17:51:00.000-07:00

For the first month or two after the Joplin tornado, the affected area looked like a war zone in time of war. Now, after two and half months of debris removal, the affected area looks like a war zone after the war is over. For the first couple of months, the main impression I got upon driving through town was one of destruction. Now, the impression I get is one of desolation.
The Ozarks and the whole 4-State area, of course, has a long history of violent, tornadic weather. In April of 1880, for instance, a tornado virtually wiped Marshfield off the face of the map and killed over ninety people. In the number of people killed and certainly in the total amount of destruction, the Marshfield tornado did not rival the recent Joplin storm, but since Marshfield was a much smaller town, the 1880 storm at Marshfield destroyed a much larger portion of the town's buildings and killed a higher percentage of its people than did the Joplin tornado.
Although a sense of destruction and desolation is inevitable for those of us who drive through the affected area of Joplin on a daily basis, something else has made just as strong an impression on most of us as the images of ruin, and that is the outpouring of support that Joplin has received in the wake of the tornado.
Marshfield, too, received a lot of aid in the aftermath of its tornado. Help arrived from Springfield, for instance, within a matter of hours. In fact, Joplin was one of the communities that pitched in to help Marshfield back in the spring of 1880. Some citizens from Joplin, including notorious jayhawker Charles "Doc" Jennison, trekked to Marshfield to view the devastation for themselves in the days after the storm, then came back to Joplin and organized a local relief effort to benefit Marshfield, with Jennison leading the effort.
One other thing that the Joplin and Marshfield tornadoes have in common besides the widespread death and destruction and the outpouring of suppport afterward is the fact that in both instances the storm happened on a Sunday evening.

Hot Weather

2011-07-30T11:25:00.000-07:00

According to the weatherman on one of the Joplin TV stations, this summer is shaping up to be one of the hottest on record. I know it's one of the hottest in my memory.
I think the summer of 1954 is considered the hottest on record in the Ozarks, when we had 39 days (I believe) in which the temperature topped 100 degrees, with several of those days topping 110. At the rate we're going, we may challenge the 1954 record of 39 days with temps over 100.
I vaguely recall the summer of 1954, when I would have been seven years old. Actually, I don't recall the specific year. I only recall that during a couple of the summers of my childhood it was extremely hot. It has been only during my adulthood, after I read or was told that 1953 and 1954 were unusually hot summers, that I've concluded those must have been the years I remember as being very hot. We didn't have air conditioning, either, back in those days, but somehow the heat didn't bother me much. I'd hate to have to be without air conditioning this summer. I think it would bother me a lot, but, of course, I'm not seven anymore. Temperature extremes don't seem to bother kids the way they do adults. At least they didn't bother me and my childhood friends when we had important things to do like playing baseball or going fishing.
Extremes in weather always seem to be a topic of conversation. Recently I ran onto a piece in the September 4, 1881 Joplin Daily Herald in which a correspondent was reporting from McDonald County and complaining about the hot, dry weather. "The rains of last week that visited Joplin and vicinity failed to reach this region," the correspondent said, "and, if possible, everything looks more dry and desolate here than there. Early planted corn will make hardly a half crop, while late planting will barely make fodder. Wheat yielded about a two thirds crop. Along Lost Creek, in the neighborhood of Seneca, the corn crop would have been very good but for the chinch-bugs. What the drouth has accomplished in other localitites they have done there."

The Drake Constitution

2011-07-22T15:12:00.000-07:00

The Missouri Constitution of 1865, passed at the end of the Civil War when Radical Republicanism was at its zenith in the state, completely disenfranchised unrepentant Southern sympathizers. Usually called the Drake Constitution after its chief proponent, Charles D. Drake, the constitution provided that anyone who had ever been in Confederate service or who had openly sympathized with the rebellion could not vote, hold office, serve on a jury or hold certain important jobs like teacher, preacher, or lawyer without first taking an oath of allegiance to the United States. The most amazing thing to me about the Drake Constitution is that, even with unrepentant Southern sympathizers barred from voting, it barely passed when put to a statewide vote in June of 1865. Obviously there were a lot of conservative and fair-minded Union people who didn't feel it was right to punish a person for what he believed or had believed in the past. There were just enough Radicals, though, to get the constitution passed into law. I can, to a certain extent, understand the punitive feeling of the Radicals who pushed the new constitution into law. If I had been a strong Union sympathizer during the Civil War, I would have found it hard to immediately start welcoming back with open arms the people who had wanted to rend the country asunder. However, the practical effect of the Drake Constitution was merely to deepen and prolong the bitterness that had torn the country apart in the first place. In some cases,it even led to violent incidents, such as the murder of Rev. Samuel S. Headlee, a Southern sympathizer who was killed when, without having taken an oath of allegiance, he tried to preach at Pleasant View Church just across the Greene County line in Webster County (near present-day Elkland) in the summer of 1866 with an eye toward restoring the congregation, which had aligned with the Methodist Episcopal Church North during the war, to the southern branch of the M. E. Church.
Fortunately the Drake Constituion didn't last very long. By the early 1870s, the most objectional provisions of the document were already being repealed.

Saline County

2011-07-14T06:41:00.000-07:00

I just got back yesterday from a trip to Marshall, Mo. in Saline County. I don't normally think of Saline County as part of the Ozarks, because it's a little too far north; so I don't know a lot about the area's history and seldom write about it. However, I suppose Saline County is considered the northern edge of the Ozarks by some definitions, where the Missouri River represents the northern boundary, and even if it is not, it is close enough to the Ozarks that it won't hurt to mention on this blog the few tidbits of Saline County history that I am familiar with.
Saline County was the site of fairly significant Civil War action, the so-called Battle of Marshall (although it was little more than a good-sized skirmish). The Battle of Marshall was the culmination of Colonel Jo Shelby's raid into Missouri during the fall of 1863, the main purposes of which were to recruit for the Confederacy, lift the spirits of Southern sympathizing people in Missouri, and perhaps occupy Federal forces that could otherwise be used in fighting battles in the East. After chasing Shelby for several days, General Egbert Brown finally caught up with the Rebels at Marshall and almost succeeded in trapping them in a deadly circle. Shelby was able to break through the Federal line, but his forces became separated into two bodies during the escape and both columns had to beat a hasty retreat toward the Arkansas border.
Probably the only other thing about Saline County that I'm familiar with at all is the fact that Arrow Rock, located on the river east of Marshall, was a significant town in the very early history of Missouri. For instance, it was the home of three Missouri governors: Claiborne F. Jackson, Meredith Miles Marmaduke, and John Sappington Marmaduke. It was also the home of artist George Caleb Bingham, who was famous for his paintings of Missouri scenes.

James H. Fagg

2011-07-03T13:10:00.000-07:00

I think I've mentioned Pink Fagg on this blog before. He was a notorious character in the Ozarks in the late 1800s. He first got in trouble in Springfield in the mid 1870s for theft, spent a stint in the state prison, and then got in trouble around 1880 for trying to kill his wife in Jasper County. He beat that rap but tried to kill a man at Pierce City a few years later and went up the river for another stay at Jeff City. He got released again after only a couple of years and went to Fort Smith, where he killed a man in an argument over a woman. After a term in the Arkansas State Prison at Little Rock, he finally settled down and lived out the rest of his days as a liquor dealer in Tulsa. My next book from Pelican Publishing, entitled Desperadoes of the Ozarks, will contain a chapter on Pink.
Pink Fagg apparently came by his wild streak honestly, because his father, James H. Fagg, was a character of some notoriety himself. When Pink was a kid, his father ran a grocery/saloon in Springfield and, during the Civil War era, often butted heads with law officers, both civil and military, over liquor and other violations.
To cite only one instance, James H. Fagg and his partner, DeWitt Brewster, got in trouble in December of 1863 with the provost marshal of the Springfield post for selling liquor to soldiers in violation of military policy. According to statements given to the provost marshal by soldiers and other witnesses, when Brewster and Fagg's business on the east side of town was raided in the wee hours of the morning of December 27, the pair was not only caught in the act of serving booze to soldiers but was also in possession of some flour that had been stolen the night before from one of the military units stationed at Springfield. Although Brewster denied all the charges, Fagg admitted he had sold liquor to soldiers but claimed that he thought the order against doing so had been lifted because all the other liquor dealers had been selling to enlisted men, too. Fagg implied that he was being singled out only because he had previously been accused of being disloyal, a charge which he denied. Brewster and Fagg ended up having their supply of goods confiscated by the government and getting their business shut down, but the closure must have been only temporary, at least in the case of Fagg, because he got in trouble with the provost marshal again for selling liquor to soldiers at least one more time later in the war.

Joplin Tornado

2011-06-28T11:35:00.000-07:00

There's a reason why I haven't posted an entry on this blog for over a month. Until yesterday, I had been without internet service ever since the Joplin tornado. Don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining. I realize I'm lucky just to be alive, because there were people who lived only a block or two away from me who perished in the storm. I'm just explaining why I haven't posted lately.
I've read that the Joplin tornado ranks as the 7th deadliest ever in U. S. history. In terms of the amount of property damage, however, I'm sure it ranks quite a bit higher than 7th. The amount of devastation is mind-boggling.
Even now, over five weeks since that fateful Sunday evening when everything changed in Joplin, I can barely fathom the scenes that I continue to witness every day. It's still hard to come to grips with the idea that the Joplin many of us have known and loved for years no longer exists. Driving down 26th Street only a few minutes ago, I was struck once again by how much of the town is simply gone. Yes, we'll rebuild, and Joplin will once again be a vibrant, industrious town, but it has been forever changed. A few years down the road, Joplin may even come out of this stronger than ever, but it still won't be the same Joplin that I've known for 37 years.

Bloody Conspiracy Theorists

2011-05-18T11:33:00.000-07:00

I remarked several months ago about the tendency that many people have to claim a connection to notorious figures from the past. I think I was speaking specifically at the time about the exaggerated idea that Jesse James spent a lot of time in and around Joplin, Missouri, when the best evidence seems to suggest that he did not. But, of course, it's not just groups or whole towns that claim dubious connections to notorious historical figures. Individual persons do so also, probably to an even greater extent. For instance, it's not unusual at all to run on to someone who claims to be related to Jesse. I've met enough such individuals that I'm convinced that not all of them could possibly be correct.
In addition to claiming unfounded kinship to notorious individuals, a lot of people also seem to want to rewrite history where renowned historical figures, both famous and infamous, are concerned. For instance, I suppose there are still people around who refuse to believe Elvis is dead. I know there are people who don't believe Jesse James was really killed in St. Joseph in 1882 by Bob Ford. Likewise, there are people who don't think Bloody Bill Anderson was killed in Ray County in 1864. People seem to love an intriguing mystery, and if none exists, they'll create one.

Skirmish at Ft. Lawrence

2011-05-14T15:59:00.000-07:00

On the early morning of January 7, 1863 (some sources mistakenly say January 6), a skirmish that occurred at Fort Lawrence in what was then Taney County served as a prelude to the Battle of Springfield the next day. Fort Lawrence was just a blockhouse manned by the local Enrolled Missouri Militia. It was located on Beaver Creek, and the place was sometimes referred to as Beaver Creek Station or just Beaver Station. It was located in a part of Taney that later became southwestern Douglas County (near present-day Rome). When the E. M. M. at the fort were surprised by a force under Colonel Emmett McDonald, who was temporarily detached from the larger force under General John S. Marmaduke that later attacked Springfield, many of the militiamen took to flight at the sound of the first gun. The Enrolled Missouri Militia in general contained a lot of reluctant warriors. The E. M. M. was created in the summer of 1862 as a sort of home guard force to supplement the already exisisting Missouri State Militia Cavalry and to free up the MSM to pursue guerrillas or meet other threats throughout the state. Since service was compulsory for all able bodied men not already in the Federal military, the creation of the E. M. M. drove many Southern sympathizers into Confederate service or into the bush as guerrillas. Many others, however, went ahead and joined the E. M. M. rather than reveal their true sentiments and became dubious warriors for the Union cause. When it came time to do battle, though, they often fled at the first fire or, in some cases, even went over to the other side. For this reason, the E. M. M. was derided as the "Paw Paw Militia" in some parts of Missouri. I'm not saying the E. M. M. at Fort Lawrence were Southern sympathizers, but, like a lot of their comrades, they apparently weren't any too eager to do battle.

Unionist Arkansawyers

2011-05-05T14:23:00.000-07:00

First, I want to call attention to the fact that I did not entitle this post "Unionist Arkansans." I hate that term. When I hear it, I always think the speaker must be from Kansas or someone who is trying to put on airs. People from Arkansas, at least not if they are old-time hillbillies, don't call themselves Arkansans.
Anyway, now to the real topic of this post. As a Missouri native and a somewhat serious student of the Civil War, I always think of my home state as a place that witnessed a particularly bitter form of guerrilla warfare and a place where the civilians suffered more than their share of depredations. There was, of course, a good reason for this. Missouri stayed in the Union, but its people were bitterly divided in their political sentiments. As a slave-holding border state, Missouri had many Southern sympahtizers, despite its inclusion in the Union.
I sometimes tend to forget that Arkansas to our south was just as bitterly divided, at least in the northern counties. Even though Arkansas seceded from the Union, many of the hillfolk in the northern counties were Union sympathizers, and they were treated just as badly as their counterparts in Missouri by the roving bands of guerrillas and quasi-Southern soldiers that infested both states. After describing the deplorable situation that Union citizens in southwest Missouri faced in the summer of 1862, a correspondent of the New York Times, writing from Springfield, turned his attention to Missouri's neighbor to the south. The condition in northwestern Arkansas, he said, "is still worse. In Carroll, Washington and other Counties, there are hundreds of Union men; but they are at extreme peril of property and life. The rebel Conscription act, and roving bands of plunderers, have compelled many of them to leave their homes, to find their way within our lines as best they might."

