Quantrill's Richmond Trip

In a couple of my previous posts, I've mentioned Confederate guerrilla leader William Quantrill making a trip to Richmond, Virginia during the winter of 1862-63 in quest of a colonel's commission. There's no written record that he received a colonel's commission in Richmond, but he may have or he may have received a field commission later, because some of Quantrill's men did refer to their leader as "Colonel Quantrill," even after the war.
In the past, there has been some scholarly disagreement on whether Quantrill even made such a journey to Richmond, but this question can be laid to rest. Quantrill's military service file alone provides enough evidence to prove that he did make such a journey, because it shows him, for instance, drawing pay from a Confederate paymaster in Alabama in early March of 1863 (presumably on his way back from Richmond). Also, an item in a Leavenworth newspaper in the spring of 1863, after the guerrilla leader and his men arrived back in their Jackson County stomping grounds, announced that Quantrill had just returned from Richmond.
While Quantrill, accompanied by one or two of his men, made the trip back east, most of the guerrillas attached themselves, under William Gregg, to Shelby's command of Marmaduke's division and fought at Cane Hill, Prairie Grove, Springfield, and Hartville during Marmaduke's winter campaign of 1862-1863.

Baxter Spring Battle and Massacre

William Quantrill is normally not closely associated with the Ozarks, and the Kansas City area was, in fact, his main field of operations. However, the notorious Confederate guerrilla leader did make several excursions through our region. In a previous post, I've already mentioned one such foray, the Cedar County raid in the spring of 1863 as Quantrill was returning from his trip to Richmond. Quantrill's most notable action in this region, however, was the battle and massacre that occurred at the edge of the Ozarks in Baxter Springs, Kansas, on October 6, 1863.
The action is sometimes loosely referred to as the Baxter Springs Massacre, but it actually involved both a battle and a massacre. As Quantrill and his men crossed into Kansas on their way south to spend the winter in Texas, they came upon a Federal fort that was still under construction, and they launched two or three attacks on the rampart before withdrawing to the edge of the Spring River timber north of the fort. Those attacks constituted the battle part of the action.
But even the massacre part of the action started out as a battle. After withdrawing to the edge of the timber, the guerrillas discovered a body of about a hundred Union troops, who later proved to be General James Blunt and his escort, drawn up in a line facing them from across the prairie. Quantrill ordered a charge, and the Federals put up a feckless resistance. Some in Blunt's escort had no arms, and many of those who did prematurely fired out their ammunition, while others turned to run without firing a shot. The guerrillas quickly chased them down, and many of the soldiers were reportedly killed as they tried to surrender, pleading for their lives. The action was therefore dubbed the Baxter Springs Massacre. Only a handful from the Federal detail, including Blunt himself, managed to escape.
Speaking of Quantrill, some readers may not be aware that there is such a thing as the William Clarke Quantrill Society (www.wcqsociety.com) comprised of people who are interested in the Civil War in general, the guerrilla and border warfare in Missouri in particular, and Quantrill and his men even more especially. I'm not a member of the group, but I'm acquainted with a few people who are, including Harold Dellinger, owner and operator of an online bookstore (www.haroldsbookstore.com) that specializes in books about the Civil War in Missouri and Kansas and about the outlaw era after the war. Harold's is one of several online bookstores that carries my books, including my new novel.

Christmas Day Massacre

The fact that it's getting close to Christmas reminds me of one of the most notorious incidents of the Civil War in the Ozarks, the Christmas Day Massacre (also called the Wilson Massacre) that occurred in Ripley County on December 25, 1863. In late 1863, Union troops captured Centreville, the county seat of Reynolds County, but on December 21 a company of Colonel Tim Reeves's 15th Missouri cavalry regiment under Captain Jesse Pratt recaptured the town and took about 100 Federal soldiers prisoner. Pratt hauled the captives south to Ripley County and turned them over to Colonel Reeves. On the 23rd, Major James Wilson was sent out from Pilot Knob with two companies of Union militia in pursuit of the rebels. On December 25, Reeves was camped at Pulliam's farm in the southwest part of Ripley with about 150 of his men, along with the Federal prisoners, and at least sixty civilians from the region, many of them family members of Reeves's soldiers, to celebrate Christmas. Reeves, who was also a Baptist minister, conducted religious services, and then the group sat down for a holiday dinner. Suddenly the festivites were violently interrupted when Wilson and his men charged into the camp and started firing. Only about thirty-five Confederates, who were guarding the prisoners, had arms, with the rest having stacked their weapons during dinner, and the rebel camp was quickly overrun. At least thirty rebels were killed, and most of the rest were taken prisoner, although Reeves managed to escape. Some accounts claim that many of the civilians, including women and children, were also slaughtered, although this point is in dispute.
What seems without doubt, however, is that this incident clearly illustrates that peace on earth did not reign in the Missouri Ozarks during America's Civil War, even on a sacred holiday like Christmas Day. The war in our state was a bitter provincial conflict, with Missourians often killing other Missourians, and such was the case with the Christmas Day massacre. The war in Missouri was often driven by revenge, and the aftermath of the Christmas Day massacre also illustrates this aspect of the war. When Major Wilson and a handful of his men were captured during General Sterling Price's invasion of Missouri in the fall of 1864, they were turned over to Colonel Reeves, who ordered the captives summarily executed in retaliation for the Ripley County atrocity.

