The Ed Clum murder case

For romantic intrigue, few criminal cases in Ozarks history rival the murders of J. J. White and Ella Bowe by Ed Clum in Barry County during the summer of 1886. At the time, the case was called "Barry County's most shocking crime," and the details remain pretty startling even today.
White and Clum were from the same small town in New York and were members of the same unit of the Union army during the Civil War. Returning home after the war, they remained friends and took up residence close to each other. The older White had married during the war, and Clum entered into wedlock with a carefree girl named Lottie not long after his discharge. White was apparently a frequent visitor in the Clum home, and he and Lottie soon started carrying on together, right under Clum's nose. White's wife eventually killed herself because of her husband's shenanigans, but it didn't stop his philandering.
When Lottie's health began to fail, she went to live with a sister at Lebanon, Missouri, but White soon followed and took her to a farm he had purchased south of Pierce City in Barry County. Clum showed up and was introduced around Pierce City as Lottie's brother, presumably to protect her reputation. He took her back to Lebanon and continued to New York with the understanding that she would join him as soon as her health allowed her to make the trip, but instead she went back to White's Barry County farm.
After Lottie died during the winter of 1885-1886, Clum made the trip back to Missouri again and resumed the charade he'd started the previous summer, passing himself off as the brother of White's deceased "wife." Folks in the area considered him and White not only brothers-in-law but also good friends.
Soon White started romancing a 17-year-old neighbor girl named Ella Bowe, and when the couple announced plans to get married, it was more than Clum could take. He killed them both with two shotgun blasts apiece. Clum was convicted of murder and hanged on the square in Cassville in the spring of 1887.
The full story of the Clum murders constitutes a chapter in my "notorious incidents" book.

Emma Molloy

Last time I mentioned the notorious Graham murder case that happened in Greene County in the mid 1880s. The main reason it received such notoriety was because of the involvement of nationally known evangelist and temperance revivalist Emma Molloy. Molloy came to Greene County in the winter of 84-85 and held a series of revival meetings at a Springfield church. A younger man named George Graham, with whom Molloy had previously been involved in the publication of a temperance newspaper, showed up shortly after the meetings began and started courting Ms. Molloy's foster daughter, Cora Lee. After the meetings were over, Molloy purchased a farm near Brookline and was assisted in the transaction by James Baker, a prominent Springfield citizen who had helped bring the revivalist to Greene County to begin with.
Molloy, her foster daughter, and Graham started living at the residence, and Graham soon married Cora Lee. The problem was that he hadn't told anyone he was still married to his first wife. When Sarah Graham showed up, George killed her and dumped her body in an abandoned well on the Molloy farm.
When the body was finally discovered, George Graham was charged with murder, Cora Lee with being an accessory before the fact, and Emma Molloy with being an accessory after the fact. Before Graham came to trial, he was lynched by a mob, and the cases against Cora and Emma were eventually dismissed after preliminary hearings that attracted many spectators and drew sensational publicity. Ms. Molloy then went on to re-establish her reputation in the nationwide temperance movement.
Even today, however, the extent of Molloy's involvement, if any, in the murder of Sarah Graham and the coverup of the crime, remains a subject of debate among those few individuals familiar with the case. Part of what fuels the debate is the involvement of James Baker as Ms. Molloy's patron. Twenty years earlier Baker had been a strong defender of the vigilante Regulators in Greene County, and it is thought by some that he was one of the organizers of the mob that lynched George Graham (so that George couldn't implicate Cora and Emma).
You can read a more detailed account of this case in my book about notorious Ozarks incidents.

Religious Criminals

While surfing the Internet not long ago, I ran across a New York Times article, dated April 3, 1887, that contained an interesting comment on the murder a year and a half earlier in Greene County, Missouri, of Sarah Graham by her husband, George, and the sensational trial that followed of temperance revivalist Emma Molloy as an accessory to the crime. After giving the circumstances of the crime and the trial, the writer said, "It is a curious fact that in no part of the country are religious professions and simulated religious fervor more effectively used as a cloak for atrocious criminal tendencies and acts than in Southern Missouri. One of the leaders of the infamous bands of thugs called the Bald Knobbers is a Baptist preacher, and several of his fellow assassins are members of his church. It was in Southern Missouri that Sarah Graham was murdered in September, 1885, and on Mrs. Molloy's farm."
Ozarks folklorist Vance Randolph made a similar observation in his book (written under the pseudonym of Harvey Castleman) about the Bald Knobbers when he said, "Nearly all these murderers and outlaws, for some reason, were very religious men."
I might add Kate Bender of the Bloody Bender family to the list of religious killers from this general region. Although she wasn't, as far as I know, particularly religious in the conventional sense, she did claim to be a spiritualist and seeress.
I'm not sure whether there is anything to the Times reporter's observation that the southern Missouri region seems to breed more than its share of criminals who try to hide their heinous tendencies behind a veneer of religious fervor, but it is food for thought. It seems religion has been twisted to serve violent purposes ever since there was such a thing as religion, but I'm not sure people in the Ozarks and surrounding area are any more prone to such a tendency than people from other places.
More about the Emma Molloy case next time.

Jesse James

If one were to believe all the legends and folklore about Jesse James that I've heard during my lifetime of living in the Ozarks and especially during my adulthood living in Joplin, one would think that Jesse spent a good deal of time in these parts, particularly the Joplin area. I've found very little documentation, however, to support such a claim. I do know that Fletch Taylor, who led a company of Quantrill's guerrillas during the Civil War that included Frank and Jesse James, moved to Joplin during the 1870s and that a sister of Jesse paid a visit to Taylor here one time around 1880. (Taylor was involved in mining and became a respected businessman in Joplin.)
However, the only time that I know about that Jesse himself was in this area was when George Shepherd, another ex-Quantrillian, tried to kill him near Galena, Kansas, in the fall of 1879. In fact, Shepherd rode into Galena claiming that he HAD killed Jesse. Few people believed him, though, even at the time. Some thought Shepherd was merely a fanciful liar, while others suggested that he was in cahoots with Jesse and the whole incident had been staged to make people think Jesse was dead so the law would quit looking for him.
What is known for sure is that some sort of gunplay between Shepherd and Jesse's gang did occur, and, given the severity of the wounds sustained by both Shepherd and one of the gang members, it seems unlikely that they were participants (at least not willing participants) in a staged event. Although the following possibility was scarcely mentioned at the time, my research has led me to believe that Shepherd sincerely thought he had killed Jesse but that the desperado survived the assassination attempt and seized the opportunity to try to stage his own death.
You can read more about this incident in my book on Ozarks gunfights, which is supposed to be released later this month.

Galena and Empire City

Galena, Kansas, is pretty tame nowadays compared to what it was during its early days. Like several of the towns in the tri-state region of Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma that got their start as mining camps, Galena was a rough and rowdy place in its infancy. During the spring of 1877, lead was discovered on Short Creek just across the Missouri state line in southeast Kansas, and miners and other adventurers flocked to the area throughout the spring and summer.
Two towns, Galena and Empire City, sprang up on opposite sides of Short Creek, and a bitter rivalry between the two fledgling communities quickly developed. Empire City resented the fact that Red Hot Street at the north edge of Galena quickly became a center of saloons and other entertainment for the miners, drawing them away from their own town, and, during the summer of 1877, the city fathers began constructing a long, tall wall to separate the two towns, claiming its purpose was to retard the filthy stench emanating from Galena. Violence erupted and the citizens of Galena burned the wall down before things finally began to settle down when the cool weather of fall approached. The rivalry continued with less intensity, though, for several years, until Empire City was finally annexed into Galena during the early 1900s.

Youngers & Pinkertons

I mentioned in a previous post a few months ago that I passed through Roscoe on my way to the Sedalia State Fair, and I noted at that time that Roscoe is near where the infamous Younger brothers had a shootout in March of 1874 with agents of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. I co-wrote an article about the shootout that appeared in Wild West Magazine a few years ago, and a similar version of the article appears as a chapter in my book about notorious incidents of the Ozarks.
One of the difficulties I encountered in researching the article was in trying to determine the exact route of the Chalk Level Road, along which the shootout and the events leading up to the shootout occurred. The Chalk Level Road going north out of Roscoe followed roughly the route of present-day Highway E but definitely not exactly the same route. For example, while modern-day Highway E skirts the eastern edge of Roscoe and then angles back to the northwest, the old Chalk Level Road did just the opposite--that is, it started from the center of Roscoe and angled northeast past the Theodrick Snuffer home, which sat almost a mile east of present-day Highway E.
I am currently working on a book about the battles of Newtonia, and I find that I am once again encountering difficulty determining the exact routes of old roads. The routes of some of the roads in and out of Newtonia are fairly well established, but figuring out the routes of others is an inexact science. As I understand it, section lines in Newton County were not drawn until after the Civil War; so most of the old roads simply followed the path of least resistance. But determining exactly where they ran is not easy, since Missouri road maps from the Civil War era are almost nonexistent.

The Cherokee Neutral Lands

The Neutral Lands was an area in southeast Kansas that was originally set aside as a buffer between Missouri and Osage Indian territory after the Osages were removed from Missouri to Kansas under the terms of an 1825 treaty. The area; comprising present-day Cherokee County, Crawford County, and a strip of southern Bourbon County; was ceded to the Cherokee Indians as an additonal allotment of land under terms of the 1835 treaty by which they were removed from the Southeast to Indian Territory, and the region became known as the Cherokee Neutral Lands. Few Cherokees actually settled in the area, however, and when white settlers started squatting on the land around the time of the Civil War, the Cherokees decided to sell it.
In 1866, the Cherokees signed a treaty with the United States to act as their agent in the transaction, and the following year the government sold the land to railroad magnate James F. Joy, who was representing the Kansas City, Fort Scott, and Gulf Railroad. The prospect of a railroad coming through the Neutral Lands, though, angered many settlers already there, and settlers and prospective settlers were further enraged when the railroad starting selling excess land at what they considered exorbitant prices. The clash between the two sides turned violent and ended up being the biggest railroad-settler dispute in Kansas history.

