Arkansas Traveler

Many people today probably think of the student newspaper at the University of Arkansas or the minor league baseball team based in North Little Rock when they hear the term "Arkansas Traveler." However, the term actually has a long history that goes back over 150 years.
“Arkansas Traveler” originally referred to a tune, a dialogue, or a painting, all of which date from the mid-nineteenth century. The tune and the dialogue or skit had their origins around 1840 when Colonel Sanford Faulkner got lost in rural Arkansas, stopped to ask directions at a local squatter's home, and subsequently started performing a dialogue and fiddle tune called “The Arkansas Traveler” based on the experience.
In 1856, Arkansas artist Edward Payson Washbourne painted a picture based on the meeting between the Traveler and the Squatter (see accompanying illustration). Washbbourne later painted a second picture called "The Turn of the Tune," depicting the Traveler entertaining the Squatter by playing his fiddle.
The image of the Arkansas Traveler also spawned a humorous newspaper by that name, founded in 1882. The Traveler, in print and in humorous performance, came to perpetuate a negative, “hillbilly” image of Arkansas and, by extension, the Ozarks.
From 1949 to 1963, "The Arkansas Traveler" was the official state song of Arkansas. The negative stereotype might have had something to do with the decision to drop the song as the state's official song, although I don't know that for sure. The song is now designated as the state's official historical song.
At any rate, the negative connotation of the Arkansas Traveler has obviously lessened in recent years. Otherwise, the University of Arkansas probably wouldn't be using it as the name of its student newspaper, nor would a minor league baseball team based in Arkansas be calling themselves the Travelers.


"Currier-ives-arkansas-traveller". Licensed under Public Domain via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Currier-ives-arkansas-traveller.jpg#/media/File:Currier-ives-arkansas-traveller.jpg

Civil War Execution of Thomas J. Thorpe

While Federal executions of Missourians for bushwhacking and other disloyal activities were not uncommon during the Civil War, they were not everyday occurrences. Authorities were usually reluctant to impose the death penalty except for very serious cases and even more reluctant to carry it out. Even when a man was condemned to death, the execution sometimes got postposed repeatedly. Such was the case of Thomas J. Thorpe of Oregon County.
Thorpe, according to his own statement, joined Thomas Freeman’s Missouri State Guard regiment (part of General James McBride’s division) early in the war. Freeman and twenty-nine of his men were captured in February 1862 at the Battle of Crane Creek (near present-day Crane, Missouri), and Thorpe might have been among those taken prisoner, although this is not altogether clear.
Regardless, Thorpe said he remained with McBride after he left Freeman’s regiment. So, he apparently did have some standing as a regular soldier, at least during the early part of the war.
However, he operated as a partisan or guerrilla later in the war. In October of 1863, he was taken into custody at Pilot Knob. According to his own account, he surrendered, but Union authorities reported only that he was arrested as a rebel. On the 19th, he took an oath of allegiance and gave a $1,000 bond. He was 28 years old at the time and stood 5’7” tall. He was described as having dark eyes and dark hair. The terms of his oath specified that he must not go south of Oregon County and must report to the provost marshal’s office at Pilot Knob on the last day of each month.
Sometime after his release from custody at Pilot Knob, he and two other men were accused of killing a citizen named Obediah Leavitt. On March 20,1864, Thorpe was arrested in Oregon County and charged with murder, violating his oath, and being a guerrilla. He was tried about the first of July and found guilty of murder and being a guerrilla. On July 6th, he was transported to St. Louis and imprisoned at Gratiot Street Prison to await the promulgation of his sentence.
The sentence was announced on July 29—to be hung by the neck until dead. The execution was scheduled to be carried out on September 2 at Pilot Knob.
Thorpe appealed to the president of the United States for a new hearing, but Lincoln denied the request and also declined to pardon Thorpe. However, on September 1, the day Thorpe was to be escorted back to Pilot Knob to meet his death, the sentence was temporarily suspended by General William Rosecrans, commanding the Department of the Missouri. On December 3, Thorpe was sent in irons to Alton (Illinois) Military Prison to await his fate.
The reason for the first postponement of Thorpe’s execution is not clear, but it was postponed three more times during February and March of 1865 on account of his poor health. Finally, in late April, he was deemed sufficiently recovered that he could be put to death. He was scheduled to hang on May 1.
On April 30, Thorpe was taken from Alton back to Gratiot Street Military Prison, where the execution was to take place. The next day, he was escorted to the prison yard, where a gallows awaited him. A few spectators and two or three reporters were there to witness the event. Asked if he had any last words, Thorpe replied that he had been accused unjustly and that he had never killed anyone nor been a guerrilla. A recent convert to Catholicism, he said he would die happy and he expected to go to heaven. He left a note to his wife asking her to make sure their kids received schooling and requesting they be baptized by a priest.
The rope was then placed around Thorpe’s neck, and he dropped to his death at 10:48 a.m. He died almost instantly, his neck broken by the fall, but he was not declared dead until 11:21.