Emmett Kelly

America's favorite clown, Emmett Kelly, Sr., was born in Sedan, Kansas, around 1898, and the family moved when he was about seven years old to rural Houston, Missouri, near the village of Yukon, where he grew up. Both Sedan and Houston claim Kelly as a favorite son. I live in the Joplin area, which is almost exactly halfway between the two towns, and I've been to both places. (In fact, I lived at Houston for a year during the early 1970s.)
Sedan has an Emmett Kelly Museum featuring clown memorabilia, especially that which is related directly to Emmett Kelly. The museum was opened in the late 1960s, and Kelly came back to Sedan for the occasion.
Kelly got his start in entertainment when he was still a teenager at the Old Settlers Reunion in Houston (now called the Texas County Fair and Old Settlers Reunion) drawing cartoons and doing a chalk talk while dressed as a clown. The town named a city park for Kelly in 1975, and just as he had returned to Sedan for the museum opening, he came back to Houston for dedication of the park. Every year Houston also hosts the Emmett Kelly Clown Festival during the first weekend in May.

Pierce City: What's in a Name?

Many years ago, when I first saw the town of Pierce City spelled "Peirce City," I thought the author had made a mistake, but I soon learned that the town's name was indeed spelled "Peirce City" during its early days. That part is not in doubt, but there still seems to be conflicting information on the Internet and elsewhere as to exactly how the town got its original name. According to information I found on the website of the Springfield-Greene County Library, for instance, the depot at what became Peirce City was named after railroad executive Andrew Pierce, but the name was misspelled as "Peirce" on the original plat dedicating the land for public use. However, according to workers at the Harold Bell Wright Museum at Pierce City with whom I talked last summer, this is not true. They said that Andrew Peirce's name really was spelled "Peirce" and that descendants of the family even objected when the name of the town was officially changed to "Pierce City" in the 1980s. What is known for sure is that the "Pierce City" spelling had been in widespread popular use for many years before it was officially adopted. Can anyone shed additional light on this issue?

Nettie Pease Fox

The late 1880s were a time of great social and spiritual experimentation. All sorts of Utopian societies and religious communities were founded. One such movement was spiritualism, the belief that one could communicate with spirits of the dead. Spiritualism traces its roots to the 1840s but reached its peak in the United States during the latter half of the nineteenth century when spiritualist lecturers toured the country and mass camp meetings were held.
One such lecturer was Nettie Pease Fox, who caused quite a stir in Springfield when she and her husband, Dorus M. Fox, arrived in the city in the fall of 1877 and started printing a spiritualist newspaper from an office located in the 200 block of South Avenue, just south of the square, and lecturing at the Opera House located a block farther south. During Nettie Pease Fox's stay in Springfield, many locals were reportedly converted to spiritualism, but the fervor died almost as quickly as it had arisen and the Foxes' sojourn in the city proved brief.

Tipton Ford Train Wreck

A mural painted by Anthony Benton Gude (grandson of Thomas Hart Benton) was recently installed at the First United Methodist Church in Neosho commemorating the tragic head-on collision between a gasoline powered passenger train of the Missouri and North Arkansas line and a Kansas City Southern freight train that occurred at Tipton Ford in Newton County, Missouri, on the late afternoon of August 5, 1914, and claimed the lives of approximately 50 people. The passenger car burst into flames, and many of the victims were burned beyond recognition. Many of the dead were black residents of Neosho who were on their way home from an Emancipation Day celebration in nearby Joplin., and a few days later the whole Neosho community came together for a public funeral on the courthouse square for both the black and white victims. Some of the victims were buried in a mass grave at the IOOF Cemetery in Neosho, and large memorial stone was later placed there by the community. It is this spirit of unity that the new mural celebrates more than the actual train wreck. The mural will be dedicated and officially unveiled this Saturday, December 6.