Springfield and Joplin Street Names

2011-04-28T18:20:00.001-07:00

Joplin has a pretty simple system of street names. The main east-west thoroughfare in the very early days of the town was Broadway, which connected East Joplin and West Joplin. All the east-west streets south of Broadway were numbered: First Street, Second Street, Third Street, etc. All the east-west streets north of Broadway were designated by letters of the alphabet: A Street, B Street, C Street, etc. You can't get much simpler than that. The main north-south street in Joplin is Main Street, or at least it was in the early days. Most of the north-south streets east of Main were named after states: Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, etc. Many of the north-south streets west of Main, at least in the beginning, were named after founding fathers of the town: Byers, Murphy, Sergeant, etc. Again, it's a fairly simple system. As the town got bigger over the years, the people who name the streets varied from the original system, of course, especially when naming the north-sourth streets, because they soon ran out of founding fathers, but the basic plan is still easily discernible.
Springfield, too, had a pretty simple system for naming its streets, at least in the very early days. Many of the main streets were named after the principal town to which they led. For instance, St. Louis, which ran east off the square (and still does) was so named because the road ultimately led to St. Louis. Boonville was so named because it led to Boonville. Jefferson, I think, was named Jefferson not after the president but because it was the road one usually took out of Springfield to go to Jefferson City. South Avenue was so named for an obvious reason: it ran south off the square. Mt. Vernon Street led to the town of Mt. Vernon, the county seat of Lawrence County. State Street was given its name because it was a main state road that one took out of Springfield to go to Cassville and eventually to Fayetteville, Arkansas (which became known as the Wire Road). Then there is College Street, the fourth street leading off the square, which got its name because an early academy or college was located on it. No fancy explanation for how the streets got their names, at least not if you know a little about the history of the town.
When I visit a town I've never been to before, I appreciate simple systems for naming streets. New York City, for instance, is very easy to know you're way around in. All the main east-west roads are numbered streets, and most of the principal north-south roads are numbered avenues. Tulsa, Oklahoma, is another city that comes readily to mind as a place that has a simple system of street names.

The Price of Gas and Corn

2011-04-22T09:08:00.001-07:00

Nearly everyone is complaining about the price of gasoline nowadays, as it approaches four dollars a gallon, and I admit that I'm right there with them. It really takes a bite out of the old pocketbook when you have to pay well over $50 for a fill-up. It's especially a hardship on people who commute back and forth to work a considerable distance each day.
Yet, when viewed from a historical perspective, the price of gasoline is really not all that far out of line from other goods and services. I can recall paying as little as 17 or 18 cents a gallon for gasoline during the 1960s, but that was during the so-called "gas wars" that were relatively common in those days. The usual price was more like 25 to 30 cents a gallon. Until recently, the price of gas nowadays was in the three dollar per gallon range. So, you might say that gasoline has only gone up by approximately a factor of ten. I can think of many other products that have gone up at least that much. For instance, I recall that the going price for a candy bar when I was a kid was a nickel. Nowadays, a Snickers bar costs over a dollar if you purchase it at the local convenience store. That's a factor of twenty! Things like health care and higher education have probably increased that much as well.
The price of some things (notably U. S. agricultural products), on the other hand, have not increased even ten times. In doing historical research on another topic, I recently ran onto an advertisement of the Jefferson City Market, wholesale and retail dealers in groceries and other provisions, in an 1858 edition of the Jefferson City Inquirer that gave the price of various commodities at that time. A bushel of shelled corn, for instance, ranged from 75 to 80 cents. That, I'm assuming, was the retail price. So, it's hard to compare that price to the price of a bushel of corn today, because corn is usually not sold by the bushel at the retail level (at least I've never purchased it that way). The wholesale price for a bushel of corn nowadays is in the seven dollar range, I think, and that's after a fairly dramatic increase in recent years. So, you might say that the price of corn has gone up only somewhat more than a factor of ten in over 150 years. If that were true of everything else and yet we all still had the same income we do today, most of us would be rich.

Clinton Flogging Revisited

2011-04-16T09:04:00.001-07:00

About a year and a half ago, I posted an entry on this blog about the whipping of some Union soldiers at Clinton, Mo. that occurred on the Fourth of July of 1861. A combined force of U. S. Army regulars and Kansas volunteers of about 2,000-3,000 men were marching from Kansas to link up with General Nathaniel Lyon, who was on his way to Springfield. At Clinton, some of the volunteers got drunk and started committting minor depredations like stealing chickens from local residents. I reported last time that Major Samuel Sturgis, in command of the combined force, ordered the volunteers flogged with fifty lashes each from a black-snake whip, and the punishment was carried out by some of his regulars, which almost caused a mutiny among the volunteers. There was more to the story than that, however, and I recently ran across a newspaper article that sheds additional light on the circumstances of the flogging. Colonel George Deitzler, commanding the volunteers, came under criticism in the Kansas press for allowing the whipping of the volunteers, and the newspaper article contained a letter from one of Deitzler's captains explaining what had happened in more detail and defending the colonel. Apparently at least a couple of regulars were also among the soldiers that Major Sturgis had arrested and brought before him because of their unruly behavior. Colonel Deitzler was notified of the arrests, and he called a meeting of his captains to decide what should be done. The officers agreed that the men should be given stern punishments in order to instill a sense of discipline in the command, and they agreed to leave the volunteers with Sturgis to allow him to mete out the punishment. However, they did not expect the men to be so severely punished as to be flogged with a teamster's whip. When Col. Deitzler learned of the first whippings, he hastened to Sturgis's headquarters and protested the brutal punishment. Sturgis at first refused to countermand his order or to turn the volunteers over to Deitzler, but at last Deitzler succeeded in getting a few of the volunteers released into his custody and saved them from the harsh punishment.
Speaking of the Civil War, I'm happy to announce that my book on the two battles of Newtonia recently won the Walter Williams Major Work Award, an annual award given by the Missouri Writers' Guild for a "major work" written by one of its members. My Ozarks Gunfights book also took a second place in the Best Book about Missouri category.

Little York

2011-04-09T08:42:00.000-07:00

I've always been fascinated by the way some early communities prospered and grew, while others stagnated or completely died out. And often the towns that nowadays are the most populous and vital are not the oldest. For instance, Little York was a prosperous little community in western Greene County, a mile or two west of present-day Brookline, that no longer even exists. When the railroad came through about 1872, the new community of Brookline grew up beside the railroad, and most of the people of Little York moved to the new town. Republic came along in the same general vicinity about the same time as Brookline and, of course, outshone both Little York and Brookline to the point that Brookline, too, is today little more than a wide place in the road. Ebenezer and Cave Spring, a couple of other very early communities of Greene County, barely exist today. Then you have towns like Fair Grove and Walnut Grove that have been around since before the Civil War but have never experienced quite the growth that newer communities like Nixa, Republic, and Willard have. In the case of Fair Grove, its lack of growth during the late 1800s and early 1900s may have had to do with its lack of a railroad. In the case of Walnut Grove, it may have had more to do with its distance from Springfield. The same phenomenon that we see in Greene County was also at work here in Jasper County (as well as other places, I'm sure). We have communities here like Medoc and Fidelity that predated the Civil War but that barely exist nowadays, whereas newer communities like Carl Junction have boomed in recent years. In fact, because Jasper County was a huge mining district in the late 1800s, we probably have more than our share of once-booming little towns that now no longer exist or barely exist. Then we have Oronogo, which is an example of a town that was a booming mining town, virtually died out, but has made a comeback in recent years and is now a thriving bedroom community for people who work in the Joplin area. Joplin itself, of course, is not nearly as old as some of the other towns in Jasper County, like Carthage and Sarcoxie.

Civil War Ozarks

2011-04-04T07:17:00.000-07:00

Holcombe's 1883 History of Greene County, Missouri, in discussing the months leading up to the Civil War, observes that people were very fickle in their political sentiments--that Unionists one week became secessionists the next and vice versa. This observation applies not just to the people of Greene County but to people throughout Missouri and probably northern Arkansas as well. The number of ardent Unionists or ardent secessionists was relatively small. Most people were somewhere in the middle, and they were guided not so much by political beliefs as they were by impulses of self-preservation. A vast number of people (and I don't mean this as a criticism) were willing to shift with whichever way the wind was blowing. When Union troops were in their area in force, they were Union sympathizers; when Confederate forces were in control, they became Confederate sympathizers. This state of things was truer at the very beginning of the war and during the months leading up to its outbreak than it was later in the war. A lot of people who would have preferred to stay neutral were forced to choose sides at some point. However, even later in the war, the overriding principle for many people was simple--how they could best survive the war. This partially explains why the people of Missouri, who were predominantly conservative Unionists at the start of the war, became even more Unionist in sympathy as the war wore on and it became increasingly clear that a Southern victory was a longshot.

Hot Springs

2011-03-28T06:55:00.000-07:00

I just returned from a weekend vacation with my wife in Hot Springs. Although not technically in the Ozarks, Hot Springs is located in the neighboring Ouachita Mountains and has a very interesting history. I'm not sure how geographers distinguish between the Ouachita Mountains and the Ozarks. The Boston Mountains, I believe, are considered to be the southern range of the Ozarks. However, if you go a little farther south, even though you have never left mountainous territory, you are considered to be in the Ouachita Mountains, a separate range. What's up with that? Anyway, back to the town's interesting history. On this blog, I've previously discussed towns, such as Eureka Springs, that grew up in our region during the late 1800s because of nearby mineral water springs. Hot Springs, however, predated Eureka Springs and most of the other mineral water springs of the Ozarks by almost half a century. People started trekking to Hot Springs to "take the cure" as early as the 1830s. The town became one of the first, if not the first, resort spa in America. I'm even more fascinated by the criminal history of Hot Springs than by its mineral water history. By the late 1800s, the town had become not only a famous mineral-water town but also a mecca for gamblers. During the 1880s, Frank Flynn controlled most of the gambling--the town's organized crime boss, so to speak. In the mid 1880s, Alexander S. Doran, a former Confederate major, came to town and opened up his own gambling house. He and Flynn clashed almost immediately, and they ended up in a gunfight. Flynn was wounded, but Doran soon left town, relinguishing any claim on the town's gambling interests. A couple of years later, Doran was killed in a shootout in Fort Smith (an incident that is the subject of a chapter in my upcoming book, Desperadoes of the Ozarks). Meanwhile, Flynn continued to control gambling in Hot Springs. Law enforcement officials not only looked the other way where gambling was concerned but actually supported it because of the revenue it brought in. Hot Springs gambling eventually led to a notorious shootout in 1899 between city police and the county sheriff's department. On the surface, the city police seemed to support the gambling interests while the sheriff's office appeared to be trying to crack down on the vice, but the battle was really over which side would control the gambling. Later, during the gangster era of the 1920s and early 1930s, gangsters like Al Capone hung out in Hot Springs when they wanted to take a break from their regular gangster activities in Chicago and elsewhere. In fact, there's a Gangster Museum in Hot Springs today.

John David Mefford in Joplin

2011-03-17T09:03:00.000-07:00

I knew even before I started researching my Wicked Joplin book that a couple of colorful characters from the Kansas-Missouri border region during the Civil War ended up coming to Joplin after the town got its start as a booming mining camp in the early 1870s. Namely, I was aware that Charles Fletcher "Fletch" Taylor, who was a lieutenant under Quantrill during the Civil War, came to Joplin very early on in the town's history and, in fact, served a term on the city council during the 1870s. Taylor's residence in Joplin partially explains the legend of Frank and Jesse James's connection to Joplin, because Taylor was the James brothers' immediate commander during 1864. The James boys probably did visit Taylor in Joplin at least a time or two after they became notorious, but the legend of their close connection to Joplin has probably been exaggerated. I also knew vaguely that Charles R. "Doc" Jennison, the notorious Kansas jayhawker, came to Joplin in the late 1870s and lived here into the 1880s. However, I was not aware of the prominent role he played in early-day Joplin. Despite being one of the town's biggest gamblers, he was also considered a leading citizen.
The character that I knew nothing at all about, as far as his residence in Joplin is concerned, prior to writing the book is David Mefford. He was neither a guerrilla like Taylor nor a notorious jayhawker like Jennison, but he was still a character of some note during the Civil War, operating against Tom Livingston and others along the border as a captain (later promoted to major) in a Kansas cavalry unit. He, like the other two men, came to Joplin during the 1870s. He was a saloonkeeper both in Joplin and in Galena, Kansas, and also tried his hand at mining, as did nearly every other man who came to Joplin during its early days.

Maiden Lane

2011-03-11T17:47:00.000-08:00

Anyone who is familiar with Joplin knows that one of the main north-south streets in the town is Maiden Lane. Anyone who has lived in Joplin very long has probably also heard the legend of how the street got its name. Supposedly it was named Maiden Lane because it served as Joplin's principal red light district during the town's early mining days.
In researching my Wicked Joplin book, I turned up no evidence to support this legend. In fact, I can say almost unequivocally that there is no truth to the legend. The main area for prostitution in Joplin from the very early days of the 1870s through the 1910s (shortly before Prohibition put a damper not only on Joplin saloons but also on the town's other vices) was the downtown area, not a street almost one mile west of downtown.
It seems plausible to me to speculate that Maiden Lane probably got its name because during Joplin's early days it was the site of the town's horse racing track in what was then the extreme southwest edge of town. In the world of horse racing, of course, a "maiden" is a horse that has not yet won a race, and there often are races held especially for maidens. The road that we now know as Maiden Lane would have been the "lane" down which the "maidens" would have traveled to reach the race track.
The oval race track to which I referred in the previous paragraph was located at about 17th and Maiden Lane across from the present-day Price Cutter store, and it was built in the late 1870s. However, even in the early 1870s there was a straight one-half mile race track for horses in Joplin that ran on a diagonal from near the entrance of present-day Fairview Cemetery (then called the City Cemetery) to near present-day West Central Elementary School on 7th Street. So, almost from the town's beginning, Maiden Lane was the place for "maiden" race horses.