Regulators

Vigilantism was prevalent in America for many years after the Civil War, and the vigilante actions often had political overtones left over from the war. Nowhere was this truer than in Missouri. A slave-holding border state that remained in the Union, Missouri was very divided during the war, and the bitterness engendered by the conflict lingered and gave rise to violence long after the war officially ended. Although not an act of what we would normally think of as vigilantism, the killing of Rev. Samuel S. Headlee, which I discussed last time, is an example of an act of violence that occurred shortly after the war and had political overtones. Rev. Headlee was killed by Union men in large part because he was an unrepentant and outspoken Confederate sympathizer.
About the same time that Headlee was killed in the western edge of Webster County in late July of 1866, another drama that definitely did involve vigilantism was winding down in neighboring Greene County. In fact, the Regulators, formed earlier in the year to combat an outbreak of thievery that centered around the Walnut Grove area of northwest Greene County, held a mass meeting on the very day that Headlee was killed, although there was no apparent connection between the two events.
The Regulators, who disbanded shortly after the mass meeting, were something of an exception to the idea that vigilante groups tended to be politically motivated. Although the Regulators were made up mostly of Union men and many of the lawbreakers that they opposed had been Confederate guerrillas or at least Southern sympathizers, the first victim of the Regulators was Green B. Phillips, a former captain in the Enrolled Missouri Militia who had aided in the defense of Springfield during John S. Marmaduke's attack on the town in January of 1863. There is also little evidence to suggest that Phillips had seriously violated any laws. However, he had apparently fallen in with the thieves and was therefore lynched for befriending the wrong people.
You can read more about the Regulators in my book about Ozarks gunfights and other notorious incidents.

Samuel S. Headlee

Another chapter in my new book is about the murder of the Rev. Samuel S. Headlee at the Pleasant View Church in northwest Webster County near Elkland shortly after the Civil War. I mentioned Headlee in a previous post about a year ago and discussed the Headlee family fairly extensively, but I went into very little detail about the murder itself. Without giving away the whole story (which you'll have to read my book to get), I will briefly outline the circumstances surrounding the killing.
Before and during the early part of the war, Headlee was a circuit-riding minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church who often preached at Pleasant View. The Civil War tore the church apart, and it split into two factions, the ME Church North and the ME Church South. Although the Northern faction came to dominate the church by the time the war ended, the Southern faction still claimed title to the building.
The Drake Constitution, adopted in Missouri shortly after the war, forbade anyone who had sympathized with the Confederacy from holding a responsible job like teaching, preaching, or practicing law without first taking an oath of allegiance to the Union. Headlee, as an unrepentant Confederate sympathizer, refused to take the oath but decided nonetheless to try to reclaim the Pleasant View Church for the Southern faction. When he announced that he was going to hold a revival meeting there near the end of July 1866, the Northern faction organized to oppose him and warned him not to try to carry through on his plans.
The headstrong Headlee showed up anyway on the appointed day insisting on his right to preach, but a mob that had gathered to challenge him forced him off the church grounds. As he was removing to some land he owned in the vicinity with plans to preach on his own property, he was shot and killed about a quarter of a mile from the church.

Wild Bill Hickok & Dave Tutt

My book entitled Ozarks Gunfights and Other Notorious Incidents has been released (or at least it's available for order from online bookstores); so for the next several posts, I thought I'd touch briefly on some of the subjects covered in the book. A few of them I have already mentioned in previous posts, but most of them I have not previously mentioned.
Chapter One of the book is an account of Wild Bill Hickok's shootout with Davis Tutt on the Springfield square shortly after the close of the Civil War. I won't try to recount the event here, but I'll mention two or three things that struck me as remarkable as I was doing my research, because they were things I was not already aware of. The first thing is that the circumstances surrounding the event and the guilt or innocence of either party were not black and white. In the popular myth, of course, Wild Bill is the good guy, but in reality, he had something of a notorious reputation himself, at least around Springfield. Many Southern-leaning citizens felt that the jury, composed almost exclusively of Northern sympathizers, brought in its not guilty verdict more because of the fact that Hickok had been a Union soldier and Tutt had served in the Confederate army than because of the circumstances of the duel.
We usually hear that the Hickok-Tutt gunfight grew out of dispute over a card game, but I was a little surprised to learn that Tutt, according to at least one report, was not actually involved in the game. Tension between the two men (partly over a romantic rivalry) had supposedly already reached such a point that Hickok refused to play cards with Tutt, and the dispute that led directly to the gunfight involved a prior debt that Hickok owed Tutt, not a debt arising out of the game that occurred on the fateful day.
Finally, my research has led me to believe that the gunfight occurred later on the same day that the poker game took place, not the next day as many accounts suggest. It should be remembered that back in those days card games were often played during daylight hours, mainly because of the unavailabilty of electric lights. Since the gunfight took place around 6 p.m., it seems logical to conclude, and the evidence seems to suggest, that the card game had taken place earlier the same day, not the previous day.

Bloody Bill Anderson

My wife and I just returned from a weekend trip to north Missouri, and we passed through Huntsville, which was the boyhood home of notorious Confederate guerrilla William "Bloody Bill" Anderson. The Anderson family moved to Kansas in 1857, but Bill paid a return visit to his old hometown after he had become notorious. During the summer of 1864, he and his band rode in, fired a few shots, and placed the whole town under arrest. While still holding the town captive, Bill visited pleasantly with a couple of men he remembered from his youth. Then he and his gang loaded up all the valuables they could haul and galloped out of town.
Anderson, of course, operated mainly in north Missouri, but he did make at least a couple of forays into the Ozarks--one as a member of Quantrill's band in the fall of 1863 when the guerrillas attacked Baxter Springs and the other the following spring when he returned to Missouri leading his own small band after wintering in Texas. During the latter incursion, the Anderson gang captured a Union man in the northwest edge of Greene County and took him into Polk County, where they killed him and supposedly mutilated his body.

A Patriotic Flogging

Civil war, by its very nature, tends to give rise to atrocity. America's Civil War was, of course, no exception; and the state of Missouri, where a ferocious brand of guerrilla warfare arose, probably witnessed more than its share of barbaric acts. In addition, the state also saw a number of lesser cruelties that, while perhaps not rising to the level of atrocity, were nonetheless notorious deeds. One such incident occurred at Clinton, Missouri, very early in the war.
On July 4, 1861, a combined force of about two or three thousand Kansas volunteers and army regulars marched into Clinton, the Henry County seat, on their way to link up with General Nathaniel Lyon, who was marching toward Springfield from the Missouri River region around Boonville. Although most of the Southern-leaning young men of Henry County had already gone south with General Sterling Price and Governor Claiborne Jackson a few days earlier, Sturgis found Clinton "pretty much given over to rebellion," according to the Leavenworth Weekly Conservative. It was Independence Day, but the Clintonites had "abolished the great anniversary, Yankee Doodle, the Stars and Stripes, the American Eagle, and all other National institutions."
Some of the volunteers celebrated the Fourth by imbibing a little too freely when a local man "rolled out a large keg of mean whiskey," and a few of the inebriated Kansans started stealing chickens and vegetables from local citizens and committing other minor depredations.
Eight offending soldiers and one teamster were promptly brought before Major Sturgis, who ordered them flogged by some of his regulars. The next day (the same day that Governor Jackson met Colonel Franz Sigel at the Battle of Carthage) they were tied in turn to a cannon and given fifty lashes each on the bare back with a teamster's blacksnake whip.
The severe punishment almost caused a mutiny among the Kansas volunteers, with some of them threating to kill Sturgis, and the Conservative questioned why loyal U. S. solders were dealt with so sternly for relatively minor indiscretions, while men who were in open rebellion against the United States could escape punishment by merely taking an oath.

Newtonia

I am currently in Columbia, where for the past day or two I've been doing some research at the State Historical Society of Missouri and at the Western Historical Manuscript Collection on the MU campus for a book I am writing about the two battles of Newtonia. When I first undertook this project, I worried that there wouldn't be enough material for a book-length manuscript (minimum length approximately 40,000 words). How much can a person write about two relatively minor Civil War battles? I asked myself. However, I'm beginning to think that lack of material may not as much of a problem as I first anticipated. There's a lot more than one might think about the Newtonia battles. Some of the sources I was completely unaware of until I started research for the book--for instance, M. Jeff Thompson's memoir here in Columbia at the Western Historical Manuscript Collection. Thompson commanded Shelby's brigade of Shelby's division during Price's invasion of Missouri in the fall of 1864, and he wrote fairly extensively about the campaign in his memoirs, including a petty good account of the Second Battle of Newtonia.

Thompson, by the way, was quite a colorful character. The mayor of St. Joseph before the Civil War, he was named a brigadier general in the Missouri State Guard when the war broke out and earned a reputation in southeast Missouri as the "swamp fox of the Confederacy." Thompson fancied himself a poet of sorts, and some of his writings are interesting to read.

Saratoga Springs

As I think I mentioned in one of my previous posts about mineral water towns, some of them, like Eureka Springs and Siloam Springs, continued to flourish even after the mineral water craze passed, but a lot of them faded into obscurity almost as rapidly as they sprang up. One of the latter was Saratoga Springs in McDonald County, Missouri.
Located at the edge of Cowskin Prairie in Prairie Township in the southwest part of the county, Saratoga Springs was laid out in 1880, and three additions were laid out the following year. For a year or two, according to Sturges's History of McDonald County, the town "promised to be a place of some importance" and "had the prettiest location and most abundant water supply of all the medical towns." Many houses were erected, several business buildings went up, and even a newspaper "flourished in its palmiest days." By the time Sturges's history was published in 1897, though, "the pride of her glory" had already "long since departed" and "the bloom of her beauty faded slowly away." Only a few residences, a post office, and a couple of small stores remained at the "once promising little city."
Today Saratoga Springs still exists but only as a wide place in the road on Highway 90 about halfway between Noel and Southwest City, and it is known nowadays as Saratoga, without the "Springs."