Cedar County Raid

In my previous post, I mentioned that Jasper County guerrilla leader Thomas Livingston was killed at Stockton, the seat of Cedar County, while leading a charge on the courthouse there in July of 1863. Another interesting incident of the Civil War that occurred in Cedar County was William Quantrill's raid through the county in April of 1863. Quantrill had recently made a trek to Richmond, Virginia, seeking a commission as a colonel in the Confederate army, and he and his men were on their way back to their Jackson County stomping grounds around Independence. During their foray through Cedar County, the gang killed seven members of the Eighth Missouri State Militia Cavalry, who were on their way home from Springfield, and at least four civilians, including Baptist minister and state representative Obadiah Smith, a Union sympathizer who incurred the guerrillas' special ire because of his friendship with hated Kansas Senator Jim Lane. For a more complete account of Quantrill's Cedar County raid, see my article on the topic in the April/May 2002 issue of The Ozarks Mountaineer.

Thomas Livingston

In my last post, I mentioned Tom Livingston's killing of Union troops near Sherwood, Missouri, during the Civil War and the subsequent destroying of the town by Federal soldiers in retaliation.
Livingston was an interesting character who refutes the common perception of Confederate guerrillas in Missouri. Today they are thought of by many as little more than outlaws who merely used the Civil War to indulge an already-established proclivity toward lawless behavior, but, in reality, such a stereotype fits a relatively small number of them. Livingston, for instance, was a well-respected merchant and smelter in Jasper County prior to the war, and many of his followers were landowners and established citizens of the county. Livingston lived at a place called French Point, located on Center Creek just a mile or two west of present-day Oronogo, which was known as Minersville during the Civil War, and most of his men, as I pointed out last time, came from the western half of Jasper County in and around Sherwood.
Livingston was killed in July 1863 while leading a charge on the courthouse at Stockton in Cedar County. Acording to one story, he was brought back to Sherwood and buried in the cemetery there, but a second, more likley story, says he was buried in an unmarked grave at Stockton.

Sherwood, Missouri

A town that used to be but no longer exists and that is closer to my neck of the woods than Dubuque, Arkansas, which I wrote about a few days ago, is Sherwood, Missouri. The latter town was situated at the present-day intersection of JJ Highway and Fir Road in Jasper County between Joplin and Carl Junction. There are several houses at or near this intersection today, but all of them are of relatively recent origin. The only relic that remains of old Sherwood is a cemetery, at the end of a narrow lane off Fir Road just east of the intersection.
At the time of the Civil War, Sherwood was the third-largest village in Jasper County, trailing only Carthage and Sarcoxie. On May 18, 1863, Jasper County guerrilla leader Thomas Livingston surprised and overran a foraging party of Union soldiers southeast of Sherwood, killing about twenty of them. Most of the dead men were black soldiers stationed at Baxter Springs, Kansas, and the next day Federal troops from the post came back to Missouri and burned Sherwood to the ground, because most of Livingston's men lived in and around the village. Most of the civilian refugees from the destroyed town fled to Texas, and Sherwood was never rebuilt.

Dubuque, Arkansas

I suppose a person who is interested in history is, by definition, interested in things gone by, but one class of "used to be things" that I'm particularly interested in is former villages and towns of the Ozarks that no longer exist. One such town was Dubuque, Arkansas.
It was located on the south bank of the White River just below the Missouri-Arkansas line near where the community of Diamond City is now situated a few miles north of Lead Hill, except that the actual town site of old Dubuque was covered by the waters of Bull Shoals Lake when the dam was completed in 1951.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, Dubuque was the northern-most point for steamboat travel on the White River, and the town was a receiving point for merchandise headed to Forsyth and other places upstream via the old Dubuque-Forsyth road and a shipping point for furs and other goods headed downstream. Today, much of the old road is likewise covered by Bull Shoals.
During the Civil War, Dubuque was a Confederate stronghold and the site of a lead smelter that supplied bullets for rebel forces. It was the scene of several minor skirmishes, including one in November of 1862 when Captain Milton Burch led an expedition of the Fourteenth Missouri Cavalry (Militia) into southern Missouri and northern Arkansas. In his after-action report on the mission, Burch explained, "I thought it best to visit the vicinity of Dubuque and break up the harbors of the rebels who have with impunity infested that portion of the country." The result of the raid on Dubuque, according to Burch, was twelve Southerners killed and one taken prisoner. Among those killed was a man named Oldham, who was the postmaster at Dubuque.