More Adventures of Bonnie and Clyde

After the Barrow gang’s infamous shootout with Joplin police in April 1933, Bonnie and Clyde fled to Texas, where Bonnie was seriously injured in a car accident in June. The gang’s adventures in Missouri and the Ozarks, however, were far from over. Immediately after the car wreck, the gang retreated to northwest Arkansas and checked into a tourist camp in Fort Smith to lie low while Bonnie recuperated.
W.D. Jones and Clyde’s brother Buck, though, started pulling off a string of robberies to pay the gang’s bills. On June 23, they robbed a grocery in Fayetteville and were headed back to Fort Smith when they rounded a curve near Alma and rear-ended a slow-moving vehicle. Alma city marshal H.D. Humphrey and a deputy, on the lookout for the Fayetteville bandits, happened upon the scene and stopped to investigate. When Humphrey got out of his car and started toward the two disabled vehicles, Buck knocked him down with a shotgun blast, mortally wounding him. The deputy returned fire, but during the lively gun battle that ensued, Buck and W.D. managed to commandeer the police vehicle and roar away to reunite with the rest of the gang in Fort Smith.
Over the next few weeks, the Barrows stayed on the run in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. In mid-July 1933, they landed in Iowa, where they pulled off a string of robberies on the 18th. They then fled south into Missouri and checked into the Red Crown Cabins near Platte City north of Kansas City late that night.
The manager grew suspicious of the mysterious group occupying his double cabins and informed authorities. Lawmen soon concluded that they were facing the notorious Barrow gang, and they closed in during the wee hours of the morning on July 20th. Another wild gunfight erupted, reminiscent of the shootout with Joplin lawmen nine months earlier, as Clyde, Buck, and W.D. shot their way to freedom. Buck was seriously wounded during the exchange. He died about a week later in Iowa, after being seriously wounded a second time in yet another shootout with officers. His wife, Blanche, was captured, and W.D. left the gang shortly afterwards.
Meanwhile, Bonnie and Clyde retreated to Texas, where Bonnie helped Clyde break his old pal Raymond Hamilton and several other inmates, including Henry Methvin, out of the Eastham Prison in January 1934. The next month, Bonnie and Clyde showed back up in Missouri with Hamilton and Methvin.
On February 12, the gang stole a car from the Thompson Tire Company in Springfield and fled in two vehicles. As the gang roared through Hurley, twenty-five miles to the southwest, Hamilton and Methvin were in a red Chevy sedan, and Clyde was at the wheel of the Thompson auto. Bonnie, his “cigar-smoking sweetheart,” as one newspaper called her, was at his side.
Notified of the gang’s approach, Stone County sheriff Seth Tuttle and three deputies drove out on the highway north of Galena in search of the desperadoes, and the gang roared past them at a high rate of speed. The lawmen turned around to give chase and found the Thompson car abandoned two miles east of Galena.
Tuttle took charge of the Thompson vehicle, while his deputies resumed the pursuit. The gangsters, who’d all piled into the red Chevy, approached an underpass leading into Reeds Spring and came upon a roadblock set up by local constable Dale Davis. They turned around and retreated, briefly exchanging gunfire with Davis in the process.
On a side road, the gang kidnapped pedestrian Joe Gunn and forced him to guide them. Coming out on the road between Reeds Spring and Cape Fair, they met the Stone County deputies, who had continued through Reeds Spring and doubled back. The two vehicles stopped a couple hundred feet apart, and the two sides exchanged fire until the lawmen ran out of ammo. The gangsters piled back into the Chevy and roared past the deputies.
Near Berryville, Arkansas, the gang took another hostage, but they let both him and Gunn out unharmed between Berryville and Eureka Springs.
Three and a half months later, Bonnie and Clyde were killed in a police ambush in Louisiana after Methvin betrayed them.