Alf Bolin

Alf Bolin, as most students of Ozarks history and folklore know, was a notorious bushwhacker in the Taney County area during the Civil War. He was not, however, nearly as notorious as the legend would have one believe. At least, I don't think so. I've written about this before in The Ozarks Mountaineer and elsewhere, but it continues to bother me when I see stuff written about Bolin perpetuating the notion that he was one of the worst criminals to ever step foot on the soil of Missouri. In fact, so much bloated nonsense has been written about Bolin that he has been turned almost into a folk hero.
The truth is Bolin wasn't even very well known in his own time. He may have had a local reputation around Forsyth as a thief and a bully, but if he had been even half as bad as the modern-day legend leads one to believe, he would have been well known throughout the whole state. Taney County may have been an isolated area during the Civil War, but it wasn't that isolated. Confederate guerrillas like Tom Livingston of Jasper County were well known in Union circles at least as far away as Kansas City and St. Louis, and Livingston was often mentioned in official Union and Confederate reports. Bolin, on the other hand, who was supposedly more heinous than Livingston ever thought about being, receives not one mention in the Official Records--not one. There is one brief mention of a horse thief named Boler in the Taney County area that may refer to Bolin but nothing specifically about Alf Bolin.
Because Bolin was not particularly infamous, very little was written about him until after he died, and because of this lack of a written record, it's hard to go back and disprove the legend. In at least one instance, though, the legend can be discredited by available written records. Bolin is usually blamed (or given credit for) the murder of Old Man Budd in southern Christian County. Written records at the Missouri State Archives show that this incident occurred during the late summer or early fall of 1861, and the leader of the gang who committed the murder was not Alf Bolin. Bolin may have been among the gang, but he was not its leader.
The main reason Bolin became so legendary and notorious after his death was the way he died and what happened to his body postmortem. He had the misfortune (or the good fortune one might say if he was aiming for immortality) to get his head chopped off.

Stand Watie

Not long ago, I ran across a short article in the September 14, 1871 Neosho Times about the death of Stand Watie that had occured a few days before. (Yes, I spend a lot of time perusing old newspapers.) Watie, as anyone who has studied the Civil War in the Trans Mississippi knows, was a Confederate general during the war, perhaps most famous for the two battles of Cabin Creek near the spot where the Fort Scott to Fort Gibson road crossed the creek a couple of miles north of present-day Pensacola, Oklahoma, not far from the Craig-Mayes county line. The first battle, in the summer of 1863, was a Federal victory, but Watie got a measure of revenge a little over a year later when he whipped the Yankees at the Second Battle of Cabin Creek.
In the years leading up to the war, Watie was the leader of the mixed-race Cherokees, while John Ross, chief of the tribe, was the leader of the purebreds. This is quite ironic, though, since Watie was seven-eighths Cherokee while Ross was a Scotsman with only one-eighth Cherokee blood. The mixed-bloods, who had a long history of interaction with whites, had mostly favored the treaty by which the tribe was removed from the Southeast, while the full-blood Cherokees largely opposed it. The split led to a bitter feud between the two factions that resulted in the deaths of Watie's brother, uncle, and others and that continued clear up through the Civil War. There's a lot more to the story, but that's the very short version.
Stand Watie is buried at the Ridge cemetery just west of Southwest City, Missouri, a mile or so inside Oklahoma.

Dennis Weaver

I've mentioned several famous and semi-famous people from the Ozarks in past posts. Another person who comes to mind is Dennis Weaver, who grew up in Joplin, where I currently live. The house where Weaver lived as a boy, in the 600 block of Brownell, is still standing, and Joplin has a street near the airport named after Weaver. As a young man, Weaver attended Joplin Junior College (which grew into Missouri Southern State University).
Weaver is mainly remembered for his roles in three TV series: Gunsmoke, Gentle Ben, and McCloud. One of my most vivid memories of the McCloud series is the time Weaver's character was being tracked by radar and, to his boss's alarm, it showed him going across New York City on a diagonal at over 100 miles an hour. Come to find out, he had somehow managed to get himself into a predicament that forced him to be hanging on to the bottom rails of a speeding helicopter. Another vivid memory is the made-for-TV movie Duel, in which Weaver was being chased by a seemingly driverless semi-trailer truck.

Climax Springs

One of the ways I come up with new ideas to write about is let to something I've previously written about be a springboard to my next project. So, it is with this blog. I find myself using previous entries to come up with ideas for new ones, and right now I seem to be stuck on the general subject of towns throughout the Ozarks that sprung up around mineral springs.
Another such community is Climax Springs in Camden County, Missouri. It was founded in 1882 as merely "Climax." The "Springs" part was added in 1886 by a group of businessmen who decided to promote the healing waters of the area's many mineral springs. Although Climax Springs never enjoyed the popularity of some of the other mineral-water towns in the Ozarks, the 1889 Camden County history declared that it was "a romantic and pleasant village in which to live" and claimed that "as a health resort it is probably not excelled."
Today Climax Springs sports a population of only 100 people or so, but the town and the surrounding area still prosper enough to support a high school.

Cedar Springs and Jerico Springs

A few weeks ago, in a couple of my posts about towns in the Ozarks that grew up around springs during the mineral-water craze of the late 1800s, I mentioned Monegaw Springs in St. Clair County and Eldorado Springs in Cedar County. Cedar County was also home to at least a couple of other famous springs, Cedar Springs and Jerico Springs.
Cedar Springs, another town that I passed through coming home from Sedalia recently, was laid out in 1884 and originally called Balm to suggest the healing powers of its waters. Like quite a few such towns, Cedar Springs declined rapidly after the mineral-water craze passed, and today it is little more than a wide place in the road along Highway 54 east of Eldorado Springs.
Jerico Springs, located in western Cedar County near the Barton County and Vernon County lines, was laid out in 1882, although the area was reportedly known for the curative powers of its waters long before that date. The name of the town came from a combination of the biblical city of Jericho and a man named Carrico, who had formerly owned the land on which the town was built. Bath houses were opened in Jerico Springs in 1883, and the town's springs were advertised as the "Fountain of Youth." Today, Jerico Springs, with a population of a couple of hundred people, has declined since its heyday, but it has not yet faded to near extinction the way Cedar Springs has.

Baxter Springs

Few towms in the Ozarks have a richer history than Baxter Springs. (I consider Baxter Springs in the Ozarks, although admittedly it's right at the western edge.) The town is famous on at least three separate counts.
First it is well known as the site of Quantrill's battle and massacre there in October of 1863. After attacking Fort Blair, which was still under construction at the time, and being repelled, Quantrill attacked and annihilated a Union wagon train under General James Blunt that was on its way into the fort, leaving over ninety bodies strewn about the field.
Baxter is also famous for being the first cow town in Kansas. During the years immediately after the Civil War, before the railroad reached towns farther west like Abilene and Wichita, Baxter Springs was the main destination for herds of longhorns driven through Indian Territory from Texas to Kansas. After the long journey along the Shawnee Trail, the cattle would usually lay over in Baxter before being herded (later shipped) on to their final destination. Part of the reason for Baxter's rise as a cattle town was the fact that Kansas had laws that allowed the Texas longhorns to enter the state only during specified months, and the cattle would lay over in Baxter, which at the time was located south of the state line in the Cherokee Neutral Lands, while awaiting passage. Although Baxter's life as a rowdy cow town was short lived, for a while it roared just as loudly as its successors farther west. Larry O'Neal of the Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum told me yesterday that the only thing the other towns had that Baxter lacked was a famous marshal like Wyatt Earp. I reminded him that probably part of the reason Baxter lacked a famous lawman was because two of the town's early marshals were killed in the line of duty. I find it a little ironic that perhaps the only reason they didn't become famous was that they didn't live long enough to embellish their stories the way Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok did.
Baxter declined for a time during the late 1800s after its hurrah as a cow town, but it revived in the early part of the twentieth century during the tri-state district's lead mining days and once again became a booming town for awhile.
Baxter has a few other minor claims to fame, too, such as being the hometown of golfer Hale Irwin, but the first three are the main ones.
By the way, Treble Heart Books has just released my new historical novel, entitled Showdown at Baxter Springs, that is based on the town's heyday as booming cow town. As far as I know, it's the only western ever set in early-day Baxter Springs. For anybody who's interested, you can order the book directly from the publisher at http://www.trebleheartbooks.com/SDLarryWood.html.

Traveling to the Sedalia Fair

My wife and I made a trip from Joplin to the Missouri State Fair at Sedalia over the weekend, and, taking the shortest route (via Eldorado Springs) we passed through some interesting small towns along the way. Of course, small towns are my favorite kind, especially small towns of the Ozarks.
At Eldorado Springs, we took Highway 82 to Osceola, and along the way we passed through such wide places in the road as Roscoe, which is near the spot where the Younger brothers had their infamous shootout with Pinkerton agents in the spring of 1874. From Osceola, we followed 82 until we came to Highway 83, and we then took 83 into Warsaw, where we picked up Highway 65 for the rest of the trip to Sedalia. Neither Highway 82 nor Highway 83 is what one would call a good road. Both roads are relatively narrow and have a lot of curves and hills, but it is the shortest route.
Coming home, we took 65 all the way to Preston, where we picked up Highway 54 through Eldorado Springs, and then we got on Highway 71 at Nevada for the rest of the trip back. Not quite as eventful as the trip up, but we still saw some interesting little towns, like Weaubleau and Wheatland, and even came within seven miles of Elkton, the hometown of Sally Rand--the same place that I said in a post a couple of weeks ago that I had never visited. I was tempted to take a side trip to Elkton just to say I'd been there but decided I was in too big of a hurry to get home.
Oh, and we did stop at Collins, where we ate at Smith's Restaurant, home of the famous homemade pies. They were out of my favorite, coconut, though; so I didn't have dessert.
It was somewhat of a hectic trip, since we made the journey up and back in the same day, but still kind of fun, because I always enjoy getting out and seeing the Ozarks, especially parts of it that I don't normally visit on a regular basis.