Butterfield Overland Stage Reaches Springfield

2011-03-04T11:29:00.000-08:00

In October of 1858, when the first eastbound stage coach of the newly formed Butterfield Overland State Line reached Springfield from San Francisco, over a hundred local residents, according to the Springfield Advertiser, were there to greet it when it drew up in front of Smith's Tavern and Hotel just off the public square on Boonville. The stage had made the trip in what was considered an incredible time of less than twenty-two days, and an air of excitement attended the arrival. The stage got to Springfield at 3:30 on the afternoon of October 8 carrying six passengers, all of whom had come all the way from California. After changing horses and coaches at Springfield, the travelers continued on their way on the last leg of the stage journey to Tipton, Missouri, where they would then board a train for St. Louis. That evening, after the stage had already departed for Tipton, Springfieldians celebrated the momentous occasion of its arrival in their town with a fireworks display.

Wicked Joplin

2011-03-01T10:55:00.000-08:00

My latest book, entitled Wicked Joplin, has just been released by History Press (the same company that published my Newtonia book). As the name implies, the book is about the notorious history of Joplin when it was a booming mining town with lots of gambling, saloons, and other vice.
The first chapter is mainly about the very early history of Joplin prior to incorporation in 1873 and the first couple of years after incorporation. During the pre-incorporation days, Joplin experienced what came to be known as the "reign of terror." Because the closest law enforcement officers were at the county seat of Carthage twenty miles away, the rowdy miners infesting the mining camp of Joplin pretty much had things their own way, and the anything-goes atmosphere attracted not only a lot of rough characters who were habitually getting into fights but also a lot of gamblers, prostitutes, and other ne'er-do-wells.

The Lynching of Mart Danforth

2011-02-23T07:24:00.000-08:00

The case of Mart Danforth, a black man who was lynched in Springfield, Missouri, in August of 1859, was fairly typical of the time. He was accused of raping a white woman, supposedly confessed to the crime, and was strung up by a mob before any legal punishment could be meted out.
Holcombe's 1883 History of Greene County says about the case only that Mart Danforth, a "negro rapist," was lynched in a grove just west of the cotton factory in August of 1859. Fairbanks and Tuck's Past and Present of Greene County , published thirty years or so after the first county history, adds a few more details. It says that Danforth was arrested and indicted and that he promptly confessed his guilt but before he could be brought to trial, a mob took him from the custody of his guards and hanged him from a tree in the Jordan valley, "just east of where Benton Avenue now crosses that stream."
I recently found a contemporaneous account of this incident in a Missouri newspaper that was originally published in the Springfield Mirror. From the newspaper account, I've learned that the exact date of the lynching was August 25, the alleged rape having occurred a few days earlier on the 20th. On the latter date, according to the newspaper account, Mart, a slave belonging to the estate of a recently deceased man named Danforth, "went to the house of a respectable married lady who resides about five miles from this place (Springfield) and whose husband was absent at the time, and demanded entrance." When the demand was refused, the black man reportedly broke a window in the house to try to gain entrance and a struggle ensued. The woman threw hot but not scalding water on her assailant but couldn't deter him. Seizing her by the throat, he choked her "senseless" and accomplished his purpose on her.
Immediately afterwards, the woman reported the incident to her neighbors, and a determined search for the culprit was begun. He was not immediately located, but over the next few days supicion began to be attached to Mart Danforth, and, on August 24, several days after the incident, a "posse" went to where he was at work and elicited a confession from him. According to the Mirror, "No force or threats were used to induce him to tell." He was kept under guard and brought to Springfield the next day. Circuit Court was in session at the time. The sheriff took charge of the prisoner, putting him under guard at the Temperance Hall, and his case was going to be taken up that very day. However, a mob of about three or four hundred men gathered around the Temperance Hall, gained entrance, took the prisoner out to the edge of town, put a rope around his neck, and hanged him.
The assertion that Danforth's confession was not coerced, of course, needs to be taken with a grain of salt. No doubt black men did occasionally rape white women during slavery and the years following slavery when blacks were still oppressed, but it is also undeniable that black men were sometimes forced through abuse and intimidation into making false confessions. (It's probably also true that black men raping white women did not occur as often as white men raping or taking advantage of black women.) Nothing incited white men to violence toward blacks quicker than the idea that "their women" might be "despoiled" by a black man, whether through forcible rape or consensual sex. A black man having sex with a white woman was the ultimate challenge to white, male authority. Fairbanks and Tuck's account of Danforth's lynching illustrates the attitude I'm talking about. The authors attributed the outbreak of mob violence in 1859 to "that ever-present menace where there is a large negro population" and later suggested that "this crime committed by a black ruffian upon a helpless white woman instantly kindles a flame that nothing short of the quick and merciless death of the guilty one can satisfy." They seemed to suggest that it was not only understandable but appropriate that, throughout U. S. history, in cases like the lynching of Mart Danforth, the law had almost never been able to convict any of the "indignant slayers of the ravisher."

Dueling and Early Missouri Politics

2011-02-15T14:32:00.000-08:00

I read a book one time about dueling as an especial phenomenon of the Old South. It put forth the idea that dueling was one manifestation of the language of honor (specifically that Southern gentlemen often challenged other men to duels when they perceived that their honor had been questioned). The book went so far as to suggest that being the victor in a duel accorded the person added status and sometimes even served as a springboard to political office.
The author cited numerous examples to support his thesis, and it does seem to have some credence. For instance, I am aware of a couple of examples just in the early politics of Missouri. When Thomas Hart Benton (great uncle of the artist) was a lawyer at St. Louis during Missouri's territorial days, he killed a rival lawyer in a duel in 1817, and then when the territory became a state in the early 1820s, he was elected one of Missouri's first senators and served about thirty years. (Benton had also shot Andrew Jackson, a political ally, during a dispute a few years before the St. Louis incident.) General John S. Marmaduke killed General Lucius M. Walker near Little Rock, Arkansas, during the Civil War when Walker challenged Marmaduke to a duel after Marmaduke had made statements that seemed to question Walker's courage. Marmaduke, of course, went on to become governor of Missouri several years after the close of the war.

Sam Hildebrand and Family

2011-02-08T08:28:00.000-08:00

When I was writing my book Other Noted Guerrillas of the Civil War in Missouri and specifically when I was researching the chapter on infamous guerrilla Sam Hildebrand, one of the most surprising things I found out about the man had nothing to do with his Civil War exploits but instead pertained to his family heritage. I was surprised to learn that his great great grandfather, John Hildebrand, was the very first white man to settle away from the early French villages in what later became Missouri. In 1774, he settled on Saline Creek south of St. Louis in the area that later became Jefferson County. I found it rather amazing that there were white settlers in Missouri almost fifty years before statehood. In fact, I was also quite amazed, while studying my own family history, to learn that my earliest ancestors in Missouri came here before statehood. Not fifty years before by any means, but still the idea that I had ancestors in Missouri (the Franklin County area) as early as the 1810s was certainly surprising. So, I guess that's why I identify so strongly with the Ozarks. At least one branch of my family has been here for almost 200 years, and the other branches weren't far behind.

Absalom Stonecipher Humbard

2011-02-02T12:48:00.000-08:00

There seems to be a common misconception that the Missouri guerrillas during the Civil War were little more than outlaws. Of course, that's how Union authorities tried to brand them, but the truth is that many, if not most, of the guerrillas were respected citizens before the war (or, in the case of the younger guerrillas, came from respected families). An example is Absalom S. Humbard of Jasper County. Humbard got married in Jasper County in 1856 and was an established farmer when the war came on. In the years immediately preceding the war, he was a member a group calling themselves the Minutemen who formed in Jasper County for protection against Kansas jayhawkers. Leader of the group was county judge John R. Chenault. At the outset of the war, Humbard joined the Missouri State Guard but declined to re-enlist when his initial six-month term was over. Many of the men who initially joined the State Guard did so with the limited goal of protecting their own soil, and this was true of Humbard. By the end of the six-month enlistment, though, most of them were being asked to join the Confederacy or were being otherwise expected to fight outside Missouri. Like a lot of his fellow State Guardsmen, Humbard balked at this idea and instead returned to Jasper County, where he began recruiting his own small squad. Not long afterwards he fell in with Tom Livingston and became an officer in Livingston's command. Although officially affiliated with Standwatie's Cherokee Indian regiment as part of the Confederate army, Livingston's men were usually referred to as a guerillas. At one point during the war, Humbard was taken prisoner and held at Springfield for six weeks. At the end of the war, he moved to Texas and became a prominent farmer. Humbard's story is probably more typical of the Missouri guerrillas than that of the men we tend to hear about--men like Frank and Jesse James, who became post-war outlaws.

Merrell's Female Tonic

2011-01-27T11:23:00.000-08:00

I've mentioned on previous occasions the mineral-water craze of the late 1800s. Mineral water spas in places like Eureka Springs and Eldorado Springs were immensely popular, and thousands of people trekked to the mineral-water towns to take the cure. However, it wasn't just mineral water that people thought would heal whatever ailed them. All sorts of tonics were also thought to have curative powers. Even soda pops like Dr. Pepper and Coca Cola were marketed as much for their "pick me up" qualities as for their taste. No matter what ailment might afflict a person, there was bound to be some sort of tonic to relieve the condition, and some tonics, if you believed the advertisements of the day, could relieve virtually any symptom.
An ad from an 1887 Springfield newspaper for Merrell's Female Tonic will illustrate what I'm talking about: Merrell's Female Tonic is prepared solely for the cure of complaints which afflict all womanhood. It gives tone and strength to the uterine organs, and corrects dangerous displacemnts and irregularities. It is of great value in change of life. The use of Merrell's Female Tonic during pregnancy greatly relieves the pains of motherhood and promotes speedy recovery. It assists nature to safely make the critical change from girlhood to womanhood. It is pleasant to the taste and may be taken at all times with perfect safety. Price $1. For Sale By All Druggists.
In truth, of course, Merrell's Female Tonic probably had no curative powers whatsoever, no matter which sex the person taking it happened to be. It was not until the first Food and Drug Laws were passed in 1906 that restrictions began to be placed on the claims that manufacturers could make for their products.

Bolivar's Greatest Day

2011-01-21T12:52:00.000-08:00

I recently visited the RootsWeb genealogy site for Polk County, Missouri, and I noticed the site mentioned the dedication of the statue of Simon Bolivar that took place in Bolivar on July 5, 1948. I wrote an article about this event, sometimes referred to as "Bolivar's Greatest Day," a few years ago for the Ozarks Reader. After taking office earlier in 1948 as Venezuela's first popularly-elected president, Romulo Gallegos wanted to present a statue of Simon Bolivar to the U. S. as a gesture of good will. Bolivar, Missouri, was selected as the site for the presentation because it was one of the more populous towns in the U. S. that was named after Simon Bolivar, and July 5, the Venezuelan Independence Day and only one day after our own Independence Day, was selected as a fitting date. Both Gallegos and U. S. President Harry Truman were present for the occasion, as were the governor of Missouri and other dignataries. The town of Bolivar went all out in preparation for the event, and a crowd estimated as high as 60,000 people turned out. The statue was unveiled in Bolivar's Neuhart Park, and both presidents gave speeches. Perhaps the most memorable thing about the day, however, turned out to be the intense heat, as the temperature soared to near 100. In later years, according to legend, President Truman, who previously had been inclined to use the expression "hotter than hell" when talking about the weather, resorted instead to describing unbearably hot weather as "hotter than Bolivar."

West Plains Dance Hall Explosion

2011-01-16T12:26:00.001-08:00

I've been reading a book by Lin Waterhouse entitled The West Plains Dance Hall Explosion. It's about a tragedy that occurred in West Plains, Missouri, on the night of Friday, April 13, 1928, in which 39 people were killed and numerous others injured. A dance was taking place on the second floor of a building on East Main Street just off the square when a tremendous explosion on the bottom floor of the same building (where an auto dealership was located) blew apart not only the building where the dance was taking place but also the two buildings on either side of the dance hall and set them on fire. The dancers, most of whom were young people from prominent families, were blown momentarily upward before plunging down into a large heap of burning debris. Many who were not killed by the initial explosion were trapped in the rubble and burned to death.
What is surprising to me is that, despite the magnitude of the tragedy and despite the fact that I'm a life-long resident of the Ozarks with an interest in the region's history, this is an event that I had never even heard about until the book came out a month or so ago. One of the points Ms. Waterhouse makes in the book, however, is that many people who survived the tragedy didn't like to talk about it, and it became almost a hush-hush subject in subsequent years. So, maybe that is partly why I'd never heard about it. Anyway, the book is interesting, particularly, I would think, for anyone who has a connection to West Plains.

Laclede County Rural Schools

2011-01-11T12:50:00.001-08:00

Last time I listed a number of rural schools from the Greene County area that were present on a 1940s topographic map but that have long been gone. I have a similar map showing the southeastern part of Laclede County and a small chunk of western Pulaski County, and it, too, shows a whole slew of rural schools that no longer exist. The ones in Pulaski County are Prospect School, Fairview School, Cave Spring School, and Bellefonte School. The Laclede County schools listed on the map are Prairie Creek, Similin, Rippy, Crossroads, Stockdale, Brownfield, Mt. Salem, Oakland, Nurse, Simpson, Morehouse, Nelson, Harmony, Heard, Barnett, Delto, Franklin, Fairview (not to be confused with the school by the same name in Pulaski), and Success (not to be confused with the Success School in nearby Texas County, which, the last I knew, was still in existence. As far as I know, all of these small, rural schools in Pulaski and Laclede no longer exist. Again, if anybody out there attended one of these schools or knows anything about any of them, I'd be interested in hearing from you.