Bonnie and Clyde--Part 1

Some people might not readily associate Bonnie and Clyde with Missouri and the Ozarks. Both were born in Texas around 1910. They grew up there during the teens and twenties. And they met their end in Louisiana in May 1934—killed by a police ambush after one of their partners betrayed them. But the desperate duo committed several of their infamous deeds in this region.
The pair was still relatively unknown outside Texas when they first appeared in Missouri in the fall of 1932. Using a Carthage motor lodge as their headquarters, Clyde and two other members of his gang pulled off a string of robberies in the Jasper County area during November. On the 29th, Clyde sent Bonnie into Oronogo to scout out the Farmers and Miners Bank. The next day, Clyde and his two male sidekicks drove into Oronogo in a Chevy they’d stolen that morning while Bonnie waited just outside town in the getaway car, a Ford V-8. Clyde and one of his partners went into the bank and got into a shootout with the cashier when he resisted the holdup. They scooped up a small amount of money and raced outside to the Chevy, where the third man waited as a lookout. The desperadoes sped out of town through a hail of bullets from citizens who’d hurried to the scene at the sound of gunfire. Outside town, they abandoned the Chevy, hopped in the Ford with Bonnie, and made their getaway.
On January 26, 1933, less than two months after the Oronogo caper, Bonnie and Clyde, along with new partner W.D. Jones, kidnapped Springfield motorcycle cop Tom Persell at gunpoint near the Shrine Mosque after he pulled them over on suspicion. They forced Persell to guide them out of town. A few miles north of Springfield, still compelling their hostage to pilot them, they turned west and traveled at a high rate of speed along the back roads through Golden City and finally came out on a north-south road north of Carthage (present-day I-49/U.S. 71). Late that night, they finally let Persell out unharmed north of Joplin near Carl Junction. As he was getting out of the car, Persell, still unaware who his captors were, asked whether he might have the weapon back that they had taken from him. Clyde told the cop not to press his luck. Slamming the door, he and the rest of the gang sped off, leaving Persell to find his way into Joplin on foot. The cop told his story to a Springfield newspaper the next day. The girl, who kept bumming cigarettes from him, simply “ate fags,” Persell complained, and all three of the gang members were quite profane in their language.
After the Persell kidnapping, Bonnie, Clyde, and W.D. went back to Texas and picked up Clyde’s brother Buck and Buck’s wife, Blanche. The five soon returned to Missouri and rented an apartment in south Joplin in early April 1933. On the afternoon of April 13th, the police closed in. Thinking they were dealing with bootleggers, two Joplin policeman, two highway patrolmen, and a Newton County deputy drove up to the apartment in two separate cars. The car containing the city cops and the county deputy blocked the driveway while the highway patrolmen cruised past the residence and parked at the side of the street. The gang immediately opened fire, killing the deputy almost instantly and mortally wounding one of the Joplin officers when they stepped out of their car to return fire. W.D. Jones was wounded in the exchange, but Clyde and Buck kept firing away. Two of the remaining lawmen circled around toward the back of the apartment, while the third kept up a sporadic fire at the front of the building. The five gangsters piled into their Ford V-8, and Clyde revved up the engine and dropped the clutch. The Ford rammed the police vehicle and knocked it down the inclined driveway into the street, clearing a path for the gang’s escape. The Barrow gang sped away at such a high speed that an eyewitness said the Ford almost wrecked rounding a curve south of town at Redings Mill.