Murphy Movement

I mentioned in my last post about Liberal that the late 1800s were a time of great social and religious experimentation across America. It was also a time of religious revival and reform. One aspect of the reawakening was the abstinence movement, led mainly by women, that swept across the U. S. during the late 1800s and continued into the 1900s. Organizations like the Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Union sprang up, and their anti-liquor campaigns gave rise to crusading figures like Carrie Nation.
While these groups opposed the consumption of alcoholic beverages mainly by targeting saloons and by trying to get laws against drinking passed, one strain of the temperance movement, called the Murphy Movement, concentrated on the drinkers themselves. Named after its founder, Francis Murphy, who was a former saloonkeeper himself, the movement asked people to sign a pledge not to drink, and they were then given blue ribbons to wear as a token of the pledge. The movement started in Pittsburg, Penn. in late 1876, and by early 1878 it had reached the Ozarks. A series of meetings were held at various churches in Springfield, particularly the First Christian Church located just west of the square, during January and February of that year, and over two thousand people took the pledge. The movement also spread to other Greene County communities like Ash Grove and Walnut Grove and to towns throughout southwest Missouri, like Pierce City, Carthage, Webb City, and Joplin.
By late March of 1878, the movement had petered out in southwest Missouri, having died out about as fast as it got started, but the overall temperance movement did not culminate until many years later with passage of the Prohibition law.

Liberal

I've mentioned in previous posts a couple of the communities founded in the Ozarks by Alcander Longley on the principle of practical communism during the late 1800s, and I've also mentioned at least a couple of towns that were founded as mineral water resorts during the same period. The late 1800s were a time of great social and religious experimentation in the United States, and I'm fascinated by the communities that sprang up across the country based on one utopian principle or another. Liberal, founded in 1880 by George H. Walser in Barton County, Mo., was one such town.
People nowadays don't give the name "Liberal" a second thought, but the town was given its name for a reason. Walser, a Union Army veteran, wanted his town to be a haven for freethinkers and other skeptics, where they would not be bothered by Christian neighbors. The idea seemed to work for awhile. Walser started a school at Liberal based on free thought, and he even named the town's streets after intellectuals like Thomas Paine. It wasn't long, though, before Christians, spiritualists, advocates of free love, and others who were devoted to something besides liberalism started to infiltrate the group. For a few years, there was a lot of friction between "the saints and the sinners," and for awhile in the 1890s spiritualism seemed to dominate in Liberal. Over time, though, the Christians gained the upper hand, and by the time Walser died in 1910, the town boasted several churches and was little different from any other small town. Today, about the only vestiges of liberalism in Liberal are the street signs with interesting names like Darwin and Ingersoll.

Sally Rand

Last time I mentioned the idea of famous or semi-famous people who were born in the Ozarks, and I talked specifically about Langston Hughes, a native of Joplin.
Another Ozarkian who, like Hughes, went on to achieve a certain level of notoriety as well as fame was Sally Rand, who was born in the small village of Elkton, in Hickory County, Missouri. While Hughes was already somewhat famous as a poet and author before his uncoventional beliefs (some accused him of being a communist) got him into hot water with traditionalists, the burlesque dancer became famous and infamous at the same time by taking her clothes off.
Actually, Ms. Rand rarely, if ever, appeared completely nude but instead was always partly covered by a fan, a bubble, or a sheer body suit. Her performance at the Chicago World's Fair, though, was enough for her to make a risque name for herself.
Although I've lived in the Missouri Ozarks my whole life and I've traveled to a lot of out-of-the-way places in the region, I've never been to Ms. Rand's hometown of Elkton. From looking at a map, I conclude that there's no good way to get there. I have, however, been to Elkland, in Webster County, numerous times.

Langston Hughes

In one of my posts a couple of months ago, I mentioned some of the famous or semi-famous people who were born in West Plains. Although West Plains seems to have produced more than its share of notables, a number of other towns throughout the Ozarks also lay claim to being the birthplace of certain individuals who went on to become well known in various fields of endeavor.
Langston Hughes, for instance, was one of several well-known people who originally hailed from Joplin. Hughes was born in 1902 in a house at the southwest corner of 16th and Missouri. Actually it was probably more like a shack, since, at the time, the nearby area was a mining field, and most of the homes in the area were hastily thrown-up shanties that the miners lived in. Hughes's father, though, wasn't a miner as such. He worked for a mining company, but he held an office job.
An older brother of Langston Hughes who died in infancy about the time Langston was born is buried at Fairview Cemetery, located on Joplin's Maiden Lane.
The Hughes family moved away from Joplin a year or so after Langston was born, about the time a black man was lynched in the town. In fact, the lynching was probably the impetus for the move, since many black families fled Joplin at that time.
In the 1970s the city of Joplin voted to rename Broadway Street after Langston Hughes, but not until after some controvery. There were those in the community who accused Hughes, based on some of his writings, of being a communist and such as that. There were also those who didn't like the proposal to rename the street Langston Hughes Boulevard, because they didn't want to abolish the old name "Broadway." A compromise was reached, and the street was renamed Langston Hughes Broadway. Today everyone, or almost everyone anyway, readily accepts the idea of having a street in Joplin named after Langston Hughes, but most locals still just call it Broadway.

Monegaw Springs

A few months ago, I wrote a brief entry about Eldorado Springs in Cedar County, Missouri, and I noted that it was one of many towns throughout the Ozarks that sprang up during the mineral water craze of the later 1800s and early 1900s. In fact, nearly all towns in the region that have the words "springs" on the end of their name were founded as mineral-water spas or resorts.
One of the earliest such resort towns in the Ozarks was Monegaw Springs, located about nine or ten miles west of Osceola in St. Clair County, Missouri. It was established before the Civil War and, like its neighbor to the east, was burned by Jim Lane and his Kansas jayhawkers during the war. It was rebuilt and began to flourish as a resort after the Civil War. It was during this time that it became a hideout for the infamous Younger gang. The Youngers often frequented one of the town's hotels and an adjacent tavern, and they used a secluded cave on the nearby Osage River as a hideout. A bluff above the river near the cave became known locally as Younger Lookout.
Monegaw Springs, like many of the other spring-water towns, declined dramatically after the mineral-water craze passed, and its fate as a near ghost town was sealed when the building of the Baldwin Lakes cut off easy access to the town. Today, the once-thriving little resort town is located in an out-of-the-way spot that few people visit.

Gadfly

I've mentioned in previous posts my fascination with small towns that no longer exist or that now exist under a different name. Another such place is the small community of Gadfly, located in Barry County about twelve miles northwest of Cassville or about five miles west of Purdy. Now called Corsicana, the town was founded prior to the Civil War, and it was mentioned several times in military reports filed during the war. The Union army had a detachment stationed there and operated a mill there during part of the war, and it was the site of at least one small skirmish.
In 1874, the town had several businesses and an estimated population of one hundred people. Two years later the name was changed, but the new town of Corsicana never flourished. Located off the beaten path, the village's population was never much more than the 100 people it boasted in 1874, and even that number declined over the years until Corsicana today is little more than a wide place in the road.

Fantastic Caverns

A few years ago, I wrote an article about the history of Fantastic Caverns that was published in the Ozarks Mountaineer. Probably the thing that stands out most in my mind from the research I did for the article concerns the popular story about the twelve adventurous women from Springfield who comprised the first explorers of the cave. The reason I particularly remember this aspect of the story is because I learned from my research that it's not true. After John Knox discovered the cave on his land northwest of Springfield, he announced his discovery and opened it up for public exploration in early 1867. The first group to explore the cavern went out from Springfield on February 14 and contained no women. The group that included the twelve women from the Springfield Women's Athletic Club did not explore the cave until February 27, almost two weeks later. Contemporaneous newspaper reports in the Springfield Tri-Weekly Patriot make these facts clear, but the idea of twelve adventurous women composing the first exploratory party makes a good story. So, it has been handed down as part of the popular mythology of Fantastic Caverns and is still perpetuated today, I believe, in some of the tourist attraction's own brochures. Why quibble over two weeks? I suppose.

Sheriff Hardin Harvey Vicory

A few weeks ago, I mentioned a brief story on the Officer Down Memorial Page website about Sheriff Bertie Brixey of Webster County, Missouri. It sounded as if it would make an interesting historical article, but it didn't pan out, because some of the information on the website proved incorrect.
Another interesting story on the same website concerns Douglas County Sheriff Hardin Harvey Vicory, who was killed on March 8, 1879, by the former sheriff, whom Vicory was attempting to arrest for a murder the ex-lawman had committed a couple of years earlier while still serving as sheriff. This, too, seems like a very interesting historical article in the making. Unfortunately, there seems to be even less firsthand information available about this incident, such as court records and contemporaneous newspaper accounts, than there was about the Brixey killing. For instance, I found, in a Springfield newspaper, a reference to an account of the Vicory killing that had previously appeared in a Marshfield newspaper, but the Marshfield newspaper itself no longer exists. If I can come up with additional primary sources, though, writing this story might be an interesting future project.