Bud Blunt

The last but not the least of the Granby (Missouri) desperadoes was Allen "Bud" Blunt (also spelled "Blount"). Bud was born around 1850 at Poplar Bluff (Mo.) in Butler County and moved with his family, including three brothers and two sisters, to Granby in the early 1860s. Although he was involved in a scrape in late 1873 when his pal John Cole was shot and killed on the streets of Granby (see my previous post on Hobbs Kerry), Bud, like a lot of outlaws, seemingly started off on the right side of the law, running for city marshal of Granby in 1874 as the candidate of the Workingman's Party. In 1877, though, he and a gang that included George Hudson and Bud's older brother, John, galloped into the nearby town of Webb City and shot up the place, wounding a couple of innocent bystanders, because a friend of theirs had been incarcerated there for public drunkenness. Shortly after this incident, Hudson and the Blunts moved to Colorado, where Hudson and Bud Blunt assaulted and robbed one man and, according to Blunt's own later testimony, killed another near Leadville. Around 1880, the Blunts ambled into Arizona Territory, where Bud got beat up by a man named McDonald at the mining camp of Tip Top and killed the man in retaliation. He was sentenced to the territorial prison for the crime, but Wyatt Earp, who knew the Blunt boys, intervened on Bud's behalf and helped get him released after a couple of years. Bud returned to his home territory after his release but couldn't stay out of trouble. He was arrested for stealing horses (one report says mules) and sentenced to the Kansas Penitentiary. Released around 1890, he boarded an eastbound train in Granby later that year and, near Ritchey, killed a brakeman who was trying to remove him to the smoking car because of his drunken behavior. Acting quickly, the conductor shoved the killer off the train, and Blunt was found later the same day in a ditch near where he was kicked off, having drunk himself into a stupor. He was arrested, convicted of first degree murder, and sentenced to hang. The sentence was later commuted to life in prison, and Blunt was pardoned around 1900.
As I've chronicled during the past couple of weeks, Granby had at least five desperate characters who not only were associated with the town during the post-Civil War era but who lived there during most of their youth and early manhood, and this number does not include brothers and other sidekicks of the notorious quintet. If another town of comparable size produced as many infamous characters during America's Wild West era as Granby, I don't know what that town would be.

Bob Layton

Yet another of the nest of villains inhabiting Granby, Missouri, during the latter half of the nineteenth century was Bob Layton. Bob and his family, consisting of his parents and several sisters, came to Granby from Tennessee near the start of the Civil War when he was a young boy five or six years old. Layton first etched his name in the annals of outlawry on the evening of June 16, 1877, at the fledgling mining town of Galena just across the Kansas state line. Nursing an old grudge, he and three other Granby men burst into Dykeman's Restaurant and opened fire on William St. Clair and Harry Campbell while the latter were seated at a table taking dinner. The ambush mortally wounded St. Clair and left Campbell with a flesh wound. A hastily formed posse pursued the attackers and briefly exchanged shots with them, but Layton and his cohorts made a clean escape. St. Clair was known as "Tiger Bill" because of his reputation in the area as a rough character, but it's not known what supposed wrong the Granby boys were avenging. Around this same time, Layton became a part-time sidekick of the notorious George Hudson, but it's also not known with any certainty whether Hudson came along on the Galena escapade.
What is known is that Layton and Hudson, along with Hudson's brother Jack, were passing through Batesville, Arkansas, on the evening of November 7, 1879, and tarried in town long enough to get into a barroom brawl. They conked one man over the head with a pistol and fired a shot at another one. A posse followed them to their camp outside town and captured George Hudson after an exchange of lead, but the other two men escaped. Layton came back to Batesville the next night to try to break George Hudson out of jail and was shot and killed after he was recognized and ordered to halt but went for his gun instead. Thus was cut short the promising criminal career of Robert Layton.