Rural Schoolhouses

2011-01-07T10:47:00.001-08:00

Last time I talked about what I call relics of the rural past; one-room schoolhouses, rural post offices, and crossroads general stores, for example. Following up on that post, I dug out a detailed topographic map, dating from the 1940s, that used to belong to my dad. It was part of a series of such maps put out by the U. S. Geological Survey. This particular one covers the northeast part of Greene County, Missouri (including Fair Grove and Strafford), the western edge of Webster County, the southern part of Dallas, and the southeast corner of Polk. I was struck my the number of small, rural schools listed on the map that, as far as I know, do not exist today. They include Persimmon Grove School, Rock Prairie School, and Union Grove School in Polk County; Hasten School, New Garden School, Old Goss School, and Olive School in Dallas County; Bodenhammer School, Goss School (not to be confused with Old Goss School), Holman School, and Minor School in Webster County; and Bell View School, Hickory Barren School, Ingram School, Liberty School, Locust Prairie School, and Whitlock School in Greene County. And this, mind you, covers just a small area of about 18 by 14 miles.
Of the schools mentioned above the one that was closest to Fair Grove, where I grew up, was Hickory Barren. (Actually Old Goss School might have been slightly closer, but it was in Dallas County.)
I well remember when Hickory Barren closed and was consolidated with Fair Grove. I was starting third grade when the kids who had previously gone to Hickory Barren came to Fair Grove; so this would have been the fall of 1954. Most of the others probably closed about the same time or even earlier. If anybody knows anything about any of the other schools I've listed above, I'd enjoy hearing from you.
By the way, Elkland in Webster County, also falls within the boundaries of this map, and it used to have a high school that, sometime in the late 1950s, consolidated with Buffalo, Fair Grove, and Marshfield. For many years after that, it had only an elementary school, which was part of the Marshfield school system. I'm not sure whether Elkland still has a grade school or not.

Relics of the Rural Past

2010-12-31T13:39:00.001-08:00

I have long been fascinated by what I call relics of the rural past. By that phrase, I mean institutions, buildings, and other objects that used to be common in rural areas and small towns but that are now either extinct or almost so. Examples are one-room schools, general stores, and rural post offices.
There was a time in America when almost every rural intersection of any importance at all had a general store and a post office. Some of the post offices operated as separate entities, but many were housed in the general store with the storekeeper often serving as the postmaster. Increased automobile travel and the rise of city supermarkets around the middle of the twentieth century spelled the doom of the general stores. The general store may have been convenient, but it couldn't compete with the cheaper prices that consumers could find at the supermarket. A number of factors, including the Unites States Post Office's desire to streamline its service, led to the demise of the rural post office about the same time that general stores were also disappearing from the scene.
One-room schools also used to dot the countryside, and some of the same factors that led to the passing of general stores, such as better roads and increased travel, also contributed to the disappearance of the one-room schools. It's not just rural one-room schoolhouses, though, that I tend to get nostalgic about. The movement in education toward school consolidation, especially during the early and middle 1900s, also left many small communities that formerly had high schools without such schools. Often when the school left, the town died, too. An example from my immediate area that comes readily to mind is the small community of Prosperity. At one time in the early 1900s, it was a booming little mining town with a two-year high school. The school consolidated with Webb City during the middle part of the twentieth century, and the town gradually died out to the point that very little remained except for the old, abandoned two-story school building. I remember taking pictures of the building and writing about it when it was little more than a deserted shell and the lot surrounding it was overgrown with weeds and brush. (The photo of Prosperity School accompanying this blog entry was taken during the mid to late 1970s.) About ten years ago the building was restored as a bed and breakfast, and it now looks nice and well maintained. I believe a couple of the rooms at the B&B are named for former teachers at the old Prosperity School.

Quantrill's Buried Treasure

2010-12-26T17:01:00.000-08:00

According to Ward Schrantz's Jasper County in the Civil War, Quantrill and his large band of guerrillas (estimated at nearly 400 men) camped on Spring River near present-day Oronogo on the night of October 5, 1863, on the property of Judge Onstott as they were headed south to Texas just six weeks or so after the Lawrence Massacre. One of the judge's sons, Abraham Onstott, who was just a boy at the time, later claimed that a couple of members of the guerrilla band buried some valuables at the site that had been taken during the Lawrence raid. Years later, after it was concluded that the the men who buried the treasure were never coming back for it, a search for the buried cache was made but it could not be located.
Stories similar to this seem to abound in the Ozarks (and probably elsewhere as well). For instance, I think I recall hearing about some money taken in a bank or train robbery that Jesse James supposedly buried somewhere. I don't place much stock in most of the lore of buried treasures, but reading or hearing about the stories is still interesting.
By the way, on the morning after Quantrill's band camped in Jasper County, they crossed Shoal Creek at Grand Falls and turned west into Kansas, where they came upon an encampment of Federals stationed at an incomplete fort at Baxter Springs. After being repelled at the fort, they rode out on the prairie and met General James Blunt and his escort coming from Fort Scott. Thinking the guerrillas (many of whom were clad in Federal blue) composed a party sent out to greet him, Blunt was surprised and virtually annihilated at what became known as the Baxter Springs Massacre.

Winter's Bone

2010-12-19T14:55:00.000-08:00

I had intended to read Winter's Bone a few years ago when it first came out but never got around to it. Then I recently saw the movie and decided I needed to get off my duff and finally read the book, too. I'm just now finishing it up.
Daniel Woodrell is an exellent writer, and I liked both the movie and the book. However, I have to agree with Dick from Blue Eye, Missouri, who, in the Mail Box section of the current issue of the Ozarks Mountaineer magazine, said that if the characterizations in the movie are true to Ozarks life, "those people need to stop reproducing immediately."
I think the type of people portrayed in Winter's Bone do exist in the Ozarks, and I would even agree that they might be more prevalent in the Ozarks than in some other parts of the country. However, I think what Winter's Bone does is give credence to the idea that violent, clannish people are common and, indeed, almost the norm in the Ozarks.
Although the fact that the people in Winter's Bone are involved in the illegal production, sale, and use of meth obviously contributes to their insularity and their suspicion of outsiders, the way they are portrayed in both the book and the movie, I think, still perpetuates the stereotype of Ozarkians as hillbillies. The only difference between now and a hundred years ago is that, instead of running moonshine stills, these modern-day hillbillies are manufacturing meth.
The fact is that, even though meth production and trade in Missouri and the Ozarks has become what law enforcement calls an epidemic, very few entire clans are involved in the activity as the Dollys are in Winter's Bone, and most people in the Ozarks, even those in isolated areas, are friendly and welcoming.

Swain Anderson Murder

2010-12-14T12:14:00.001-08:00

An interesting criminal case in the Ozarks during the late 1800s that I've been aware of for a long time is the murder of Swain Anderson in Wright County, Missouri on the night of May 22, 1886 as he was walking home from a Masonic meeting at Mountain Grove. I say it is an interesting case, and yet it has never struck me as quite interesting enough for me to want to write extensively about it as I have many other notorious crimes in the Ozarks during the same time frame.
The case contains a bit of intrigue in that the the accused murderers included the victim's own wife and his own sons acting in conspiracy. The wife, Hannah, and one of the sons, Henry, were charged as accomplices, while another son, Ed, and a neighbor named Ewing Sanders were charged as the principals in the crime. Hannah was initially arrested on suspicion but later released. When the oldest daughter, Jennie, died unexpectedly, it was rumored that she had been poisoned by Hannah to keep her from testifying against her brother, Ed, and it was even suggested that a romantic rivalry of sorts had developed between the two women over a young preacher.
So, as I say, the case has some interesting elements to it. Yet, I've never really been moved to investigate it or write about it in more depth. I suppose part of the reason is that I doubt that the more sensational elements of the case, such as the wife poisoning the daughter, were true, and if you take those sensational elements away, there's really not much left except a fairly routine murder case. No vigilante justice. Not even a legal hanging. In fact, the only person convicted in the case was Sanders, and his sentence was later commuted to time served after Ed Anderson had been acquitted.

Faro, Seven Up, and Hazard

2010-12-06T17:56:00.000-08:00

I mentioned in one of my posts several months ago that faro was the most popular gambling game in the Old West, even more popular than poker. I suppose the thing that made it so popular was its simplicity. There were few, if any, complicated rules to learn. If the first card turned over by the dealer matched the card you had bet on, you lost. If the second card turned over by the dealer matched the card you'd bet on, you won. There were a few other features of the game, but that was the gist of it. It is supposed that faro got its name because the backs of some early playing cards had likenesses of Egyptian pharoahs on them.
Another fairly popular card game in the nineteenth century was seven up. I think it was played more in private social groups and not so much in commercial gambling establishments as faro and some of the other gambling games. In fact, it was probably played quite a bit without gambling being involved at all. Seven up was a game that involved laying out one's cards to make books, similar to the way solitaire is played, and the first person to get rid of (or book) all his cards was the winner. I recall from reading a Quantrill biography (Connelley's Quantrill and the Border Wars, I think) that William Quantrill and his lieutenant George Todd, after they had had a falling out, got into an argument one time over a game of seven up.
Hazard was also a pretty popular gambling game, but it involved dice, not cards. The modern game of craps was derived from hazard. In the game of hazard, rolling two ones (i.e. snake eyes) was sometimes called craps or crabs. Thus, did the game of craps, a simplified version of hazard, gradually take shape.

Simcoe or Simco

2010-11-30T08:22:00.000-08:00

I think I remarked in a previous post on the the fact that newspapermen of yore seemed to have employed more colorful language than their modern-day counterparts, who are given to a more matter-of-fact and linear style. The same observation seems also to apply to historians. Some of the county histories written during the late 1800s, for example, are fun to read not just for the wealth of information they contain but also for the colorful, sometimes amusing, way in which the authors impart the information. Two or three weeks ago, for instance, I quoted the colorful words that Sturgis's History of McDonald County uses to describe the demise of Silver Springs.
The author employs similar language in his description of the death of Simcoe (sometimes spelled Simco), a small hamlet located in the northeast part of the county five or six miles from Rocky Comfort. For a while during the latter part of the nineteenth century, the place had a cooperative store run by and for surrounding farmers, but the experiment failed and the store soon passed into private hands. Sturgis describes the rest of the story in his characteristically picturesque fashion: "The neighboring farmers who had banked their savings in the enterprise, for a while basked in the sunlight of their day-visions when they were to be bloated bond holders and sport gold-headed canes. But the weird soughing of the wind through the bare shelves and the rattle of mice in the empty sugar barrels awoke them from their bright dreams, and a melancholy search was made in the recesses of their jeans for about $2000 to settle the liabilities."
Today Simco is a mere wide place in the road, if it's even that. I've actually not driven through Simco recently, if ever. So, I'm not sure exactly what is there, but I know it's not much, whatever it is.

The Alsups of Douglas County

2010-11-22T08:38:00.000-08:00

I recently made a trip to Douglas County to take a picture of the monument dedicated to the early Alsups of the county and their race horses. (I have occasionally heard Douglas County referred to as Booger County, and now I can see why. To reach the monument, I had to take narrow and rocky gravel road about four or five miles off the paved highway, and I felt as if I was getting back into the boonies. Not that I have anything against those types of isolated areas. In fact, I feel pretty much at home in the sticks. But I can see why some people might think the place is "boogery.")
The Alsups were among the early settlers of Douglas County prior to the Civil War. During the war they were strong Union supporters, and most or all of the Alsup men served in the Federal army. For many years after the war, the Alsups dominated Douglas County politics, and they made many enemies because of their firm rule.
Like many disputes during the late 1860s and the 1870s, especially in the border state of Missouri, the animosity had its roots in the Civil War, because most of the people who opposed the Alsups were former Confederate soldiers or sympathizers (or else lukewarm Union supporters) while the Alsups were Radical Republicans. It wasn't as if the family was universally hated, because the Alsup clan also had many supporters.
In addition to being involved in county politics, the Alsups were also noted for their avid interest in raising and riding fine race horses, and the monument in northeast Douglas County (not far from the Denlow community) is dedicated to the Alsup legacy of raising outstanding race horses. The monument specifically mentions the three Alsup brothers who originally settled in the Douglas County area, Ben, Moses Lock, and William, and it also mentions Lock's sons, one of whom, Shelt Alsup, was a two-term sheriff of Douglas County during the mid 1870s and was involved in a gunfight with his successor in 1879 that left both men dead.
For more information on the Alsups, watch for my book entitled Desperadoes of the Ozarks (which is due out from Pelican next spring and is more or less a sequel to my Ozarks Gunfights book). It contains a chapter on the Alsups.

Elkton

2010-11-15T06:54:00.000-08:00

I said last time that the Slicker Wars that occurred in the 1840s in Benton and neighboring counties of Missouri had some of the characteristics of vigilantism but degenerated into a feud. Actually, though, I may have gotten that backwards. The so-called "wars" may have started out merely as a feud but then took on aspects of vigilantism. Suffice it to say that the Slicker Wars involved feuding among rival families but also had characteristics of a vigilante movement.
I also mentioned last time that one of the accounts of the Slicker Wars that I have read cites Elkton in Hickory County as a hotbed of the conflict. About the only other thing Elkton is known for, as far as I know, is being the birthplace of Sally Rand, the famous (or infamous) burlesque performer who wowed audiences with her risque fan dance at the World's Fair in Chicago during the Depression. She also performed on at least one occasion at the Ozarks Empire Fair in Springfield.