"The Matthews-Payton Feud"

I've been doing some research on the Meadows-Bilyeu feud in southern Christian County that erupted into violence in late November of 1898, and I was interested to learn that one of the principals in that feud, John S. "Bud" Meadows, was also involved in a previous feud in the same vicinity back in the Bald Knobber days of the 1800s.
In early 1885, Alex Payton and L. T. Matthews were involved in a replevin suit (the reclaiming of possessions through legal action), and the outcome favoring Payton angered Matthews. A feud developed between the two families, and Bud Meadows and his father, Alexander "Old Bob" Meadows, sided with the Paytons in the dispute.
Two weeks after the suit, someone threw a lit stick of dynamite on top of the Payton home, and it ripped through the roof of the house when it exploded. A small child was seriously injured (and later died according to at least one report), and several other members of the Payton family were injured.
Suspecting that the Matthews family was either directly or indirectly responsible for the explosion, the Paytons sought revenge. On April 12, 1885, as Matthews and his family were moving by wagon to Chadwick, they were ambushed by rifle from the side of the road. One shot wounded Matthews in the arm, and another struck his young son, Claudie, killing him instantly.
Matthews ran toward the bushes where the shots had come from and saw eighteen-year-old William Payton and fourteen-year-old James Payton running away. After the boys were charged with murder, Old Bob Meadows helped in their defense, and Matthews suspected that the Meadowses had played a part in the attack on his family.
Despite the legal aid provided by Old Bob, the younger Payton was convicted of murder and sentenced to hang. However, the sentence was commuted in March of 1887. (He was eventually pardoned altogether.)
The commutation must have re-opened an old wound for Matthews. Less than three months later, on June 6, 1887, Old Bob Meadows was shot dead from ambush as he walked along the road just south of the Christian-Taney county line, the same way Matthews's small child had been assassinated two years earlier. Matthews was indicted in Taney County for the murder but was acquitted after a lengthy trial.
In 1895 (four years before the Meadows-Bilyeu feud), Bud Meadows was finally indicted as an accessory to the murder of little Claudie Matthews, but he, too, was acquitted.
After the Meadows-Bilyeu feud erupted into violence and Bud Meadows was on trial for killing Steve Bilyeu, several defense witnesses tried to suggest that Bilyeu and his sons had reputations as quarrelsome and violent men. Given Bud's prior history, that may have been an example of the pot calling the kettle black.
By the way, I haven't yet been able to determine whether L. T. Matthews was related to John Matthews and his nephew Wiley Matthews, the Bald Knobbers who, along with Dave Walker and his son, were convicted of killing two members of the Edens family south of Chadwick in March of 1887 (about the same time James Payton's death sentence was being commuted). Does anyone know whether they were related?

Rebel's Bluff

The story of Rebel's Bluff, a high cliff that overlooks a curve along Highway V about three and a half miles west of Mount Vernon, is an interesting tale. Around the mid point of the Civil War, a party of mounted Confederate bushwhackers were supposedly being chased during the night by a detachment of Union soldiers, and, not being familiar with the terrain, the rebels plunged over the embankment in the darkness, falling to their deaths about a hundred feet below.
The family who lived in the immediate vicinity heard the commotion but dared not venture out. The next morning, they found the bodies of the dead soldiers and their horses and buried them where they fell but didn't officially report the incident because they feared reprisal.
The story remained an unconfirmed legend for over a hundred years until about twenty or twenty-five years ago when a local man found an old bent rifle barrel at the site, which seemed to confirm the tale. Local historians speculated that the barrel had been bent by the weight of a horse and/or rider landing on it during the fall.
The old rifle barrel is now on display at the Lawrence County Historical Museum in Mount Vernon. I was at the museum a few weeks ago to talk about the Civil War in southwest Missouri and other regional history. During my visit, I was briefly introduced to the man who found the rifle barrel, but I regret to say I don't recall his name.

Nevada, the Bushwhacker Capital

This past weekend I was in Nevada for the town's annual Bushwhacker Days celebration. The idea behind the festival is to commemorate the town's heritage as a bushwhacker stronghold during the Civil War. At least that was the inspiration for the name of the festival, although the annual celebration involves a lot more than Civil War-related activities, just as Mount Vernon's annual Apple Butter Makin' Days celebration, for instance, involves a lot more than apple butter.
To be sure, though, many people around Nevada still identify with and celebrate the town's reputation as a bastion of Confederate sentiment during the war. On Saturday, while I was at the festival, for instance, the public address announcer pointed out, with what seemed like a measure of pride, the fact that in the U. S. presidential election of 1860 Abraham Lincoln received not a single vote in Vernon County. And more than once he joked about running jayhawkers out of town.
While Southern pride, in Nevada and elsewhere, mostly manifests itself nowadays in the same good-natured, lighthearted way that the public address announcer meant his comments, there are, of course, a few Dixie diehards who are still fighting the war. I readily admit there's a part of me that identifies with Southern culture, because virtually all of my ancestors came to Missouri from the South. But to the extent that the war was fought over slavery, I have to say that the right side won the war. Of course, we can argue all day about the extent to which the war was, in fact, fought over slavery. Many claim it had very little to do with it, and I can see their point. However, I find the argument that it had nothing whatsoever to do with it somewhat specious.

Bonnie and Clyde Again

One of my posts a few weeks ago had to do with the Barrow gang's murder of the marshal of Alma, Arkansas, in June of 1933 a couple of months after the infamous shootout in Joplin. The gang made several other forays into the Ozarks, too, besides the Joplin shootout and the killing of the Alma marshal.
One occurred on January 26, 1933, a couple of months before the Joplin shootout, when the gang kidnapped Springfield motorcycle cop Thomas Persell near the Shrine Mosque, after Persell pulled their car over for suspicious activity around 6 p.m. The occupants (Clyde Barrow, Bonnie Parker, and W. D. Jones) forced Persell into the car and headed out of town. With Persell piloting them along the unfamiliar roads, the gang headed north on Highway 65, turned off near Crystal Cave, and drove west through towns like Pleasant Hope, Greenfield, and Golden City. Once the gang reached the Joplin area, they seemed to be back in familiar territory, and they finally let their hostage out unharmed north of Joplin near Stone's Corner shortly after midnight.

Where Are the Ozarks?

I write principally about the history of the Ozarks, but I know that I often stretch the boundaries of the Ozarks when I write about things like the Dalton gang's fiasco at Coffeyville, Kansas, which is a good fifty or sixty miles beyond the Missouri border. Most attempts to define the boundaries of the Ozarks region have traditionally included a small piece of southeast Kansas but not sixty miles' worth of it. What I probably should say is that I write principally about the history of the Ozarks region and its surroundings.
So, what exactly are the boundaries of the Ozarks? The area's western edge is fairly clear to me, partly I think, because the state borders of Kansas and Oklahoma help define it. Most maps of the Ozarks that I've ever seen show the boundaries extending only a few miles into Kansas and not many more into Oklahoma. But maybe the reason the western edge of the Ozarks is fairly clear to me is merely because I happen to live in the western part of the region.
What about the northern edge of the Ozarks? The Missouri River would seem to form a natural boundary, but I'm not sure the region actually extends that far north, at least not in central and western Missouri. Sedalia, for instance, just doesn't seem much like the Ozarks to me.
I also have trouble defining our region's southern boundary. Where do the Ozarks leave off and the Boston Mountains begin? They seem pretty much the same to me, and maybe they are the same. Are the Boston Mountains simply the southern part of the Ozarks?
As for our region's eastern limit, I've seen some maps that show the Ozarks extending almost to the Mississippi River. Again, that seems a little far afield to me. I think a case can clearly be made that, when you're driving east on I-44, you're still at the edge of the Ozarks when you pass through the hills around Pacific, for instance, but to me, when you get twenty miles farther on and into the suburbs of St. Louis, you're no longer in the Ozarks.
I know that Springfield used to be fond of calling itself the Queen City of the Ozarks, and I've always thought of it more or less as the region's center. But maybe that's just my own bias coming through, since I grew up in the Springfield area. If one were to draw a circle with a hundred mile radius around the city of Springfield, would the outer limits of the circle roughly approximate the boundaries of the Ozarks? I think so, although the real geographical center of the region probably lies a few miles east of Springfield and the radius probably extends a little more than a hundred miles in many places, meaning, of course, that the circle is an uneven one.

Marshfield Tornado

A couple of my recent posts concerned the killing of Webster County Sheriff Bertie Brixey in 1914. Another historical episode of note from Webster County is the infamous Marshfield tornado of 1880.
It struck in the early evening of Sunday, April 18, catching most of the townspeople unaware. Some folks living near the town square took shelter in the bottom floor of the courthouse, but some who tried didn't make it that far before the storm hit. Many others were too far away even to try and were left with nowhere to hide.
The twister killed ninety-two Marshfield residents and seriously injured over 150 others. It virtually demolished one side of the square and left the top floor of the courthouse in ruins. About 150 homes and most of the town's businesses were destroyed. In terms of lives lost and damage done, the Marshfield tornado, at the time, was the second worst twister in U. S. history, surpassed only by the 1840 tornado at Natchez, Mississippi.
The same twister that struck Marshfield first touched down in Barry County and continued in a northeasterly direction, killing seven people in Greene County, before reaching Webster County. In addition, several other distinct tornadoes struck the Ozarks on the same day as the Marshfield twister. One of them, for instance, killed five people in rural Morgan County, Missouri, before wiping out the small village of Barnett, where several more people lost their lives.