George Hudson

I've discussed a couple of notorious characters of late nineteenth century Granby, Missouri, in my previous two posts, but the king of the Granby outlaws was, without a doubt, George Hudson. He was rumored to have already killed a man when he was a young teenager in Mississippi before coming to Granby with his parents and siblings in the late 1860s. Then, over the next twenty years, he killed five more men in four known incidents, including a murder for hire on the streets of nearby Joplin, and was rumored to have killed others. Hudson's felonious record was so extensive that it is hard to imagine how he was allowed to go free for so long, but he and his family had such a stranglehold on the lawless town of Granby that few dared to oppose them. Hudson was finally gunned down in his Granby saloon in 1892 by a deputy who was trying to arrest him for a crime he had committed years earlier during a brief sojourn in Colorado.
For a more detailed account of Hudson's murderous shenanigans, look for my article in an upcoming issue of Wild West Magazine on the "autocrat" who sat on the "criminal throne" at Granby.

Hobbs Kerry

Another notorious character who lived in Granby, Missouri during the late 1800s was Hobbs Kerry. The Kerry family moved from Arkansas during the late 1850s, and Hobbs and his older brothers, Albert and Toby, grew up in the rough atmosphere of the booming mining town. In the summer of 1870, Toby Kerry was killed in a fight over a card game while visiting a soiled dove's camp on the outskirts of town. A year later, Albert shot and killed a man named Dunlap in a row that also involved a prostitute. On a December night in 1873, John Cole and Bud Blunt were walking on the streets of Granby when they were ambushed from the dark shadows. Cole died from shotgun wounds, while Blunt made his escape. Albert Kerry, who had recently been made city marshal of Granby, and his brother, Hobbs, were suspected of the crime and arrested but released for lack of evidence.
About two years later, Hobbs Kerry drifted to nearby Joplin, also a booming mining town, where he met Bruce Younger, half-uncle of the infamous Younger brothers, and made the acquaintance of two members of the James-Younger gang. In June of 1876, he and the two gang members rode north to link up with Frank James, Jesse James, Cole Younger, Bob Younger, and one other man. In early July the eight gang members robbed a train on the Missouri Pacific Railroad just east of Otterville in Cooper County. Kerry, though, was quickly captured after he came back home to Granby and started flashing cash around. He received a light sentence in exchange for his cooperation, but by the time he gave his incriminating testimony, the other members of the gang were already headed north on an ill-fated mission to rob a Northfield (Minnesota) bank.
For a more detailed account of Hobbs Kerry's brief outlaw career, you might want to read my article in the October 2008 issue of Wild West Magazine.

Jake Killian

A week or so ago I mentioned the fact that Granby produced a lot of desperate characters during its heyday as a mining town in the mid to late 1800s. One of them was Jake Killian. In fact, all the males in the whole Killian family were a bunch of hard cases. I have an article about the Killians that will be published in a future issue of Wild West Magazine. So, I don't want to steal my own thunder by going into a lot of detail here, but here's a brief version of their story. The Killian family moved from Arkansas to Granby during the mid 1850s. The father, Cy Killian, got beat to death with a whiffle-tree by a drinking buddy on the streets of Granby in the late 1850s. During the Civil War, an older brother of Jake named Mart was taken from a jail in Carthage and strung up to a tree near Spring River by bushwhackers who rode down from Barton County to avenge an outrage on a Lamar saloonkeeper's wife. Jake himself was shot and blinded in one eye during the war while wrestling a fellow soldier named Norton for a gun after getting into a dispute over a card game. After the war, Jake killed William Lake, owner of a traveling circus, when the circus came to Granby in 1869. In 1873, another of Jake's older brothers, Ben, got into a row at a similar traveling show in Granby, and an innocent bystander was killed during the ensuing gunplay. Two years later, Jake's younger brother, Thomas, and two other men killed one of the citizens who had served on the grand jury that indicted Ben Killian for murder. Then in 1878, Jake Killian was killed by William Norton, the same man who'd blinded him during the war, on the streets of Empire City, Kansas (now part of Galena), when he went there in search of revenge. So much for the Killian family.