A Town By Any Other Name--Part 2

Last time I wrote about towns throughout southern Missouri that have changed their names at some point in their history. Two common reasons for such a change were to honor a prominent citizen and to comply with the demands of the postal service at the time a post office was sought. This week, let’s look at a few more places in the region that are now known by a name different from the original name.
Marble Hill was laid out in 1851 as the seat of Bollinger County. It was named Dallas at the time, and it absorbed a previous community called New California. In 1868, the name of Dallas was changed to Marble Hill to avoid confusion with Dallas County.
Monett, located on the Barry-Lawrence county line, has an interesting and complicated naming history that I’m not sure I fully comprehend. According to some reports, the area was originally known as Billings (not to be confused with the Billings in western Christian County), but it’s unlikely a village by that name ever existed in the vicinity. A settlement known as Plymouth began in the area about 1871. When a post office was later established, the post office was called Gonten, even though the village was still Plymouth. In 1880, the Frisco railroad started building a southern branch into Arkansas that connected to the main railroad at Plymouth, and the community was thenceforth often called Plymouth Junction. When the southern branch was finally completed in 1887, the railroad built a terminal and other facilities at Plymouth, and the area grew rapidly. A new town was platted near old Plymouth and named Monett after a railroad official. The growing new town soon engulfed Plymouth, and it became part of Monett. (At least one account I’ve read said Plymouth changed its name to Monett even before the new town was built beside it.)
Naylor, in southeastern Ripley County, was established along a branch of the Iron Mountain Railroad in the late 1880s. It was originally called Barfield, but it was renamed Naylor after a land surveyor in the area to avoid confusion with Barfield, Arkansas.
Northview, located in Webster County along I-44, was originally called Bunker Hill. A railroad was completed through the area about 1870, and the community soon changed its name to Northview because passing trainmen claimed the place offered a “good north view.”
Quincy, in Hickory County, was originally called Judy’s Gap because Samuel Judy operated a blacksmith shop there before the town was platted. When the town was laid out about 1848 or 1849, it was named Quincy, probably after John Quincy Adams, who had recently died.
Rosati, located along I-44 in eastern Phelps County, was originally Knobview. Its name was changed to Rosati during the 1890s after an influx of Italian immigrants arrived in the area.
St. Clair, also located along I-44, in Franklin County, was originally called Traveler’s Repose. When the railroad came through during the early to mid-1850s, the place was renamed St. Clair in honor of a local railroad engineer.
Sarcoxie, in eastern Jasper County, was named Centerville at first, because it was near the center of what was then Barry County. When the town applied for a post office, residents learned a Centerville, Missouri, already existed, and the name was changed to Sarcoxie after a Shawnee chief who’d previously lived in the area.
Washburn, in Barry County, was settled before the Civil War as Keetsville. Destroyed during the war, the town was later rebuilt, and it became Washburn in 1868.
We’ve looked only at towns in southern Missouri that have changed their names, but the same phenomenon is also apparent in the naming history of towns in the Arkansas Ozarks. For instance, Prairie Grove, famous for the Civil War battle that occurred nearby, was originally known as Sweet Home.