Old Theaters

I am currently working on an article for Show Me the Ozarks Magazine about restoration of the Colonial Fox Theatre in Pittsburg, Kansas, and I wrote a similar article a few months ago about the Coleman Theatre in Miami, Oklahoma. The restoration and renovation of old theaters seems to be a definite trend, not just here in the Ozarks region, but all across the country. Because of television, DVD players, and the like, there aren't as many theaters as there once were in the United States; so I guess there's a certain nostalgic element at work here. People long for the glory days of yesteryear, when nearly every small town in America had a movie house, and they want to hang on to a bit of that past by restoring some of the old theaters.
In addition to the Colonial Fox and the Coleman, I'm aware of a few other theaters across the Ozarks that have been renovated. Two in Springfield, the Landers and the Gillioz, come to mind, for instance.
Built in 1909, the Landers is reportedly the oldest and largest civic theatre in Missouri. The Landers, which has been in continuous use either as a performing arts center or a movie house since it opened, has undergone several renovations over the years, both before and after it became home to the Springfield Little Theatre in 1970. I recall going to a Springfield Little Theatre production at the Landers in the fall of 1971. In fact, I know the exact date--November 12--because it was the night my wife and I got engaged.
The Gillioz was built in 1926 and, unlike the Landers, was still in use as a movie house during the late 1960s and into the 1970s. I recall going to a few movies there during that time frame, but the crowds gradually stopped coming as the business and entertainment hub of Springfield shifted from the downtown area to Glenstone and the Battlefield Mall. The building fell into disrepair, and the Gillioz closed in 1980.
In recent years, the downtown or Park Central area of Springfield has made a comeback of sorts, and so has the Gillioz. A restoration group acquired the property in 1990, and the building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991. The theatre finally re-opened in 2006 and now hosts theatrical plays, musical performances, and other live productions.

Bertie Brixey, Part Two

Last time I mentioned that the Officer Down Memorial Page website says Sheriff Bertie Brixey of Webster County was killed by his best friend in November of 1914 and that the killer was later lynched by a mob on the square in Marshfield. As I suggested last time, Brixey was indeed killed in November of 1914, but, after additional research, I've concluded that the more sensational details are apparently not true.
What I have learned since last time is that a man hired a buggy and team at Marshfield on Saturday, November 21, 1914, and drove the buggy to Niangua, where both buggy and team disappeared after he hitched them to a rail. Returning to Marshfield, he reported the incident to Sheriff Brixey, and the lawman set out the next morning for Niangua to try to determine who had taken the buggy and team.
For some reason, the sheriff suspected a young man named Edgar Bartlett of having knowledge pertaining to the buggy and team, and he aggressively questioned the young man, even striking him a time or two about the face. Despite the rough treatment, Bartlett said he knew nothing about the disappearance of the buggy and team.
Brixey let Bartlett go but later approached him again near the young man's home, where he resumed grilling him and accused him of having a concealed weapon on his person. Bartlett bolted away and ran toward his nearby home with the sheriff in pursuit. Inside the house, Bartlett armed himself with a shotgun and ordered the lawman to halt or he would shoot. When Brixey nevertheless started to enter the home, Bartlett fired, and the sheriff fell dead.
The missing buggy and team were found the day of the shooting incident, although it's not clear whether they had already been found before Brixey confronted Bartlett. Also, there was an intimation that at least one of the parties involved (probably Brixey) had been drinking.
Bartlett was arrested and charged with murder, but public sentiment seemed to be in his favor. At his trial in January of 1915 he was acquitted. The jury initially split eleven for acquittal and one for conviction before reaching a unanimous verdict in favor of acquittal. Not exactly the type of controversial verdict that would have given rise to mob lynching, as the ODMP website suggests. Nor did I come up with any evidence that the two men involved in the confrontation were acquaintances, much less best friends.
I'm a little disappointed in my findings, though, because the killing of a sheriff by a man who hardly knew him resulting in a verdict of justifiable homicide isn't nearly as dramatic as the murder of a sheriff by his best friend and the subsequent lynching of the killer. That's a story I would have liked to have written. The truth doesn't make nearly as good a story.

The Case of Sheriff Bertie Brixey

The Officer Down Memorial Page at www.odmp.org is an interesting website commemorating law officers who have lost their lives in the line of duty. There are several interesting pages at this website about lawmen from the Ozarks region who have been killed in the line of duty. One, in particular, that caught my attention is a page about Bertie Brixey, who was sheriff of Webster County during the early 1910s. According to the Officer Down website, Brixey was killed on November 22, 1914, reportedly by his best friend, whom Brixey was trying to arrest for murder. Later the killer was supposedly lynched by a mob on the Marshfield square. It's fascinating story, if it's true, but so far I've been unable to confirm the more colorful details of the case. Sheriff Brixey was, indeed, killed (in Niangua) on November 22, 1914, but I haven't found anything yet to suggest that the killer was the sheriff's best friend or that he was later lynched on the square at Marshfield. The ODMP is normally pretty accurate, though, and I'm still looking. So, maybe I'll come up with something to confirm the rest of the story.
On a personal note, I've recently learned that my book entitled "Ozarks Gunfights and Other Notorious Incidents" should be released by Pelican Publishing within the next couple of months. Covering both the Old West era and the gangster era, the book describes 25 notorious incidents of the Ozarks, starting with Wild Bill Hickok's shootout on the Springfield square immediately after the Civil War and ending with Bill Cook's mass murder of the Mosser family in the mid twentieth century.

The Barrow Gang at Alma

I have not posted anything on this blog for almost two weeks, partly because I took a trip to New Orleans and the panhandle of Florida and just got back recently. Passing through the edge of Alma, Arkansas, both coming and going, I was reminded of the fact that the Barrow gang killed the marshal of Alma in June of 1933. After the gang's infamous shootout with police in Joplin, Missouri, in April of 1933, the gang retired to Texas, where Bonnie was seriously injured in a car wreck in mid June. Retreating to Arkansas, the gang holed up in a cabin at Fort Smith. Clyde spent his time nursing Bonnie back to health, while W. D. Jones and Clyde's brother, Buck, began holding up businesses in the area when the gang started running low on funds.
After robbing a store at Fayetteville on June 23, the pair were on their way back to Fort Smith when they rounded a corner and rammed a slow-moving vehicle in front of them. When the Alma marshal happened along and stopped to investigate, the desperate duo opened fire, mortally wounding the lawman. Buck and W. D. then reunited with Bonnie and Clyde later that evening, and the gang promptly beat a path away from the land of opportunity.

West Plains Notables

Although West Plains is not in my neck of the Ozarks (and, in fact, I don't recall that I've ever even been there) I've been aware for years that the town was home to both country music star Porter Wagoner and major league baseball player Preacher Roe. I think I was previously aware, too, that major league player and manager Bill Virdon grew up there.
However, I was unaware until I started doing a little digging that West Plains was apparently home to a couple of other minor celebrities. Ted Gullic, another major league baseball player, also hailed from West Plains, and so, too, did Jan Howard, a country singer who was famous for her duets with whisperin' Bill Anderson in the 1960s, as well as a couple of songs she did by herself.
West Plains has streets named after most of its famous natives. Apparently, Ted Gullic is the only exception. I guess he has been gone too long or else he wasn't famous enough. Someone in West Plains needs to start a campaign for Ted.
At any rate, West Plains seems to have more than its share of well-known people who were associated with the town. Five celebrities for a town of a little over ten thousand people seems like quite a few.

Joplin's Notorious Dead, Part Three

Moving to to another Joplin cemetery, Ozarks Memorial, we find Wilbur Underhill, known during the late 1920s and early 1930s as the Tri-State Terror, because of all the banks he robbed and people he killed in Missouri, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Largely forgotten today, he was, at one time, considered every bit as desperate and dangerous as Bonnie and Clyde or any of the other gangsters of the Depression era. One of his associates was Harvey Bailey, mentioned in my previous post.
Underhill grew up in Joplin and first got into trouble in his hometown during the late 1910s pulling off burglaries and then strong-arm robberies. After he was finally killed in Shawnee, Oklahoma, by agents of the fledgling agency that would become known as the FBI, his body was brought back in January of 1934 to Joplin, where thousands of curious people reportedly turned out for his funeral.
Mass-murderer Bill Cook is buried in an unmarked grave at Peace Church Cemetery at the northwest edge of Joplin. A native of Joplin, Cook kidnapped five members of the Carl Mosser family on Route 66 in late December of 1950 and, after forcing the father to drive pell-mell across the country for a couple of days, brought the whole family back to his hometown, where he killed them in the early-morning hours of January 2, 1951, and dumped their bodies in an abandoned mine shaft in the neighborhood where he had grown up. Later Cook killed a man in California, was executed for the latter crime, and was brought back to Joplin for burial. My upcoming book about notorious incidents of the Ozarks will contain a chapter on Cook.

Joplin's Notorious Dead, Part Two

Another infamous character buried in Joplin is Harvey Bailey. Often called the Dean of American Bank Robbers because of the number of banks he robbed during the 1920s and early 1930s, he was an associate of George "Machine Gun" Kelley and other gangsters.
Bailey moved to Joplin in the 1960s upon his release from prison and shortly afterwards married the widow of Herb Farmer, who himself had been an associate of the Barker gang and other outlaws. Bailey died in Joplin in 1979 and is buried in the town's Forest Park Cemetery beside his wife. Not far away lies Herb Farmer.
Forest Park Cemetery is also the burial site of a notorious character named Jay Lynch, who killed the sheriff of Barton County in March of 1919 and was lynched on the square in Lamar a couple of months later. His body was removed to Joplin, though, for final disposition and buried at Forest Park. I don't think there is a headstone, but I'm not sure, because I've never tried to look for one.
Next time, the final installment in "Joplin's Notorious Dead."

Joplin's Notorious Dead

I've mentioned previously Joplin's reputation as a wide-open town during its mining heyday in the late 1800s and early 1900s. When I lived in the Springfield area as a teenager and young adult, I would occasionally hear mention of Joplin's notorious past, and I took the stories with a grain of salt. My skepticism continued after I first moved to Joplin almost 35 years ago, because Joplin seemed about as tame as anywhere else when I arrived in the 1970s. I suspected that residents exaggerated the tales of its wild past out of some sort of perverted pride the same way that some people will brag about being related to Jesse James, even when such is not the case.
What I have learned over the years, though, is that most of the stories were true and Joplin's reputation as a rough town was well deserved. I could cite numerous cases in point, but one visible sign of the town's shady past is the number of notorious characters who are buried in Joplin.
For openers, there's Roy "Arkansas Tom" Daugherty, who started out during the Old West era as a member of the Doolin gang, later became a bank robber during the gangster era, and died in a shootout with Joplin police in the 1920s. He's buried in an unmarked grave at Fairview Cemetery on the town's west side. Another notorious duo who are buried at Fairview are Harry and Jennings Young, who killed six police officers during an infamous shootout near Brookline in Greene County in the early 1930s. A few days later, they themselves died during a face-off with Houston (Texas) police, and their bodies were brought back to Missouri for burial. Springfield and Greene County authorities turned them away, though; so the bodies were brought to Joplin. Just the fact that Greene County wouldn't accept them but Joplin would says something about the latter place. The Young brothers, like Daugherty, were buried in unmarked graves at first, but their sister Vinita later placed a headstone.
I'll mention some more of Joplin's notorious corpses in my next post.