Melville to Dadeville

The Ozarks has its share of towns that were formerly known by a different name. For instance, Ava, the seat of Douglas County, was known as Militia Springs until several years after the Civil War.
Another town that used to be known by a different name is Dadeville, located, appropriately enough, in Dade County. The first trappings of a community on the present site of Dadeville sprang up around 1855 or 1856, and the place was called Melville, a name that was supposedly based on a drawing of straws out of a hat. The man who drew the lucky straw had the honor of naming the community and decided on Melville.
During the Civil War, Melville was raided by bushwhackers under Kinch West on two separate occasions, in the spring of 1863 shortly after West's father and brothers had been killed by Union soldiers or sympathizers and again on the morning of June 14, 1864. During the latter raid, guerrilla leader Pete Roberts also came along for the lark, and the rebels rode in and took possession of the place, gunning down a sixteen-year-old boy and a blind black man in the process before the two could make their escape with the rest of the fleeing citizens. After pillaging the stores of the town, the marauders set most of the businesses ablaze and headed northwest out of town, the same direction from which they'd come.
The community was rebuilt, and in 1865 the name was changed to Dadeville, reportedly because post office workers kept getting Melville confused with another town called Millville.
After the war, Kinch West became an outlaw of some note in Oklahoma.

Friendship Community

Although my coverage of the Ozarks will undoubtedly be tilted somewhat toward the Joplin area since that is the part of the region with which I'm most familiar, I want to try to cover other areas of the Ozarks, too. So, before I get back to the desperate characters of Granby that I mentioned last time, let me briefly discuss a couple of other topics from different sections of the Ozarks. The first one that comes to mind is the Friendship Community in Dallas County.
I first ran across a mention of the Friendship Community in the History of Dallas County several years ago. The entry said that the community was established in 1872 by Alcander Longley, publisher of a communist newspaper dedicated to social reform; that members of the community shared everything equally and lived together as one family; that they were left alone to do as they pleased; but that they disbanded in the 1880s as members became disillusioned.
All of this is largely true. The Friendship Community, located about four miles due west of Buffalo on Lindley Creek, was, in fact, a communist community, one of several started by Longley throughout the state of Missouri during the late 1800s. Longley did not view communism in political terms and was not an admirer of Karl Marx. Rather he was an advocate of what he called "practical communism" and urged people to live together in shared communities.
However, the county history entry is not entirely true. In the first place, the community had completely disbanded by the summer of 1877. Also, one of the main factors contributing to the exodus of members was threats and intimidation from Dallas County neighbors. Although Longley was an advocate of monogamous marriage, the common perception around Buffalo was that the community practiced polygamy and free love. Longley received anonymous, threatening letters telling him to quit advocating such "doctern," and the community was victimized by vandalism on a couple of occasions.
Later Longley formed a similar community just east of Halfway in Polk County called Principia, but it was even shorter lived than the Friendship Community.

Desperate Characters of Joplin, Granby, and Galena

Before I moved to the Joplin area from the Springfield area many years ago, I had occasionally heard mention of what a wild, wide-open town Joplin used to be back in its mining heyday, and my study of local history during the years since I've lived in Joplin has confirmed this to be the case. During the Old West era, the James gang and the Youngers visited the Joplin area at least once or twice for sure and probably other times as well, and a passel of lesser-known desperadoes frequented the town with some regularity. During the gangster era of the 20s and 30s, outlaws like Bonnie and Clyde, the Barkers, and Arkansas Tom of Doolin gang fame used Joplin as a hideout. Not until lead and zinc mining started petering out around the middle of the 20th century did the town finally begin to lose its reputation as an anything-goes type of place.
What I have learned in recent years, however, is that, for being a rough-and-tumble mining town in its early days, Joplin had nothing on either Granby or Galena (Kansas). Granby in particular, was home to an unusual number of murderers and assorted other rough characters. I'll be writing about some of them in more detail in future posts.

Bloodland

A fantastic story that has apparently circulated among certain military personnel stationed at Fort Leonard Wood over the years holds that the Bloodland area of the sprawling army post is haunted by ghosts. The story traces its origin to an incident that supposedly occurred shortly after the fort was completed in the early 1940s when a soldier, who got drunk on guard duty near Bloodland, explained his intoxication by claiming he had been kidnapped by ghosts and forced to drink hard cider through a straw. Subsequently, other soldiers reported being taken hostage in similar fashion, and in each case the kidnapping was attributed to the ghosts of former residents of the small community of Bloodland who, upset over being forced off their land when the fort was constructed, still haunted the area. I don't lend much credence to tales of paranormal phenomena in general, and I place even less stock in this one. Bloodland, of course, was only one of several small communities that were wiped off the face of the Pulaski County map when Fort Leonard Wood was built, but it was the largest. At the time the army announced plans to build the fort, Bloodland boasted a high school, two general stores, three filling stations, a post office, a couple of churches, and a population of about 100 people. While it's true that many of the people who had to leave land they had lived on all their lives were initially upset about moving, most quickly accepted it as their small patriotic contribution to winning World War II, which started only a few months later. As a lady whose family was displaced by Fort Leonard Wood told me about ten years ago when I wrote an article for The Ozarks Mountaineer about construction of the fort, "Everybody knew we had a war to win, and once they accepted it, everybody got behind it." My parents seemed to exemplify the same sentiment. They were two of the people who had to leave Bloodland because of the fort, and I never heard them complain about it. So, I don't think there are any ghosts haunting Bloodland, although visiting the cemetery there, where my grandparents are buried and which is about the only still-visible sign that the community ever existed, can be a bit eerie. And when I took basic training at Fort Leonard Wood during the Vietnam era, I always viewed the entire training area, including Bloodland, with some apprehension, but it had nothing to do with ghosts.