A Town By Any Other Name--Part 1

A quirky aspect of Ozarks history that I’ve been interested in for a long time is the large number of towns in the region that changed their names. I’m sure this phenomenon is not unique to the Ozarks, but I haven’t examined other regions.
There are at least three variations on this theme of towns changing their names.
Many communities adopted a name at the time of official formation or incorporation that differed from the name the settlement was previously known by. Some of these name changes were brought about when the town applied for a post office and learned that another town with the same or a similar name already existed.
Some towns, on the other hand, did not change their names until after they were officially formed. Many of these changes came soon after formation, but on occasion they might come years later. One of the most common reasons for such a change was to honor a prominent citizen.
A third variation on the theme of name changes involved a new town being established near an older one. If the new town began to outpace the original community, the general area, which had originally been known by the old town’s name, would gradually take on the name of the new town. Eventually the old town would be engulfed by or completely outstripped by the new one to the point that the original town would lose its identify and either die or become part of the new town.
Examples of all three phenomena occur in the naming history of Ozarks’ towns. Let’s look, in alphabetical order, at a sampling of towns in the southern Missouri Ozarks that are known today by a name that differs from the original.
Ava, the seat of Douglas County, did not change its name as such, but it had a forerunner named Militia Springs, a Civil War encampment with a government post office. When Ava was formed a mile or so to the south at the end of the war, the post office was moved to Ava.
Crane, located on Crane Creek in northern Stone County, was originally called Hickory Grove. About 1890, the town sought a post office and learned a Hickory Grove already existed in Missouri. The town changed its name to match the name of the creek it was on.
Dadeville in eastern Dade County was established before the Civil War as Melville. In 1865, the name was changed to Dadeville, supposedly because postal workers kept getting it confused with a town named Millville.
Doolittle in Phelps County was originally called Centertown because it was halfway between Rolla and Newburg. The town boomed during construction of nearby Fort Leonard Wood in the early 1940s, and it was incorporated and renamed in honor of World War II general Jimmy Doolittle.
Farmington was originally called Murphy’s Settlement after David Murphy, the first white settler, who arrived in the late 1790s. In 1822, Murphy donated land for the town as a prospective county seat for Francois County, and it was shortly afterwards named Farmington because of the fertile soil in the area.
Fremont was established along the railroad in Carter County in the late 1880s. It was originally going to be called McDonald after the man who laid out the town. However, the post office rejected the name, and the town was named Peggy instead, after the wife of an early settler. In 1907, the name was changed to Fremont.
Irondale in southeast Washington County was laid out in 1858. In 1906, the town changed its name to Savoy so that people wouldn’t confuse it with Ironton and Iron Mountain, but the name was changed back to Irondale the next year.
Jane, in southern McDonald County, was originally called White Rock Prairie, but when a post office was established in 1882, it was named Jane after the postmaster's daughter.
Lebanon, the seat of Laclede County, was originally called Wyota after the Wyota Indian village where it was established. It was renamed after Lebanon, Tennessee, which was the hometown of a respected local minister.

Great Blue Norther of 11-11-11

November has been mild so far this year, but that could change anytime. Let’s hope it doesn’t change quite as drastically at it did back in 1911. That was the year of the Great Blue Norther.
Blue northers are sudden cold snaps that occur when Arctic air plunges south, often under clear blue skies, to drive out warm humid air. The clash of the two systems creates strong storms, occasionally even blizzards or tornadoes. Blue northers usually occur in November and sometimes can come in February or March but rarely any other time.
The blue norther of 1911 was a doozie! Sometimes referred to simply as 11-11-11 to indicate the date it happened, the Great Blue Norther affected all of the central United States. The Ozarks was right in the middle of it.
Temperatures were unseasonably warm during the early to mid-afternoon of Saturday, November 11, 1911. Several places set record highs for the date. By late that night, some of the same places also experienced record lows. For many Midwest cities, it is the only time that record highs and record lows were broken on the same day.
In Springfield, Missouri, the temperature soared to a record-high 80 degrees in the early afternoon. Then the storm hit. High winds blew out windows, felled trees, and damaged houses across the city. For one minute the wind maintained a velocity of 74 miles an hour. A rate of 54 miles an hour was sustained for a full five minutes. The temperature dropped almost to freezing within a matter of minutes. When the wind let up, a terrific hail storm pelted the city. This was followed by heavy rain. The rain soon turned to sleet and snow, which fell the rest of the day.
By shortly after dark, the thermometer read 21 degrees. By midnight, it stood at 13, giving Springfield a record low and record high on the same day. The record low set in 1911 still stands. The record high has been tied but not surpassed.
The sudden shift in the weather was just as dramatic in the eastern Ozarks, although the storm hit a couple of hours later so that few, if any, record highs and record lows were set on the same day. The Potosi Journal reported that the turn in the weather was “the most sudden and extreme in variation of temperatures this section has experienced in several years, and the coldest since 1838 for so early in November.”
The newspaper went on to say that warm temperatures and a strong south wind had prevailed for several days prior to the 11th. The mercury almost touched 80 on Saturday. Then came the storm. “Between five and six in the evening, the sky took on a threatening, stormy cast, with little whips of rain. About 6:20, the wind suddenly veered around to the west, and the storm broke with a fury. A deluge of rain swept on before the gale, and the quicksilver made a hurried retreat down the tube.”
By nine o’clock, it was almost freezing, and by early Sunday morning the temperature was “down pretty close to zero.” There was also a skiff on snow on the ground. Between Saturday afternoon and sunrise Sunday morning the temperature had dropped 70-75 degrees.
My grandmother was a teenage girl growing up in Texas County in November of 1911. I remember her talking about this storm. She said the temperatures dropped so fast that most of her family’s potato crop, which had been stored in a shed, froze before she and her siblings could move the potatoes to the cellar.
Let’s hope we don’t have a repeat of the Great Blue Norther in 2015. Although some folks could use a little rain.