Oronogo

In my previous post about the Reunion Community, I mentioned that it was located in Jasper County about two miles northwest of Oronogo. Like the Reunion Community, Oronogo, too, has an interesting history. Founded as a lead mining camp prior to the Civil War, it was called Minersville until some years after the war.
The story of how the name change came about is a fascinating sidelight in itself. During the early mining days, it was common for miners to barter for goods and services when they didn't have cash, with lead ore being the principal medium of exchange. One day, a miner supposedly offered a merchant at Minersville something other than ore as trade for the merchant's goods, and the merchant refused the offer, saying it was "Ore or no go." The name stuck, got contracted to Oronogo, and eventually was adopted as the official name of the town.
Oronogo was a booming little town during the heyday of the Tri-State Mining District from late 1800s until the middle part of the twentieth century, and it witnessed its share of notorious incidents over the years. For instance, the Bank of Oronogo was robbed by infamous characters on at least a couple of different occasions, once by Roy "Arkansas Tom" Daugherty and another time by Clyde Barrow. The last I knew, the old bank building was still standing, although it was sitting vacant and in a somewhat dilapidated condition.
During the latter half of the twentieth century, Oronogo became almost a ghost town, but in recent years it has made a comeback. It is home to a relatively new elementary school (part of the Webb City School District), and a building boom has turned it into a thriving bedroom community for Joplin, Webb City, and other surrounding towns.

Reunion Community

One of my posts a month or two ago was about Alcander Longley and the Friendship Community east of Buffalo in Dallas County. Longley's first experimental communist community in Missouri, though, was located in Jasper County near the present-day site of Oronogo. Also called the True Family Community, the Reunion Community was founded in 1868. At the time, Oronogo was still known as Minersville, and the communist community was located about two miles northwest of the town. The members of the Reunion Community engaged in farming and the nursery business, selling grape vines to the people of Jasper County. Like all of Longley's later communities in Missouri, the Reunion Community was relatively short-lived. By the end of 1871, Longley had returned to St. Louis, and the Reunion Community had disbanded. Longley went on to make several more attempts at establishing a communist community in Missouri, next in line being the Friendship Community, which he started in 1872.

Wyatt Earp

Many people, when they think of the Old West, automatically think of places farther west than Missouri--places like Dodge City, Kansas; Tombstone, Arizona; and Virginia City, Nevada. Actually, though, there was period of time immediately after the Civil War when the Ozarks region was the Old West.
For instance, Wild Bill Hickok's shootout with Davis Tutt immediately after the Civil War on the square in Springfield is widely considered the first gunfight of the Old West era. And, as I've mentioned in previous posts, the lead-mining town of Granby, Missouri, was one of the wildest and most lawless towns in America in the years leading up to and immediately following the Civil War. Then there was Baxter Springs, Kansas, at the edge of the Ozarks, which lays claim to the title of "First Cow Town in Kansas."
Another example is the fact that Wyatt Earp; who, of course, went on to Wild West fame as a lawman in places like Wichita, Dodge City, and especially Tombstone; got his start as as a lawman when he was hired as the constable of Lamar, Missouri, in the fall of 1869. Earp left Lamar, though, about a year later under a cloud of suspicion, and he was subsequently sued twice in Barton County, once over an allegation that he had failed to turn over public funds that he had collected while serving as constable and a second time over a charge that he had falsified court documents. In fact, although dime novels, movies, and TV made Wyatt Earp into a hero and a romantic legend of the Old West, a cloud of controversy or suspicion hovered over much of his whole career. The point at hand, though, is that it all started here in the Ozarks, America's first Wild West.

Eldorado Springs

During the late 1800s, many towns sprang up in the Ozarks and, indeed, all across the country, at the site of mineral springs, which were thought to have curative powers. In our region, these communities were concentrated in northwest Arkansas and in Missouri along the northern rim of the Ozarks. The area around Springfield and east of Springfield, because of a preponderance of pure water, had comparatively few towns founded because of mineral springs.
Probably the most famous town in the Ozarks that was founded at the site of a mineral spring is Eureka Springs, but there were many others, some of which no longer even exist and others of which are now mere wide places in the road.
Another comparatively well-known town that was founded because of its mineral water and that is still a prospering little town today is Eldorado Springs, in Cedar County, Missouri. People were already coming great distances to drink the water at the site of Eldorado Springs for its supposed medicinal value when the Cruce brothers, Nathanial and Waldo, platted the town in July of 1881. By December of the same year, the town had already grown to a population of about 500 people, and by 1896 Eldorado Springs was home to almost 3,000 people.
Most people no longer believe in the curative powers of spring water, but a lot of the towns that sprang up back when most people did believe are still in existence. If you know of a town with the word "springs" on the end of its name, chances are it was probably founded during the spring water craze of the late 1880s.

White Squirrels of Marionville

One of the minor mysteries of the Ozarks are the white squirrels that inhabit the town of Marionville in Lawrence County. No one seems to know exactly where they came from or when. One theory holds that they escaped from a traveling circus around the time of the Civil War, but some people scoff at such a notion.
I wrote an article about the furry albino creatures about 25 years ago, and judging from what I've been able to glean from the Internet, the situation with the Marionville squirrels is still about the same today as it was then. The rivalry between Marionville and Olney, Illinois, over which town has the most white squirrels and which one had them first still rages. One of the best places for viewing the white squirrels of Marionville apparently is still the grounds of the Methodist Manor, and morning and evening are still the best times to see them.
Another stronghold for the squirrels at the time I wrote my article was Lindeman's orchard at the edge of town. Apparently the squirrels were fond of apples, although I don't know whether they still hang out at the orchard or not. In fact, I'm not even sure Lindeman's orchard is still in operation, but I think it is. Maybe someone can clue me in. And if you haven't ever been to Marionville to see the white squirrels, they're worth a visit.

Monett and Plymouth

In a previous post a month or two ago, I briefly discussed the fact that Dadeville in Dade County was originally known as Melville, and I mentioned Ava in Douglas County, originally known as Militia Springs, as another example of a town that has had more than one name. A variation on this idea of the same town having been known by more than one name is the phenomenon of two different towns being built very near the same site and one of the two later outstripping and eventually absorbing the other.
Such is the case with Monett, located on the westerm Barry-Lawrence county line. When the railroad connecting Springfield and Pierce City began construction around 1880 on a southern branch that diverged from the main branch about four or five miles east of Pierce City, a town known as Plymouth or Plymouth Junction sprang up at the site. A few years later, the railroad moved its division point from Pierce City to a site just east of Plymouth and called the new town Monett. The new town grew rapidly and eventually engulfed its smaller neighbor.
In fact, the area of Plymouth/Monett has supposedly had three different names. Some sources say that the area was originally known as Billings (not to be confused with the Billings in Christian County), but whether there was actually a town or even a village by that name is doubtful.

Lynchings

Last time, I mentioned vigilantism in the Ozarks, a topic that brings to mind lynchings, since extra-legal execution was the most extreme form, yet a fairly common form, of vigilantism in early Ozarks history, as well as in the history of America as a whole.
Many people automatically associate lynching in this country with racism. Extra-legal execution, especially hanging, was, in fact, often employed by whites against blacks who had supposedly committed one crime or another, even though in many cases the evidence for such crimes was scant. In this racist sense, lynching was not as common in Missouri and other parts of the Ozarks as it was in the deep South. Of course, this was partly because the concentration of blacks in this area was not as great. Even so, we definitely had some high-profile cases of racial lynching, such as the notorious Pierce City lynchings of 1901 and the equally infamous Springfield lynchings of 1906, but overall such lynchings weren't as common in this area as they were in the deep South.
White men lynching other white men, though, I'm not so sure about. I have a hunch that the Ozarks witnessed at least its share and very likely more than its share of this type of lynching. I don't have any statistics to back up my assumption, but I've read enough old newspaper accounts and so forth to know that a lot of such extra-legal hangings occurred in this area.
This area also saw a rare instance of black men lynching another black man. In the wee hours of the morning on April 25, 1899, Charles Williams, "a disreputable negro," as a Joplin newspaper called him, was dragged from his jail cell at Galena, Kansas, at the edge of the Ozarks, by a mob of black men and shot four times when he "showed fight." Williams's girlfriend had been found dead in her bed the day before, and Williams was suspected of having strangled her to death in a fit of rage.

Taney County Vigilantism

If I were asked to describe or summarize vigilantism in the Ozarks, one of the first subjects that would come to my mind would be the Bald Knobbers of Taney County. As most people familiar with the Ozarks and Ozarks history know, the Bald Knobbers were a so-called "law and order" group that arose during the 1880s in Taney County to counter the lawlessness that had plaqued the county since the Civil War. They were such eager disciplinarians, however, that the anti-Bald Knobbers arose in response to the Bald Knobbers' heavy hand, and the two sides warred with each other for a few years before disbanding.
Recently I was reading some online newspaper entries from the old Springfield Express, and when I stumbled upon an account of a triple hanging that occurred in Taney County in the name of vigilantism, I found it interesting that the event occurred in the spring of 1882, because this predates by almost two years the formation of the Bald Knobbers.
The three victims of the 1882 lynching were Tom and John McClanahan and a man named Meex Snapp. Reportedly they had recently burglarized a store at Kirbyville and stolen a horse from a farmer, and they had been implicated in various other criminal offenses throughout the previous year. Finally, by early April of 1882, local citizens had apparently had enough. The trio were taken to the pine trees south of Kirbyville and strung up. So, it seems that vigilantism already had a good foothold in Taney County even before the Bald Knobbers came along.
By the way, one of the Bald Knobbers' victims in 1886 was Sam Snapp, who was a little too vocal in his opposition to the group to suit the Knobbers. I don't know whether he and Meex were related, but it's very likely they were. If so, that might partially account for the resentment Sam seemed to harbor against vigilantism in general and the Bald Knobbers in particular.