The Headlee Family

I wrote an article for the October-November 2001 issue of The Ozarks Mountaineer entitled "Murdered for Preaching the Gospel?" about Samuel S. Headlee, a minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church South who was killed on July 28, 1866, in the aftermath of the Civil War, when he attempted to preach at an M. E. Church North (Pleasant View) in northwest Webster County near Elkland, Missouri; and I have had more than a passing interest in the Headlees, one of the prominent families of early Greene County, ever since. So, recently as I was perusing the Missouri in the Civil War message board (http://history-sites.com/cgi-bin/bbs53x/mocwmb/webbs_config.pl) , a thread entitled "Who Was Capt. Headlee?" caught my attention.
"Capt. Headlee" refers to Samuel W. Headlee, who, as one of the postings pointed out, served as a Union captain in both the 72nd Enrolled Missouri Militia and the 16th Regiment of the Missouri Cavalry. One of the respondents to the original post also pointed out that there were two Samuel Headlees, presumably first cousins, and that Samuel W. Headlee was not to be confused with Rev. Samuel S. Headlee, the man who was killed near Elkland. All of this is true, except that there were actually five Samuel Headlees who were first cousins.
Revolutionary War veteran Elisha Headlee and most of his adult sons and daughters moved from Maury County, Tennessee, to Greene County during the early to mid 1830s, accompanied by the family of fellow Revolutionary War patriot Samuel Steele, five of whose daughters had married five of Headlee's sons. Most of the Headlees settled in the Hickory Barrens area between Springfield and Fair Grove, although some lived near Ebenezer, and all five of the Headlee-Steele marriages resulted in a son named Samuel, after the wives' father.
After the Civil War, Samuel W. Headlee served several terms as a state representative and one term as a state senator, and he ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor. Another of the like-named cousins, Samuel H. Headlee, became a prominent physician and moved to Phelps County, where he, too, served a term as a state senator, and at least a couple of the other Greene County Headlees were prominent in the post-Civil War politics and civic affairs of the county.
Some of the Headlees helped found Mount Comfort Church, and Samuel Steele is buried there. Many of the Headlees, including Samuel S. Headlee's father (Joseph) and grandfather (Elisha) are buried at Old Salem Cemetery on Fruitland Road (Farm Road 173) just a mile or so west of Old Highway 65 between Springfield and Fair Grove, but the reverend himself was brought back to Elm Springs Cemetery for burial (just north of the Hickory Barrens area) after he was killed in Webster County.
On a personal note, I would like to thank my friend and fellow writer Marilyn Smith for helping with my Headlee research. I'd also like to thank Mary Nida Smith, whose recent article in the Missouri Writers' Guild newsletter inspired me to start this blog, for her tips and advice on blogging. You can check out her blog at http://marynidasmith.blogspot.com/.

Halltown

I mentioned Halltown in my previous post a couple of days ago. It's located about twelve to fifteen miles west of Springfield on Highway 266, which is old Route 66. You can see the town sitting off to the north near the Carthage-Avilla exit as you drive by on I-44. Halltown is one of many once-thriving small towns scattered throughout the Ozarks that have gone downhill since their heyday in the early 1900s. George Hall started the first business in Halltown in 1876, and the town was named after him. The town prospered, especially after the coming of the Mother Road, Route 66, during the 1920s. In 1925, Halltown boasted a high school, three general stores, nine service stations, two barber shops, and numerous other businesses. Later, the town was home to many antique shops and became known as the "Antique Capital of the World." When I-44 was built during the early 1960s, the road bypassed the business district, hastening the decline of Halltown, as it did for many other small towns along Route 66. Nowadays, most of the people who travel through Halltown are locals or Route 66 enthusiasts, and only one or two businesses remain.