Slicker Wars and other Vigilante Feuds

2010-11-12T08:08:00.000-08:00

Vigilante movements of old usually started in one particular area but often spread to neighboring communities. For instance, the Bald Knobberism that sprang up in Taney County during the mid 1880s soon spread to nearby Christian and Douglas counties. Also, sometimes a later vigilante movement would simply take the name of an earlier one. The Regulators of Greeene County shortly after the close of the Civil War were preceded by the Regulators of Missouri's territorial days fifty years earlier. The territorial Regulators were centered around the St. Louis area, notably St. Charles County, and spread to nearby counties like Lincoln. The dispute, at least initially, involved bogus bank notes. There have been other vigilante groups throughout American history who called themselves "regulators," and there may well have been others just in Missouri's history, because the term "regulators" was quite common.
The Slicker Wars of the 1840s in Benton and Hickory counties of Missouri also had some of the characteristics of a vigilante movement, although it apparently devolved into little more than a feud. It, too, seemingly spread from its point of origin to neighboring communities, but even pinning down exactly where its point of origin was is somewhat difficult. I've read at least two different accounts of the feud. One says it started south of Warsaw but still in Benton County, whereas the other places the center of the feud around Quincy in Hickory County and extending as far south as Elkton, which was a "hot bed of contention." Both accounts give Turk, Jones, and Nowell (or Newell) as some of the principal family names associated with the feud, but one account also chronicles the large role played by the Hobbs family while the other fails to even mention the Hobbses. Apparently the Slicker Wars started out as a dispute over gambling but expanded into a general feud.
As I mentioned in a previous post, researching pre-Civil War events in the Ozarks is difficult, but finding out more about the so-called Slicker Wars of the Benton/Hickory counties area is something I might like to attempt one of these days.

Silver Springs

2010-11-04T08:22:00.000-07:00

In previous posts, I've mentioned the mineral water craze that swept through the country about 1880 and continued throughout the next decade or two. I've also mentioned specifically several towns in the Ozarks that were established during this time as mineral water resorts. Some of them were very successful and are still thriving towns today. Eureka Springs is perhaps the best example. Others flourished briefly before declining almost as rapidly as they sprang up and then receding into history to the point that little, if anything, remains to mark the spot where the town was located. Saratoga Springs, which I wrote about in a previous post, is an example.
I guess, however, there is yet another category: mineral water towns that were laid out but never actually populated. Silver Springs in McDonald County, Missouri, appears to be such a town. The place was surveyed and given the name Silver Springs in August of 1881 by a couple named William and Arzelia Harness, but that's about as far as the venture ever got. Sturgis's History of McDonald County tells the story in vivid language of what happened afterwards: "The seasons came and went. William's beard grew grizzled, and the cheeks of the fair Arzelia lost the pink tint of youth, but adversity flapped her wings over the enterprise, and their bright dreams of stocking legs filled with the shining metal vanished for aye--and the water still trickles through the gravel as of yore."
The county history places Silver Springs in Section 6, Township 22, Range 29, but I haven't found it listed on any maps and I'm not familiar enough with the townships and ranges of McDonald County to know where the place was located (or was intended to be located).

The Elusive Frank Martin

2010-10-28T08:01:00.000-07:00

As I've mentioned previously, I often find secondary topics to write about while I'm researching a primary subject. I don't necessarily take much notice of the second topic, though, unless I encounter the same subject again later on. If I run onto the same topic more than once, I usually begin to think that maybe it's a subject worth writing about.
An example is the case of Frank Martin of Laclede County, Missouri, that occurred circa 1880. When I first read about this case it didn't strike me as particularly fascinating, even though it had an element of romantic intrigue, but I've run onto multiple items about the case in 1880s newspapers and have begun to think that, if it was followed so closely at the time, maybe it's worth writing about now.
Briefly the facts of the case are these: Martin, a young man of about 20 years old, killed a man named George Mizer in Laclede County on June 9, 1879 (one report says Mizer was Martin's uncle). In February 1880, Martin was convicted of murder and sentenced to hang, but while the case was being appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, the sheriff's niece, Maggie Wilson, who apparently had fallen in love with the jailbird, helped him escape in November of 1880. She and the fugitive absconded together, got married, and settled down together in Tennessee. Martin, though, was recaptured in Sullivan County, Tennessee, about the first of September of 1881 and brought back to Missouri aboard a train. As the train slowed for a hill near Dixon (in Pulaski County just east of Laclede), the prisoner, even though he was shackled at the wrists and ankles, leaped from the train and made his escape, as a search turned up no trace of him. He was later recaptured at his father's farm in Laclede County, but in the meantime, the Supreme Court had granted him a new trial on the murder charge. He was retried in Dallas County on a change of venue in April of 1882 and was found not guilty. His wife, meanwhile, had given birth to twin babies after having been held briefly in the Laclede County jail for aiding her husband in his first escape, and the couple was, as one newspaper worded it, "rewarded by an opportunity for them to live in peace a wedded life begun under such adverse circumstances."

Killings in Butler

2010-10-24T15:22:00.000-07:00

Recently I visited the Oak Hill Cemetery at Butler, Mo. to take pictures of the tombstones of J. H. Morgan and John P. Willis. The two men killed each other in 1889 while Morgan was serving as the city marshal of Butler and Willis was a deputy U. S. marshal. The incident will be one of the subjects covered in my next book; so more about them later. While I was at the cemetery, though, the sexton told me about another Butler lawmen, A. J. Aleshire, who also lost his life in the line of duty. A little research revealed that Aleshire was a night watchman and was killed by a man named Summer Holcomb when the two got into a dispute. Holcomb was eventually found not guilty of murder, something that seemed to happen with regularity in the Wild West days. If two men got mad at each other and one or both went for their weapons, the killer was often not convicted of any crime. Murder, it seems, almost had to be premeditated and cold-blooded in order to result in conviction of a crime. Aleshire's tombstone says that he died in March of 1893. However, a genealogy website that I found says the incident happened in March of 1883. I think the 1893 date is right, but I'll have to do a little more research to find out for sure. Interestingly, Aleshire's oldest son was killed in Butler just a little over a year after Aleshire was killed. Again the assailant was found not guilty.
I'm scheduled to give a presentation at the Grove (Oklahoma) Public Library at noon on November 18. I'll be talking about both my Ozarks gunfights book and my book on the two battles of Newtonia.

Two Blacks Lynched By Burning at Carthage

2010-10-18T07:39:00.000-07:00

Last time I promised to give a brief account of the burning of two black men at Carthage that occurred in 1853, as the event was chronicled in the Springfield Advertiser (and later reprinted in the Liberty Tribune). The newspaper account largely agrees with the account written years later that appears in Livingston's History of Jasper County. Indeed, Livingston, who no doubt was privvy to details not available to the newspaper, gives a more thorough account than the Advertiser. The county history, though, was wrong in at least one important detail. Livingston says the event occurred in August of 1853 when the actual date was July 30, 1853. A slave named Colley, who belonged to a man named Dale, apparently decided to rob a Dr. Fisk after Dale paid Fisk a fairly large sum of money in a business transaction, and he recruited a slave who belonged to a neighboring farmer named Scott to help in the scheme. A few nights after the business transaction, Colley went to the Fisk house and said that his master, Mr. Dale, needed the doctor's services. Dr. Fisk grabbed his doctor's bag and headed toward the Dale farm. He had gone but a little distance when he was accosted by the Scott slave, who was lying in wait. Trailing behind Dr. Fisk, Colley came up and joined his partner in crime, and together the two killed the doctor by knocking him in the head with an ax. Not finding any money on the doctor, they returned to Fisk's house, where they killed his wife and child. (They reportedly also outraged the wife, but this report probably needs to be taken with a grain of salt, as it may have been an embellishment that was added to the tale simply to inflame opinion against the murderous pair.) Colley was quickly apprehended and made a confession, but the other slave made a run for it and was caught a couple of days later several miles north of Carthage. He was brought back to town, where the townspeople held an impromptu "trial" and convicted the pair of killing the Fisk family. A vote was taken on whether to hang the men or burn them, and burning won on an almost-two-to-one vote. On Saturday, July 30, the two were chained to stakes and burned to death in downtown Carthage with a large gathering of spectators in attendance.

Pre-Civil War Southwest Missouri Records

2010-10-14T07:26:00.000-07:00

Most of my historical writing has been about either the Civil War or events (often notorious events) that have occurred since the Civil War. One reason for this is simply that the Civil War provides a natural dividing point, but the main reason that I haven't written much, if anything, about pre-Civil War events is that there is a dearth of primary sources pertaining to those events, particularly if the events occurred in the southwest Missouri area, my primary area of interest. For instance, almost no southwest Missouri newspapers from the pre-Civil War era survive, mainly because they were burned during the war by bushwhackers or other raiding parties. Most county records were likewise destroyed when courthouses were burned. (Many county records were also destroyed by accidental fire after the war during the late 1800s.) There are a few scattered issues of Springfield newspapers from the pre-Civil War era that are extant, but that's about the extent of antebellum newspapers from southwest Missouri.
So, it's unusual to find a newspaper account of something that happened in southwest Missouri during the 1840s, 1850s, or early 1860s. Occasionally, however, if an event was newsworthy enough, other newspapers in Missouri or elsewhere might publish an account of the event from a special correspondent, or more likely they would reprint an account of the event that had originally appeared in a southwest Missouri newspaper. That is what happened in the case of the burning of two slaves at Carthage by a vigilante mob in late July of 1853. A brief story of the event was published in the Springfield Advertiser but then was reprinted in the Liberty (Mo.) Tribune. So, thanks to the Tribune, we do have at least a brief contemporaneous account of this event. (The event is also described in Jasper County histories written years after the fact.) I'll describe what the Tribune (i.e. the Advertiser) said about the event next time.

Cora Hubbard Addendum

2010-10-07T06:54:00.001-07:00

My book on Ozarks Gunfights and Other Notorious Incidents contains a chapter on Cora Hubbard, the female bandit who helped rob the Pineville, Missouri, bank in 1897. Cora was convicted of robbery and sentenced to twelve years in prison, but, as I say at the end of the chapter, the sentence was commuted by the governor and she was released on January 1, 1905. I still don't know what happened to her after her release, but I do have a little more information (that I didn't have at the time I wrote the book) about Cora's time in prison. According to an article in a Jefferson City newspaper at the time of her release, she had been employed as a seamstress during her incarceration and had been a model prisoner. Now proficient at sewing, she planned to seek employment in that line of work.

McNatt

2010-09-30T06:45:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I posted an entry about Indian Springs, the mineral-water town that sprang up in northern McDonald County in the early 1880s but died almost as quickly as it arose. I said that the town was renamed McNatt not long after it had fizzled as a mineral-water town. Actually, though, that's not exactly true, as I was recently informed by a man who currently owns property at McNatt.
McNatt is located where the old Neosho to Pineville road crossed Indian Creek, and apparently there was a trading post or general store at or near the crossing quite a while before the town of Indian Creek sprang up on the nearby hill that overlooks the stream. The store's location at the crossing had no official name prior to the formation of Indian Springs, but after the demise of the mineral-water town, it was given the name McNatt after the person who ran the store and/or owned the surrounding land. So, in fact, McNatt and Indian Springs were two different places located very close to each other, not the same place as I suggested in my previous post.
This crossing at McNatt is the one used by Confederate troops on their way south when they evacuated Newtonia shortly after the First Battle of Newtonia. Leaving Newtonia headed south, they struck the Indian Creek woods and followed the creek in a southwesterly direction until they struck the Neosho to Pineville road just above the crossing and then took this road south toward Pineville.

Mary Grabill

2010-09-23T09:32:00.001-07:00

I have a confession. Even though I've written several books and numerous magazine articles about the Civil War, I'm really not very interested in military strategy, troop movements, or what sort of weapons were used during the war. I'm much more interested in the effects that the war had on people, both soldiers and civilians.
For instance, the thing that I found most interesting during my research and writing of The Two Civil War Battles of Newtonia was Mary Grabill's letter to her daughters, written years after the fact, detailing her experiences during the war. In fact, I tried to use Mary and her experiences as the connecting thread throughout the various chapters of my book.
Mary was a young woman (age 22 I believe) at the outset of the war, newly married to E. H. Grabill, a Newtonia merchant, and the family lived in Newtonia throughout most of the war. Even though her letter was probably written around 1900, many years after the close of the war, she recalled many of her experiences quite vividly, and her reminisciences shed light on not just what life was like in Newtonia during the war but what it must have been like for other people like Mary and her family in other parts of Missouri. Mary mostly talked about the hardships she and her family endured (because hardship was mostly what the Civil War was all about), but I found it interesting that she also mentioned some of the high points or pleasurable experiences that the war brought about. For instance, she commented on the pleasant visits and conversations that she and her husband occasionally had with Union officers and their wives, refined people that she might not otherwise have encountered had the officers not been stationed at Newtonia.
Mary and her husband continued to live in Newtonia for several years after the war, then moved to Springfield, where Mary died in 1912. She is buried at Maple Park Cemetery in Springfield.

A Galena Lynching

2010-09-13T09:23:00.000-07:00

Last time I mentioned that, although Joplin may have been the most populous of the mining towns of the tri-state region and probably had the most notorious reputation, several of the smaller mining towns in the area also witnessed more than their share of crime and rowdy behavior, and I cited Webb City as an example. Galena, Kansas, was another prime example. From its founding in the spring of 1877, Galena was a rough town where fights and even killings were not uncommon, the first murder being the shooting death of William "Tiger Bill" St. Clair at the hands of Bob Layton and friends in June of '77.
Galena was still a rowdy place over twenty years later near the turn of the century. The town witnessed an especially large rash of crime during one two-day period near the end of April 1899. The Joplin Globe reported that Galena "has been 'going on' at a lively rate for the past day or so, the old town having been the scene of cutting scrapes, exhibitions of cowboys on a rampage, murder and lynching, as well as larceny and other things. A history of the city for the past two days could be dished up in such a way as to rival the slaughter of the most bloodthirsty pirates or the lawlessness depicted in the most sensational of the dime novels."
The most shocking crimes during the spree were the murder of a black woman named Laura Canafax by her lover, Charles Williams, and the subsequent lynching of Williams by a mob of black men. After Canafax's body was found strangled to death on April 24, a coroner's jury quickly declared that she had come to her death at the hands of Williams, and the suspect was lodged in the local jail. During the wee hours of the morning of April 25, the mob of about fifteen men formed at the jail, broke the lock to Williams's cell, and invited him to come out. When he refused, they fired four bullets into his body, killing him instantly.
In addition to the murder and lynching, there were also two knife fights and a couple of lesser crimes committed in Galena during the same two-day period.