Alonzo Fagg

Holcombe's 1883 History of Greene County contains a brief account of the killing of Alonzo Fagg by Samuel Means in 1879. It seems Fagg was walking home along South Street in Springfield with another young man when Means came out of an alley, chased Fagg a short distance, and stabbed him to death with a knife when he caught up with him. Both men were reportedly under the influence of liquor, but supposedly there had been no prior argument between them, which seems hard to believe.
The interesting thing to me, however, about the account in the county history is that it says that both men came from "highly respectable families." Based on my research of the Fagg family, I'm not sure "highly respectable" would be the term that would come to mind if I were trying to describe Alonzo and his kin. Fagg's father, James H. Fagg, for instance, was a merchant in Springfield during the Civil War era, and he had a whole series of run-ins with the law during those years involving minor offenses like selling liquor without a license, selling liquor on Sunday, gambling, and so forth.
The real black sheep of the family, though, was a brother of Alonzo's named J. P. Fagg. J. P.'s first serious scrape with the law came in 1875 when he tried to rob a businessman in Springfield of a large sum of money by tossing a cannister of chloroform into a room where the man was sleeping. The plan backfired and he was arrested and convicted of attempted grand larceny. And that was just the beginning of his criminal career. However, in defense of Holcombe's county history, I have to add that some of J. P.'s more notorious escapades happened after 1883.

Dallas County Railroad

In a piece I posted back in October about the communist Friendship Community that Alcander Longley established in Dallas County in the 1870s, I said that one of the reasons the community failed and people moved away from it was threats from Dallas County neighbors. Another reason, though, was the failure of a railroad project known in Dallas County history as the "railroad that was never built." Langley started his community in the early 1870s with an understanding that the Laclede and Fort Scott Railroad, stretching from Lebanon, Missouri, to Fort Scott, Kansas, would soon span Dallas County, allowing potential residents from across the country easy access to his isolated community and providing a ready means of shipping and receiving needed goods. When the railroad didn't come, neither did the anticipated influx of communists.
Plans for the railway had first been announced back in 1869 during the railroad-building frenzy that followed the Civil War, and the clearing and grading of the roadbed started shortly afterwards. Dallas Countians heaped upon themselves a huge indebtedness in the form of bonds to help pay for the venture, but the railroad started experiencing financial difficulties in the 1870s, and the project was never completed. Citizens of Dallas County felt cheated and for many years refused to pay off the bonds. A compromise on the indebtedness was not reached until around 1920, and the last of the bonds was finally paid off about 1940. Dallas County citizens gathered at Buffalo (the county seat) to celebrate the occasion and to burn the bonds. At the time, traces of the old roadbed, the "railroad that was never built," were still visible around Buffalo, but even those signs are getting hard to see nowadays.

Ozarks Cattle Drives

When people think of Old West cattle drives in which Texas longhorns were herded to northern markets, they normally think of towns in Kansas like Dodge City, Wichita, and Abilene as the primary destinations for the cattle. The western Kansas cow towns were, in fact, the main shipping points after about 1867. Prior to that date, though, St. Louis, Sedalia, and Kansas City, Missouri were the primary destinations, and the old cattle trails criss-crossed the Ozarks.
Prior to the Civil War and during the first year after the war, the Shawnee Trail through eastern Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) was the main cattle trail from Texas. Fifty miles or so below the Kansas state line, one branch of the trail veered eastward and roughly followed the Old Wire Road to St. Louis. Near Baxter Springs, at the edge of the Ozarks, another branch veered northeastward to Sedalia, while the third branch continued north toward Kansas City, following the Military Road that connected Fort Leavenworth and Fort Gibson (in Indian Territory).
During the first year after the war, Baxter Springs became a stopover point for the herds being driven north. Thus was born the "first cow town in Kansas," a title that Baxter lays claim to today.

Splitlog

In my last couple of posts, I've mentioned Blende City, a former mining camp in Jasper County that grew into a fledgling town during the 1880s but that no longer exists. This idea of communities that once flourished but no longer exist (or barely exist) is a subject I've mentioned in a couple of my other previous posts as well, because the history behind such places seems to hold a certain fascination for me.
Another such community is Splitlog, located in northwest McDonald County near Goodman. Although Splitlog still exists, few reminders of its days as a booming little town remain.
The town began when Mathias Splitlog, a Wyandotte Indian, moved to McDonald County from neighboring Indian territory during the late 1800s. The enterprising Splitlog, called the "millionaire Indian," was already a wealthy man from his previous entrepreneurial pursuits, like mining; and he decided to build a railroad, which would connect his new home to Goodman, Neosho, and Joplin, to support those activities. The first section of the railroad was completed in August of 1887, and the entire "Splitlog line" from Joplin to Splitlog was finished a couple of years afterwards. Later, the line was extended into Arkansas, but it was not a financial success and Splitlog sold out in 1892. The Goodman-to-Splitlog branch of the railroad line soon fell into disuse, and the town gradually dwindled to a mere wide place in the road with only a small road sign, a few houses, and a couple of churches to mark its location.

Mea Culpa

In my last post, I expressed my disappointment that the websites of both the Springfield-Greene County Library and the Western Historical Manuscript Collection perpetuate the idea that Blende City and Blendville (two early Jasper County mining camps) were one in the same when, in fact, they were two distinct and separate locations. After the post, I received an email from a librarian at the Springfield-Greene County Library suggesting, in essence, that libraries should not be held responsible for the content on their websites any more than they are held accountable for the content of the books that they stock on their shelves. The librarian also pointed out that in a monumental work like Moser's Directory of Towns, Villages, and Hamlets Past and Present of Missouri (which is the source of the website information I cited) occasional mistakes are bound to occur. I have to agree. Libraries are merely repositories of information. It's not up to them to diligently screen every book they acquire or every bit of information they post on the Internet. So, I guess this is my official retraction. The lesson here, then, is that you can't believe everything you read, on the Internet or elsewhere. We need to be critical readers. For the record, though, Blende City and Blendville were definitely two different places.

Blendville and Blende City

Everybody makes mistakes. If I see a historical date listed as July 13, 1888, for instance, when I know that the event in question actually happened on July 12, 1888, I don't get particularly upset, and I hope people don't hold me to such a high standard that I'm not allowed an occasional slip-up (although I do try to limit such errors to a minimum). The Internet, in particular, seems to be the source of a lot of misinformation; so much of what you read online needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
However, some mistakes are so obvious that they are hard to overlook. This is especially true when the information is being disseminated by otherwise reputable organizations or institutions. Recently, for instance, I found two different websites on the Internet listing Jasper County place names, one site maintained by the University of Missouri's Western Historical Manuscript Collection and the other maintained by the Springfield-Greene County Library's local history section, that both contain the same mistake. Both say that Blende City and Blendville were synonymous--that Blendville was a later name for Blende City. In fact, they were two separate communities, both of which arose during the lead and zinc mining boom of the late nineteenth century in the Jasper County area.
Blende City was a mining camp that sprang up in the early 1880s a mile or two southwest of Carl Junction and about ten miles or so northwest of Joplin. It grew to a population of over a thousand people during its heyday, but today it is not part of a populated area and almost nothing remains to suggest that it ever existed.
Blendville, on the other hand, arose a few years after Blende City and was located a mile or two southwest of Joplin. Today it is part of Joplin, and the Blendville Christian Church is still located in the neighborhood.
The websites' explanation of how the two communities got their name is also incorrect, or at least incomplete. The websites suggest that the derivation of the names had to do with the blending of ores. In fact, blende is another name for sphalerite, which is the chief ore of zinc, just as galena is the chief ore of lead.

Quantrill's Lamar Attacks

There's one other episode pertaining to Quantrill's activities in the Ozarks that I want to mention, and then I'll move on to other topics besides Quantrill. Actually, though, the episode I'm talking about is two related episodes--the guerrilla leader's attacks on Lamar in the fall of 1862 and spring of 1864.
In early November of 1862, after a successful summer of raiding in the Kansas City area, Quantrill and his men were on the march south to spend the winter in Texas when they fell in with Colonel Warner Lewis of the Missouri State Guard. When Lewis proposed a coordinated attack on Lamar, Quantrill agreed and charged into the town, but Lewis failed to appear on schedule, leaving the guerrillas to blast away by themselves at the Federal troops ensconced in the Barton County courthouse. After a heated exchange in which each side lost only a handful of men in killed and injured, Quantrill set fire to the town and rode off in anger and frustration over Warner's failure to appear.
In the May of 1864, after spending the winter in Texas as they had the previous year, Quantrill and his men were headed back to northern Missouri. When they passed through Lamar, Quantrill decided to try to exact some revenge for the failed attack a year and a half earlier. The guerrillas charged the courthouse, which was now just a burned-out shell , but the small detachment of Union militia guarding the fortress repelled the assault with a well-aimed volley of fire. The guerrillas dropped back to regroup and then launched another attack. It, too, was turned away, but Quantrill and his men weren't easily dissuaded. In short order, they launched yet a third assault. When it, too, was repelled, the guerrillas finally gave up and continued their journey north, minus a few men that they had sacrified to their stubbornness.