Turnback Creek

I travel I-44 between Springfield and Joplin fairly often, and I always used to wonder, when I would see the "Turnback Creek" sign near Halltown, about the curiously named stream that meanders beneath the highway bridge there. I imagined that perhaps the creek got its name because of the many "turnbacks" of its circuitous route. Come to find out, the course that the stream follows has nothing to do with how it got its name. In the fall of 1831, so the story goes, a group of settlers from Tennessee, led by John Williams, went out from Springfield in search of new land and camped on the creek. While there, some in the group decided to turn back, presumably because of threatening weather or illness, and spend the winter in Springfield. Williams, though, ventured on and built a home about three miles southeast of present-day Mount Vernon, becoming the first permanent white settler in what became Lawrence County. A hundred years later, in 1931 the event and the location were commemorated with a large celebration, and a small monument was placed at the home site.

Thomas Hart Benton

The third annual Thomas Hart Benton festival, sponsored by the Newton County Tourism Commission, is coming up in late November. I've never been a connoisseur of Benton's art or of art in general for that matter, but, because of the local angle, I have written a couple of brief articles about his life, including one in the November 2008 issue of Show-Me the Ozarks Magazine, a publication for which I write almost every month. Benton was born in rural Neosho, but the part of his autobiography, An Artist in America, that especially interested me when I read it a number of years ago was his account of the summer he spent in nearby Joplin in 1906 at the age of seventeen. At the time, Joplin was a booming, anything-goes mining town, and Benton thoroughly enjoyed his first summer of freedom. He started out working as a surveyor for a mining company but got hired midway through the summer as a cartoonist for a fledgling newspaper, the Joplin American, in the 400 block of Main Street. At night, particularly on weekends, Benton drank beer in Joplin saloons, including the infamous House of Lords, and no one questioned the seventeen-year-old boy's adult standing. At some point during the summer, young Benton made the acquaintance of a man who frequented the bawdy houses of the wide-open town, where "insinuatingly decorated girls" plied their trade. On his first few visits to one of the houses, according to Benton, he merely waited in an outside room drinking beer while his friend went inside, but the lad eventually surrendered his innocence to a sporting girl in "a flaming red kimono." The romantic Benton found the experience unpleasant and "looked no further into the mysteries of sex."
Thomas Hart Benton, of course, went on to become a famous artist, noted especially for his murals depicting everyday American life. During the early 1970s, he returned to Joplin to paint a mural for the city hall called "Joplin at the Turn of the Century," based partly on his recollections from the summer he had spent in the town over sixty years earlier.

Dug Springs

A group of reenactors and other Civil War enthusiasts placed a monument at Clever, Missouri, on October 7 in commemoration of the skirmish at Dug Springs that occurred near present-day Clever along the Old Wire Road on August 2, 1861. The skirmishers on the Federal side were part of a force of over 5,000 men under General Nathaniel Lyon, and those on the Confederate side were part of a force of about 3,000 men under General James S. Rains of the Missouri State Guard. The action at Dug Springs, a precursor to the Battle of Wilson's Creek a week later, was considered a Union victory, since Rains retreated, leaving the field of battle in Federal hands. However, as was almost always the case during the Civil War, each side minimized its own losses and exaggerated the other side's losses in reports filed after the action. Rains, for instance, suggested that as many as fourteen Union soldiers were killed during the skirmish, but the facts seem to suggest that the number of men lost in killed and seriously wounded by each side during the skirmish could probably be counted on one hand. As Ozarks historian and folklorist Silas Turnbo said in regard to a similar skirmish that took place at Forsyth eleven days earlier, the action at Dug Springs "was not a big fight, but it was hot enough to be remembered" by those who took part in it. A solider who fell at Dug Springs was just as dead as the thousands who gave their lives in epic battles like Gettysburg.
By the way, my first job out of college was teaching high school at Clever.

Why Ozarks history?

I've lived in the Ozarks all my life and have long had an interest in local history, whetted partly by my interest in genealogy, since all branches of my family settled in the Ozarks generations ago. I've been freelance writing for publiction for almost thirty-five years, and for the past twenty years or so my speciality has been the history of the Ozarks and surrounding regions like Kansas and northern Missouri. Even my fiction tends to be historically based. I've altered the oft-cited advice to "write what you know" only slightly, in that I tend to "write where I know." Periodically I'll be posting thoughts and news pertaining to historical people and events of the Ozarks and to my writing about those events.