Webb City

2010-09-07T08:03:00.001-07:00

I'm scheduled to give a presentation to the Webb City Genealogical Society tonight at the Webb City Public Library. It's the second time in recent months I've appeared at one of the group's meetings. The first time I talked about my Ozarks Gunfights book, and this time I'll talk mainly about my Newtonia book.
Speaking of Webb City, it was a pretty tough place during its early mining history. I've been doing research lately on early-day Joplin, and I keep running into newspaper accounts and court records pertaining to shootings, murders, etc. that occurred in Webb City.
For instance, during the period from December of 1906 to December of 1914, there were at least four murders in Webb City, and those are just the ones I've happened to come across. There may well have been more. As might be expected, at least one or two of the four murders I know about occurred in saloons.
Joplin has a reputation as having been a rough and rowdy place during its early mining days, but Webb City was no quiet, law-abiding place either. In fact, the whole tri-state mining district attracted a lot of rough characters, and consequently all the mining towns probably witnessed more than their share of crime during the early days.

Professor Babboo

2010-08-30T15:12:00.000-07:00

I continue to marvel at how open the United States was to religious and social experimentation in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The Civil War had torn the social fabric of the country apart, and the old beliefs and the old ways of doing things no longer provided, for many people, a solid foundation they could count on. During the years after the war, entire communities were often founded by groups of like-minded individuals advocating an experiemental belief system or economic system. Liberal, founded in Barton County, Missouri, as a haven for freethinkers, is a good example.
The openness to experimentation and unconventional ways of doing things, though, extended beyond social and religious matters. The field of medicine was another area where the willingness to try new things manifested itself. Witness, for example, the mineral-water craze that I've written about in previous posts. Indeed, there was a tolerance toward (some might say a gullibility toward) anybody who claimed to be able to cure you of whatever ailed you, make you rich, read your mind, or tell your fortune.
For instance, I recently ran across a series of newspaper reports that appeared in the Joplin Globe during the month of May 1899 about a palm reader who called himself Professor Babboo the Hindoo Wonder. The so-called professor set up his headquarters in a Joplin hotel charging customers $1.00 per reading and was kept so busy that he tarried in Joplin throughout the whole month of May. The Globe reported in one instance that he was "besieged all day long by an eager, anxious crowd of patrons, seeking the consolation derived from a reading of the palms of their hands by this scientific adept." The Science of Palmistry, according to Professor Babboo, was "not fortune telling but is as plain as reading a book if one is educated in the Hindoo method." The Globe reporter, who seemed to be a true believer, urged his readers to take advantage of this rare opportunity to meet with a scientific adept such as Professor Babboo.

Indian Springs

2010-08-24T07:42:00.000-07:00

Last time I mentioned Saratoga Springs, located in southwestern McDonald County, as an example of a town that was founded during the mineral-water craze of the early 1880s. Although it was briefly popular as a medical resort shortly after it opened, it never really caught on the way some of the other spring-water towns, like Eureka Springs, did. Another mineral-water town that was founded in McDonald County shortly after Saratoga Springs, however, did rival Eureka Springs in popularity, at least briefly among Joplinites. Indian Springs was laid out in July of 1881 on Indian Creek in the northern part of McDonald County. The growth of the place was so rapid that by August of the same year the founders were already laying out additions to the town, and the population soared, reportedly approaching 2,000 people at its peak. Among the visitors to Indian Springs during the summer and early fall of 1881 was a steady stream of folks from Joplin looking for a little relaxation and spa treatment. The greater popularity of Indian Springs over Saratoga Springs with Joplinites can be partially explained by the simple fact that it was closer to Joplin, but also Indian Springs was better organized and promoted. However, its popularity, too, like that of Saratoga Springs, soon ran its course, and by the turn of the twentieth century when its name was changed to McNatt (after the town's founder), Indian Springs was little more than a wide place in the road.

Saratoga Springs

2010-08-17T06:44:00.000-07:00

When I was discussing on this blog a year or so ago the mineral water craze that sprang up in the Ozarks (and elsewhere) during the 1880s, I think Saratoga Springs, a town in McDonald County, Missouri, was among the examples I cited. Recently, while perusing the 1881 Joplin Daily Herald, I ran across a column written by a reporter who had taken a trip from Joplin to the fledgling community of Saratoga Springs in the late summer of 1881. The reporter said there were, at the time of his visit, two grocery stores and a drug store in the town as well as three or four dozen "summer houses" made of native lumber. Four or five springs flowed from a ravine below the town, but no medical qualities were claimed for even the largest of the group, which was dubbed the "Liz Weaver." In additon, the community had no organized town company or leaders working on behalf of building the place up. So, the reporter held out little hope that the town would flourish, and, of course, he turned out to be right. Today, Saratoga (the "Springs" part has been dropped from the name) is barely a wide place in the road on Highway 90 between Noel and Southwest City.
One place that did prosper, though, was Eureka Springs. It was tremendously popular, at least among Joplin citizens, from its very founding. It amazes me, in reading 1880s Joplin newspapers, how often I run into items reporting that a certain citizen was in Eureka Springs or had just returned from there. And I'm sure Eureka Springs was almost as popular with other residents of the Ozarks as it was with Joplinites.

W. S. Norton-Killer of Jake Killian

2010-08-07T15:59:00.000-07:00

The current issue of Wild West Magazine contains an article of mine about Jake Killian of Granby, Missouri, and his notorious family, and my Ozarks' Gunfights book contains a chapter about the same subject that is similar to the article. I don't have anything else to say about Jake and his family right now, but I would like to add a few words about William S. Norton, the man who ended up killing Jake in the spring of 1878 at Empire City, Kansas (now part of Galena), because Norton was something of a notorious character in his own right.
Norton and Killian were members of the same unit during the Civil War, and the two men got into a violent argument over a card game during the latter part of the war. They grappled over Norton's gun, but Norton managed to turn the gun toward Killian and shot him in the face, blinding him in one eye. Killian swore revenge, a mistake that eventually cost him his life.
After the war, Norton lived in Dallas County, Missouri, awhile but came to Joplin soon after lead was discovered and the town was established in the early 1870s. He served briefly as a constable or deputy constable and became embroiled in an 1874 dispute in Joplin when he was appointed city marshal after the sitting marshal was ousted by the city council. The two men feuded awhile before the incumbent went to court and regained his office. Norton hung around Joplin a few more years and was reported to have killed at least one or two men in cases that were ruled self defense.
Shortly after lead was discovered on Short Creek in southeast Kansas in 1877, Norton moved to the booming new lead town of Empire City. He killed Killian in March of 1878 when the latter came looking for him. Although this killing, like the previous ones, was ruled self defense (primarily because Killian had a notorious reputation and had stalked Norton), it was actually a clear case of murder. Killian was not even armed at the time Norton gunned him down.
Norton later ran unsuccessfully for sheriff of Cherokee County. Maybe the good folks of southeast Kansas wanted someone for their chief law enforcement officer who was a little more deliberate in the use of firearms than Bill Norton.

Douglas County Murder

2010-08-01T15:37:00.000-07:00

It's not unusual for me, while researching a historical topic, to run across newspaper stories about other interesting topics. In fact, that's how I come up with about half of my ideas. Recently, while researching the early history of Joplin, I came across a 1902 account of a murder trial which was getting ready to take place in Douglas County involving a crime that had occurred there in 1870, over thirty years before, at the beginning of what the newspaper called "the famous Alsup feud."
The Alsup family dominated politics in Douglas County for many years after the Civil War and made many enemies, but the term "feud" is a bit of a misnomer if we think of the word as implying a fight between two different families. At first the feud did involve the Alsups and their allies against John Hatfield and his few allies, but Hatfield was killed in the spring of 1871. So, the feud became one between the pro-Alsup faction and the anti-Alsup faction.
The murder about which I recently found the newspaper piece was committed by a follower of the Alsups named James Wilson, and the victim's name was Orville Lynn. After the murder, Wilson hid out in the woods awhile and ended up killing a second man named Hall when he heard Hall approaching in some bushes and, thinking his pursuers were closing in on him, fired at the noise.
Wilson later surrendered, but because he was an Alsup ally, he was not prosecuted and soon left the county. In 1889, almost twenty years later, after the Alsup reign had finally run its course, Wilson was finally indicted, but he was not captured until around the beginning of 1902, when he was caught in Oklahoma and brought back to Douglas County to stand trial. I'd be interested to know how the trial turned out, if anyone can fill me in.

Nathaniel Pryor

2010-07-24T18:35:00.000-07:00

I atended the Cowboy Days festival at Pryor, Oklahoma, earlier today for a book signing, and I was reminded that a few years ago, at the time of the bicentennial celebration of the Lewis and Clark expedition, I did an article for the Ozarks Mountaineer about Nathaniel Pryor, after whom the town took its name. Pryor was a sergeant and scout on the expedition, and he later settled on a creek near present-day Pryor. Both the stream and the town that grew up nearby came to be known as Pryor Creek. Although the official name of the town, I think, is still Pryor Creek, it has for years been more commonly called "Pryor" without the "Creek" part.
When Nathaniel Pryor died in the early 1830s, he was buried at his trading post about three and half miles southeast of present-day Pryor, but his grave was later moved to Fairview Cemetery at the eastern edge of Pryor and a monument erected there in his honor.

Gambling

2010-07-21T08:44:00.000-07:00

In researching the post-Civil War era (mainly the 1870s and 1880s), I have been struck by how much gambling went on during that time. Probably no more than today--in fact, probably less, given the overwhelming popularity of casinos nowadays. But it still seems like a lot, because I grew up during the comparatively tame 1950s and early 1960s thinking that gambling and other vices were rare in the halycon days of yore.
Most of the mentions of gambling from the 1870s and 1880s that I've run across pertain to Joplin and Baxter Springs, but I'm sure other towns, at least those of any size, like Springfield, also had their fair share of gambling establishments. By far the most popular game at the gambling houses was faro, but many of them also offered poker, keno, and other gambling games. Faro is no longer played in most casinos, because, unless it's a crooked game, the odds don't favor the house enough to justify it.
Men from the 1870s and 1880s, though, didn't have to go to gaming houses to gamble. They would bet on virtually anything: foot races, horse races, prize fights--you name it. Horse racing was probably the biggest competition for betting (outside of the gambling houses), but I imagine they even bet on baseball games.
By the way I have also been struck by how popular baseball was even as early as the 1870s and 1880s. It was not unusual for teams from neighboring towns to play each other. Often they were not affilated with schools as they almost always are today but instead were called "town teams" and were composed of any young men who wanted to play and could help the team. During this time period, basketball had not yet been invented, and the rules of football had not yet been standardized. The game still more closely resembled rugby than the game we know today as American football. So, I guess the popularity of baseball should come as no surprise. After all, that's why it has traditionally been known as the American pastime.

George Hudson Again

2010-07-11T17:10:00.000-07:00

I recently had an article in Wild West about George Hudson, the notorious villain from Granby, Missouri. I also think I may have posted an entry about Hudson on this blog a year or more ago, but I'd like to add a brief update.
As I mention in the article, one of the several murders that Hudson committed during his infamous "career" was the cold-blooded killing in 1886 of Dr. L. G. Houard, a Joplin dentist. Hudson was finally arrested for the murder in 1891, and his case came to trial the following year at Rolla, Missouri, on a change of venue from Jasper County. At the trial, evidence was a presented by the prosecution that the motive for the murder was that Houard, a known womanizer, had been having an affair with the wife of wealthy Granby mine owner Peter Blow and that Blow had hired Hudson to do the job. Despite this and considerable other evidence against Hudson, he was acquitted.
Recently I read a piece online about Peter Blow that appeared in a Tennessee newspaper a year and a half ago. (Blow spent much of his later life in Tennessee.) In discussing the Hudson murder case, the author of the newspaper piece suggests that the trial amounted to an attempt to slander Blow's good name and that Hudson was indeed innocent. He says that although a few observers made the accusation that the outcome of the trial was a travesty of justice, few people believed this assertion.
To the contrary, Hudson was widely considered to be guilty by the people who knew him and his notorious record best--the citizens of the area where he lived. In southwest Missouri, most people considered the result of the trial at Rolla to be a "bought verdict." Hudson had used intimidation, bribery, and any other means at his disposal to escape prosecution in other cases, and the overwhelming opinion around Joplin and Granby was that he had done so again in the Houard case.
I can't say with any certainty that Peter Blow hired Hudson to kill Houard, as the prosecution claimed, but I do feel quite sure that Hudson did, in fact, commit the murder.

The Benders: A Mystery That's Not a Mystery

2010-07-03T08:26:00.000-07:00

I've mentioned the Bloody Benders of southeast Kansas in at least one previous post, but recently, while doing historical research for another topic, I came across a newspaper article about the Benders that, while not exactly shedding new light on the story, does tend to confirm what I was already convinced of--namely that the so-called mystery of what ultimately happened to the Benders is not really mystery, despite the fact that the historical marker erected by the Kansas State Historical Society and the Kansas Department of Transportation at the intersection of Highways 400 and 169 near the site of the Bender Mounds proclaims the Benders' ultimate fate "one of the great unsolved mysteries of the old West."
The fact is that the Benders were overtaken and killed by the posse that went out in pursuit of them when they fled after their horrific deeds were uncovered. I have been virtually sure of this for some time, not only because it's the most logical conclusion to reach when one knows all the facts surrounding the case but also because several members of the posse, who at first refused to say what had happened, revealed in later years what had actually occurred. The 1880 newspaper article I recently came across contained another such statement, given about seven years after the Benders' disappearance by yet another member of the posse. The posse member described how the Benders had been trailed and overtaken and then shot to death after the posse gave them an opportunity to deny their guilt, which they did not do. Thus ends the "mystery" that's not really a mystery, but I know it really won't end, because people are more fascinated by the marvelous than they are by the truth. As the posse member told his readers in 1880, though, if you hear any sensational story about the Benders escaping to Mexico or returning to Germany or some other such fantastic tale, "you can put it down as a canard."

Diamond Grove

2010-06-30T07:44:00.000-07:00

In doing research about the Civil War in the area of Newton and Jasper counties, I have occasionally run into references to Diamond Grove. At first, I assumed that Diamond Grove was just a precursor to or another name for present-day Diamond, which did not exist at the time of the Civil War. There's some truth to this assumption, but it's not entirely true. While present-day Diamond did borrow its name from Diamond Grove and is located in the same general vicinity as the earlier community, it is not located in the precise same place.
Diamond Grove was north and west of present-day Diamond or due north of the George Washington Carver Birthplace. In fact, there's a Diamond Grove Prairie Conservation Area just a couple of miles north of the birthplace, and still farther north (on FF Highway or Joplin's East 32nd Street) there is a Diamond Grove Christian Church.
If there was an actual community or crossroads store during the Civil War at a place called Diamond Grove (and I assume there was), I have not, however, been able to determine exactly where it was. All I know is that it was not where present-day Diamond is. If anyone knows the precise location where the community of Diamond Grove was, please let me know.

Nettie Pease Fox in Joplin

2010-06-19T10:33:00.000-07:00

I mentioned in a post a year or so ago that spiritualism revivalist Nettie Pease Fox came to Springfield in the fall of 1877, started a spiritualist newspaper there, and held a series of lectures at the Opera House on South Street. I mentioned that the revivalist fervor in Springfield had already started to cool by the end of the year, but apparently Ms. Fox continued to conduct lectures in other parts of the Ozarks for a while longer. For instance, on the last day of January of 1878, she lectured at the Opera House in Joplin, which was located at the corner of 2nd and Main.
In the late 1800s, nearly every town of sufficient size had its own opera house. Opera houses were used for more than just operas, though. They also hosted non-operatic theatrical productions, musical performances, public meetings, and lectures by noted speakers like Ms. Fox. Nettie Pease Fox was apparently fairly well received in Joplin but didn't cause the stir or stay as long as she had in Springfield.

Newtonia

2010-06-12T09:58:00.001-07:00

My book on the two battles at Newtonia was recently released by History Press as part of the publisher's Civil War Sequicentennial Series. In an overall view of the Civil War, neither battle at Newtonia was particularly significant (although some people seem to want to try to make both of them more important than they actually were by overestimating the number of casualties, etc.) Still, they were certainly significant for the soldiers who participated in them and for other people (such as civilians who lived in Newtonia) who were directly affected, and each battle does have its distinguishing characteristics. For instance, the First Battle of Newtonia is one of the few conflicts of the Civil War that involved large-scale American Indian involvement on both sides. The second battle did not have such an unusual distinguishing characteristic, did not involve nearly as many soldiers as the first one, and did not last as long. However, it is remembered as the last significant fight of the Civil War in Missouri, and largely for that reason, therefore, it, too, is considered important. The Newtonia Battlefields Protection Association will be holding an open house at the Ritchey Mansion on Sunday afternoon, June 27, at two p.m., and they'll be hosting a book signing for me at the same time in conjunction with the open house.

Prostitutes in the Ozarks

2010-06-07T08:23:00.000-07:00

Last time I wrote about the rowdy character of the town of Baxter Springs and cited the 1870 census as evidence, particularly the fact that the occupation of seven women living in the town at the time of the census was listed as "prostitute." Actually, I got to thinking about this whole subject of prostitution, gambliing, etc. in the early-day Ozarks because it was pointed out to me not too long ago that several women living in Joplin at the time of the 1880 census were listed as prostitutes. I know, too, that prostitution was fairly common around the mining town of Granby immediately after the Civil War before Joplin was even formed. I'm not as well versed on the early history of Springfield, but I'm pretty sure prostitution was fairly common there during the war, because Springfield was a Union headquarters throughout much of the war. Anywhere young single men congregated; be they soldiers, miners, or cowboys; prostitutes were sure to show up.
What strikes me about the census records is the fact the census takers (not necessarily the women themselves) were so open about calling a prostitute a prostitute. Today, prostitutes would more likely show up on census records as "escorts" or some other euphemism.

1870 Baxter Springs Census

2010-06-02T07:56:00.000-07:00

If anyone doubts the wild and rowdy character of Baxter Springs during its early cow town days, all you have to do to see for yourself is examine the 1870 census for the town, paying particular attention to the listed occupations of the residents. As one might expect, at least a couple of cattle dealers resided in Baxter but not as many as one might think. Most cattle drovers probably lived in Texas and only drove their cattle to Baxter and then quickly returned home. Besides, the census was taken during early and mid summer when most cattle drovers probably would have been on the trail.
Not surprisingly, one of the most common occupations among Baxter residents in 1870 was saloonkeeper or liquor dealer. There were also a couple of cigar dealers, and at least one or two professional gamblers lived in the town. Several men gave their occupation as "loafing" or "loafer," while the occupation of a few others was noted as "no occupation." So, the town obviously had a number of idlers and hangers-on. Some of these were probably also gamblers at least part time. Maybe they just didn't make enough money at their chosen pastime to justify listing "gambler" as their occupation.
I counted at least seven young women whose occupation was listed on the census as "prostitute." There was one man and one woman whose occupation was listed as "keeper of a brothel," and several of the prostitutes lived with these two individuals. Not all of them though--there were at least a couple of sporting ladies who were apparently independent contractors. The fact that fully seven young women had their occupation listed on the census as "prostitute" made me wonder how many more who gave their occupation as "waitress" or something similar also engaged in the "world's oldest profession" at least part time.
To fully appreciate the wild character of a town with at least seven full-time prostitutes and at least a dozen or more saloonkeepers or liquor dealers, one needs to keep in mind that Baxter Springs had a total population at the time of a little over a thousand people. (The town continued to prosper as a cow town for at least a couple of years after the summer of 1870, and the influx of prostitutes, gamblers, and other adventurers continued as well.)

Jasper County Place Names

2010-05-28T09:00:00.000-07:00

A year or so ago, I posted an entry in which I criticized the fact that the Jasper County portion of Moser's Directory of Towns, Villages, and Hamlets Past and Present (available on the Internet at the website of the Western Historical Manuscript Collection, the Springfield-Greene County Library, and possibly other sites) confuses Blende City with Blendville. Later, I issued a mea culpa for being overly critical when someone pointed out to me that libraries should not be held accountable for the accuracy of their web content any more than they are held accountable for the accuracy of every book they stock on their shelves, and I also realize that the compiler of a monumental work like Moser's directory should himself not be held accountable for the complete accuracy of everything included in the work. The compiler of such a large work in most cases has to rely on other secondary sources and cannot be expected to personally verify every fact. So I do not intend the following to be construed in anyway as a criticism but merely as providing additional information.
To repeat what I said a year or so ago, contrary to what Moser's directory says, Blende City and Blendville were not the same community. Blende City was located a mile or so southwest of Carl Junction near what is now Highway JJ, while Blendville was located in what today is southwest Joplin. Also, there seems to be some confusion about the various names by which Blende City was known. It was originally just a mining camp called Skeeterville after lead was discovered at the site around 1880. Supposedly the man who first stuck ore there named the camp Skeeterville, suggesting the presence of mosquitoes, to try to keep other miners away. The ploy didn't work, and soon so much blende (zinc ore) was being mined from the site that the booming community was named Blende City. A year or so later, an addition to the town was built and named Lehigh, and soon Lehigh had engulfed or at least overshadowed Blende City to the point that the entire community became known as Lehigh. Under the listing for Fidelity in Moser's directory, the author notes that Fidelity was also known as Skeeterville and Lehigh. This, at least as far as I have been able to determine, is not true. Fidelity was a completely separate place (located near the present-day intersection of I-44 and Highway 71) and was never known by any other name. Apparently someone simply got Fidelity and Lehigh (or Blende City) mixed up.
Parr Hill is mentioned in Moser's directory as a Jasper County place, but the notation under the listing says that it "could not be located." For the record, Parr Hill was a mining camp/community located in what is today southeast Joplin. There is still a Parr Hill Park just a couple of blocks north of the Dillon's store on East 20th Street. Swindle Hill is also listed in the directory as a separate community, but "nothing more is known about the place." Swindle Hill was another Joplin-area mining camp located near the present-day intersection of East 7th Street and Murphy Boulevard (the Ewert Park vicinity).

Jennison in Joplin

2010-05-21T11:00:00.000-07:00

I've heard or read quite a few stories about notorious characters who frequented Joplin during its mining boom in the 1870s and 1880s. As I noted in a recent post, the notorious characters often mentioned in connection with Joplin include the James brothers and the Younger brothers. Although their connection to Joplin has been exaggerated, there were, in fact, a number of colorful or notorious characters who migrated to Joplin during the years immediately after the lead mining boom began in the early 1870s. Some of them, like Charles "Fletch" Taylor, were ex Confederate guerrillas, and others, like Bruce Younger and Hobbs Kerry, although not ex guerrillas themselves, had a close connection to the post-war outlaw gangs that sprang from the guerrilla bands.
Not all the shady characters who came to Joplin, though, were ex Confederates or were allied with ex-Confederate gangs. One notable exception was Charles "Doc" Jennison, who served during the Civil War as a colonel of the 7th Kansas Cavalry and made a name for himself as a notorious jayhawker. At least that's what many Missourians considered him.
After the war, Jennison served a couple of terms in the Kansas State legislature, but around 1877, he came to Joplin and opened a restaurant and saloon called the Saratoga. Jennison's name shows up repeatedly in Jasper County Court records, mostly in connection with violating liquor laws. Although I haven't delved into the records very much yet, I believe the violations were mainly for selling liquor without a license or for selling liquor on Sunday. I think he was also indicted a time or two for gambling violations--running a Faro bank, etc.
Jennison left Joplin in the early 1880s and died shortly afterwards at Leavenworth, Kansas.

Jesse Roper

2010-05-17T08:06:00.000-07:00

I first ran onto the name of Jesse Roper when I was reading about the infamous train robbery that occurred at Olyphant, Arkansas, in the fall of 1893. At the time Roper had been on the run from the law for over a year, after having killed Sheriff Byler of Baxter County in mid June of 1892. When one of the robbers was caught a few days after the train holdup, it was first thought that he was Jesse Roper. After a man who knew Roper viewed the prisoner and said positively that he was not Roper, it was still thought, however, that Roper was probably one of the eight men who had held up the train. (He wasn't.)
While researching other topics, I have since run onto Roper's name two or three more times. From what I've been able to ascertain so far, Roper was apparently never caught, but there were numerous false sightings of the fugitive, and a number of men were captured who were first thought to be Roper but who turned out not to be.
So, now I'm starting to get hooked, and sooner or later I'll probably have to end up delving into the Roper story a little deeper. That's usually how it happens. I run onto the name of a colorful character in Ozarks history or the mention of an infamous incident, and I lodge the name in the back of my mind but don't think much about it at first. If I run onto a second or third mention of the same character or incident, though, I start thinking more seriously about it and usually end up having to write about it in one fashion or another.

County Names

2010-05-11T08:51:00.000-07:00

In an entry I posted a year or so ago, I remarked that certain towns in the Ozarks were once known by a previous name, such as Dadeville having first been called Melville. The same is true about some of the counties in the region. For instance, Texas County was first called Ashley County, and McDonald County was first named Seneca County (after the Seneca Indians who lived in the region). What was originally Kinderhook County is now Camden county, and Dallas County was supposedly given its present name because its original name, Niangua, was considered too hard to spell and pronounce. One of the more interesting name changes pertains to Ozark County. It was originally given that name when it was first formed but changed its name to Decatur County and was known as such for a couple of years during the 1840s before changing its name back to Ozark.
I'm not sure whether there is an equivalent town in the Ozarks--one that briefly flirted with a different name before changing its name back to its original.

Jesse James Was My Great Uncle

2010-05-05T07:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I was looking through some books in the local history room of the Joplin Public Library about Joplin's early history. Some of the stories chronicled in a couple of the books appear to be based mainly on oral legend and after-the-fact exaggeration rather than contemporaneous evidence. One such story that caught my eye was the oft-repeated assertion that the infamous outlaw Jesse James spent considerable time in and around Joplin. For instance, Jesse, using an assumed name, was supposedly introduced to a Joplin banker during the 1870s, and when the banker found out Jesse''s real name, he worried that the James gang would rob his bank. Jesse, though, upon learning of the man's concern, assured the banker that he would never rob a bank around Joplin because he considered it his hometown.
From what I've been able to discern from first-hand sources, this story and those like it are, at best, exaggeration. It's true that Jesse James was known to have passed through the Joplin area at least a time or two, but there's no documentation that he ever spent any considerable amount of time here. Same goes for the Younger brothers, who, like Jesse, are sometimes reported to have been denizens of Joplin. The Youngers' half-uncle Bruce Younger did frequent the town during its early days, and Fletch Taylor (Quantrill lieutenant and the James boys' immediate commander during the Civil War) did move to Joplin during the early lead-mining days and became a leading citizen of the town. Jesse's sister was even reported in a local newspaper as having visited Taylor in Joplin. But the Younger gang and the James boys mainly spent their time (when they weren't actively on the run) farther north around Jackson County, St. Clair County, and so forth, or else in Texas.
The exaggerated stories about Jesse James's exploits in and around Joplin, though, are hardly unique. Nearly every county in the Ozarks (or the Midwest for that matter), it seems, lays claim to some connection to the notorious outlaw. And if you get to talking about family history with the people you meet, it seems that about half of them claim kinship to Jesse, as though it were some badge of honor.

Old-time Newspaper Editors

2010-05-01T09:35:00.000-07:00

I do a lot of perusing of old newspapers, and I am often amused by the sardonic wit that editors of the nineteenth century exhibited, a sense of humor that is often missing in today's more matter-of-fact approach to journalism. Another thing that characterized reporting from the 1800s that is largely absent today was a keen competition between rival newspapers. (Perhaps the main reason it's missing today is the simple fact that there are not nearly as many papers as there used to be.)
Often these two traits of nineteenth century reporting (humor and competition)were combined when the editor of one newspaper would snipe at the editor of a rival paper. If the rival papers happened to be situated in rival towns (as opposed to being located in the same town), the sniping was often accompanied by bragging on one's own town while poking fun at the rival town. It's amusing today to look back at some of these editorial jabs.
Here, for instance, is a brief comment from the editor of the Springfield Times that appeared in his November 7, 1877 edition: "Blessed is Granby! She only has 37 dogs within her corporate limits. Our marshal sees to it that more than that number are killed every week." This little item was no doubt in response to a complaint about dogs that had recently appeared in the Granby Miner. Another item from a later edition of the same Springfield paper gives a hint of the rivalry that existed between Springfield and Joplin: "The following, from the Joplin Herald, is cool and refreshing in a village like ours: 'Main street presented its old-time appearance last night. The gambling halls and saloons were crowded and money seems to be plenty.'" The editor may have been a bit smug about Springfield's superior morality, but many Springfieldians couldn't resist the lure of the money that flowed in Joplin during the mining boom and moved 70 miles west to get in on the riches.

Highway 63 and Marked Tree

2010-04-27T08:48:00.000-07:00

I just came back from Sunday's Talladega Superspeedway NASCAR race. On the way home, we drove to Memphis and then took Highway 63 thru Jonesboro, Ark. to West Plains, Mo. It's a stretch of road I had never been on before. Considering that I have lived in the Ozarks virtually my entire life of over 60 years, it sometimes amazes me that there are still a lot of places in this region that I've never been. I've probably been to most of them but not nearly all.
One of the towns I had never been to that we passed through was Marked Tree, Arkansas. The name caught my attention because it just so happens that I've been doing a little research on a notorious character named Robbie Camden, sometimes called the Robin Hood of the Ozarks, who was a terror to south central Missouri during the 1920s and 1930s. He was from the Reynolds County area, but one time, when he was on the run from the law after a shootout with the Dent County, Missouri, sheriff, he got into a second gun battle with police near Marked Tree. He was seriously injured, and it was thought his wounds might prove fatal, but he recovered and, after getting out of prison, went on to pull off other crimes, including at least one murder.

Missouri Counties during the Civil War

2010-04-16T07:57:00.000-07:00

Recently I was reading excerpts from William Monks's book entitled A History of Southern Missouri and Northern Arkansas, and I was struck by an observation the author made about the differing political makeup of Howell County, where he lived, and that of neighboring Oregon County. Monks was a former Union officer who had made a name for himself fighting Confederate bushwhackers during the war. After the war, he went home to West Plains. Although his family and those of many other Union men had been forced out of Howell County during the war, Union sentiment soon dominated in the county once they returned. Not so in neighboring Oregon County, where lawless bands under former Confederate guerrillas like Dick Kitchen and Jim Jamison held sway. Monks was called upon by Missouri Governor Thomas Fletcher to help eradicate the lawless bands from Oregon County.
What struck me as interesting was the fact that two adjoining counties could be dominated by such diametrically opposed political sentiments. During the Civil War, the state of Missouri was very divided, but generally speaking Union sentiment dominated in the urban areas (especially St. Louis), while Confederate sympathies were more prominent in the rural areas. The general rule, though, did not always apply. For instance, in the southwest corner of the state (the part of Missouri I am most familiar with), Vernon County was about as Southern in sentiment as a county could be. Yet, Cedar County, right next door to the east, tended to be dominated by Union sentiment. This clash in sentiment between neighboring counties led indirectly to the murder of Augustus Baker by John Frizzell in May of 1863 and more directly to the subsequent burning of Nevada later the same month.

Hudspeth-Watkins Murder Case

2010-04-09T17:08:00.000-07:00

The Andrew Hudspeth-George Watkins murder case that occurred in Marion County, Arkansas, in the late 1880s is one of the most interesting in the history of the Ozarks. The families of the two men were living together on the same farm west of Yellville, and apparently the intimate living arrangements proved too much temptation for Hudspeth and Watkins's wife. One day Hudspeth and Watkins came to Yellville together in Watkins's wagon, and that night Hudspeth came home alone driving the wagon. After the disappearance came to light, Rebecca Watkins admitted that she and Hudspeth were lovers, that they had plotted her husband's murder together, and that she was sure Andy had carried it out, although she wasn't present at the time and didn't know what he had done with the body. Much of her story was supported by the testimony of her and George's eleven-year-old son.
Andy Hudspeth was convicted of the murder, and, after considerable delay caused by his escape from jail and by numerous appeals on his behalf, he was eventually hanged in late 1892. In the meantime, Rebecca, awaiting indictment on a charge of being an accessory to the crime, died while in custody. The case took a strange twist in the summer of 1893 when George Watkins was supposedly found alive living on a farm in Kansas. The report was soon followed by a second story claiming the first one was a hoax, but the idea that George Watkins was found alive after Andy Hudspeth was executed for his murder is repeated as gospel even today on certain websites dedicated to exposing abuse in the American justice system. Obviously, if the story were true, it would be an extreme miscarriage of justice, but there is considerable evidence to suggest that Hudspeth did, in fact, kill George Watkins. The same websites that claim George Watkins was found alive after Hudspeth was executed also give Hudspeth's name as Charles Hudspeth. His name was Andrew J. Hudspeth. Failure to get the name of one of the principal characters right is, in and of itself, reason enough to distrust the rest of their version of the story.

More Weather: 11-11-11

2010-04-03T08:59:00.000-07:00

Last time I mentioned a few memorable weather events that have occurred in the Ozarks over the years. I forgot to mention perhaps the most spectacular one of all, though, "the Great Blue Norther" that happened on November 11, 1911. It was then that many areas in the Midwest, including towns like Springfield, Missouri, recorded their record high and record low on the same day. The morning and early afternoon of 11-11-11 was unusually mild. In Springfield, for instance, the temperature was in the low 80s in the early afternoon before the storm hit. By midnight it had dropped to around 13 degrees. Both extremes set records for the date, and I believe that one or both records still stand. I, of course, don't remember this weather event. I'm old but not quite that old. I do, however, remember old-timers from my youth occasionally talking about it. My grandmother, for instance, recalled that the temperature dropped so rapidly that most of her family's potato crop, which had been stored in a shed, froze before she and her siblings could move the potatoes to the cellar.

Ozarks Weather

2010-03-28T14:12:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, we had a late winter storm that dropped about six to eight inches of snow on the Joplin area. The photo at left of the deck and backyard at our house will give you an idea of what it looked like. It reminded me of other late winter storms of more historic proportions, such as the one in March of 1970 that dumped up to thirty inches of snow on the Ozarks. I was in the Army at the time and didn't witness that one firsthand, but my wife and other people still talk about it. Lee George, a former weatherman for Channel 12 here in Joplin, had notoriously forecasted flurries leading up to the 1970 storm, and always after that he would never use what he called the "f" word when it came to predicting snow.
A freakish Ozarks snowstorm that I remember from my childhood occurred in early November of 1952. I still have pictures of my sister and me playing in drifts up to our waists or higher and other photos of automobiles almost completely covered by snow, so that, if not for the shape, one would not know for sure what the objects were.
I think unusual weather makes a more indelible impression on children and young people than it does on adults. At least it seems we tend to remember weather events from "back in the day" better than we do recent ones. However, I would have to say that the ice storms of 2007 (January and December), for instance, have to rank with anything I had ever witnessed previously during my sixty years or so of living in the Ozarks. And the 2003 tornadoes that hit towns like Franklin, Kansas, and Carl Junction, Stockton, and Pierce City in Missouri were probably about as devastating, except in loss of life, as the infamous tornado of 1880 that destroyed Marshfield. With modern forecasting, the availability of storm shelters, and so forth, we are probably just better prepared to survive storms than we were a hundred and thirty years ago. As far as I know, though, no one has yet composed a song about the 2003 tornadoes the way ragtime musician Blind Boone did about the Marshfield twister.

Bill Cook

2010-03-22T11:58:00.000-07:00

From an early age, Bill Cook seemed destined for a life of crime. When he was only about five years old, his mother died, leaving his father to take care of Bill and his several siblings. Bill Cook Sr. apparently had neither the means nor inclination to tend to a whole passel of kids. He left them in a small cave in northwest Joplin in the side of a hill with an older sister in charge and merely checked in on them from time to time to bring food. Later young Bill stayed briefly with the older sister after she married but mainly got shuffled from one foster parent to another. When he was ten, he was placed with a foster mother but became incorrigible and left home when he was about twelve. Told that he had to stay where he was placed or else he would be sent to the reformatory, he chose the reformatory.
Bill Cook's crimes and troubles with the law only escalated from there, and he spent the next nine years or so in and out of the reformatory and the Missouri State Penitentiary. Then, during the wee hours of the morning of January 2, 1951, Cook wrote his name in the annals of American crime when he committed what, at the time at least, was one of the worst mass murders in U. S. history. He had flagged down motorist Carl Mosser and his family (wife and three young kids) a couple of days earlier on Route 66 in Oklahoma, jumped into their car, and forced Mosser at gunpoint to drive him pell-mell across the country. After more than two days of criss-crossing back and forth through the Southwest, Cook brought his hostages to his hometown of Joplin, where he killed all five of them near the intersection of 30th and Maiden Lane after almost being discovered by a Joplin policeman. He then dumped their bodies in an abandoned mine shaft in northwest Joplin, the area where he had grown up.
Cook then went on the lam and killed a couple of more people in southern California before finally being captured in Mexico and brought back to the U. S. to answer for his crimes. He was executed in late 1952 in California for one of the latter murders. His body was brought back to Joplin and buried in an unmarked grave at Peace Church Cemetery at the northwest edge of Joplin.
My book Ozarks Gunfights and Other Notorious Incidents contains a more complete version of Bill Cook's story, as well as twenty-four other incidents, all of which I've mentioned over the past few months. Now that I've mentioned all of them, I will try, for at least my next few postings, to talk about other things besides notorious incidents covered in my book.

Bonnie & Clyde in Joplin

2010-03-15T13:51:00.000-07:00

The apartment building at 3347 1/2 Oak Ridge Drive in Joplin where Bonnie and Clyde had their infamous shootout with police in April of 1933 has received quite a bit of attention lately. A new owner bought the property a few years ago and wanted to convert it to a bed and breakfast but couldn't get the request passed by the city council, mainly because of opposition from some of the neighbors living in the immediate area of the apartment. The last I knew, though, the owner was still trying to get the building declared a historic site.
For anyone unfamiliar with the location, the building sits just a couple of blocks off South Main Street, and although the address is Oak Ridge Drive, access to the apartment is actually from 34th Street. Back when many garages were detached from the primary house, the apartment at 3347 1/2 Oak Ridge was built over the garage, which was ideal for the Barrow gang's purposes. The gangsters could pull their cars into the garage and unload weapons or other contraband without being seen.
Clyde's brother, Buck Barrow, rented the apartment under an assumed name from Paul Freeman, and the gang had been there about two weeks before neighbors began to get suspicious of the comings and goings at the building and called police. The result, of course, was a bloody shootout that left two officers, J. W. Harryman and Harry McGinnis, dead.
The location on the outskirts of town near Main Street was another good thing about the apartment from the gang's standpoint, because after the gunfight, they made their escape south on Main Street, roaring through Redings Mill south of Joplin and eventually making their way to Texas.

Young Brothers

2010-03-08T13:55:00.000-08:00

Many people are familiar with the so-called Young brothers massacre that occurred near Brookline in 1932, during which Harry and Jennings Young killed six law officers sent out from Springfield to arrest them. Suspecting little resistance, the officers carried only handguns while the Youngs were armed with high powered rifles. Both of the brothers were ex-cons, and at least one of them had vowed not to be taken alive. Still, the officers failed to realize the desperate nature of the men they were after, and they paid a dear price for the mistake. The incident still ranks as the deadliest shootout in history for U. S. law enforcement. After the killings, the Youngs escaped to Houston, Texas, where they themselves died in another shootout with police a couple of days later.
What many people, even some who are generally familiar with this incident, may not know is that the Young brothers were brought back to Missouri and buried at Joplin's Fairview Cemetery. Reportedly, the Young family wanted to bury them in Greene County, but outraged citizens met the hearse at the county line and refused to let it enter the county. The driver turned back and drove to Joplin, where the bodies were buried in an unmarked grave. A sister of the Young brothers later placed a stone on the grave.
The story of the Young brothers massacre forms a chapter in my book entitled Ozarks Gunfights and Other Notorious Incidents. By the way, I am having a book signing for the book this Saturday, March 13, from 1-3 p.m. at Always Buying Books in Joplin. Also, I'm scheduled to speak to the Webb City Genealogy Society at their regular monthly meeting on April 6 at 6:00 p.m. at the Webb City Library, and I'll probably talk mainly about the Gunfights book.