Making Way for War--Part 2

Fort Leonard Wood was not the only large U.S. Army base built in southern Missouri as World War II loomed. On May 15, 1941, while Fort Wood was nearing completion, the Army announced plans to construct another training center 150 miles away in Newton County. The installation would encompass about 43,000 acres south of Neosho and cost about $22 million.
As was the case with construction of Fort Leonard Wood, many local residents were displaced from their homes, although no sizeable communities were wiped entirely off the face of the map, as was the case with Bloodland in Pulaski County. In Newton County, the main complaint came from farmers who felt they were not paid enough for their land. A parade planned in connection with the groundbreaking ceremony in August of 1941 was canceled partly because of rumors of a counter-demonstration to be staged by dissatisfied farmers.
The groundbreaking ceremony itself had to be rescheduled several times because of an inability of the Army Quartermaster Corps, the engineering and constructions firms in charge of the project, and the Neosho Ad Club and other civic groups to agree on a date. Part of the holdup involved a futile effort to recruit U.S. senator Harry S Truman as a guest speaker for the event. The Neosho civic groups finally pulled out of the ceremony altogether, and the groundbreaking was held August 30, 1941, without Senator Truman.
Original plans called for the Newton County installation to be used as an infantry training center. An urgent need for Signal Corps personnel and the fact that a Shell Oil pipeline cut across a proposed artillery area turned it into a Signal Corp Replacement Training Center. It was expected to house about 18,000 soldiers, but at its peak during the war, the base was home to over 45,000 service members. Over 350 buildings went up during initial construction; another 1,200 to 1,300 were eventually added.
About 20,000 workers took part in the construction. The population of Neosho, about 5,000 at the time, more than doubled or, according to some estimates, even quadrupled. There were no rooms to be found, and in some cases workers resorted to living in chicken coops.
Colonel George W. Teachout, the post’s first commander, arrived on September 30, 1941. The camp was still under construction, and there were only two roads on the entire post. On October 3, Teachout issued orders activating the post. The installation still had no name when Teachout arrived, but it was later christened Camp Crowder (sometimes called Fort Crowder) in honor of General Enoch H. Crowder, a Missourian who gained fame as the author of the Selective Service Act of World War I. Colonel Teachout’s headquarters was initially located in Neosho but was moved onto the base about the first of January 1942.
The first troops arrived on December 2, 1941, just five days before the Pearl Harbor attack. America’s entry into World War II spurred rapid construction, and Camp Crowder was dedicated on April 12, 1942.
Among the thousands of soldiers stationed at Camp Crowder during the war were several who went on to post-war fame. Cartoonist Mort Walker used his time at Camp Crowder as inspiration for “Beetle Bailey” and Camp Swampy. Actor Dick Van Dyke’s experience at Camp Crowder during the war inspired the fictional events portrayed in Episode Number 6 of the Dick Van Dyke Show, which aired on November 6, 1961. Actor and producer Carl Reiner also served at Camp Crowder during World War II.
Crowder served not just as a training facility for U.S. soldiers but also as a prisoner-of-war camp. It housed about 2,000 Axis POWs, the first arriving on October 6, 1943. In addition, about 500 members of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAACS) worked at Crowder performing clerical duties and operating machinery.
Senator Truman finally made it to Camp Crowder for an inspection on August 30, 1944, exactly three years after missing the groundbreaking ceremony.
When World War II ended in 1945, activities at Camp Crowder began to wind down. In 1947, much of the land was declared excess property and sold back to the public for agricultural use. The now-smaller camp served various purposes until 1958, when it was deactivated. Most of it was declared surplus property in 1962.
Crowder College was formed in 1963 and moved onto a portion of the land where the Army had moved out. The Missouri National Guard retained over 4,000 acres for a training area, which is still used today.

Making Way for War--Part 1

When plans were announced in the fall of 1940 to build a large U.S. military base in rural Pulaski County, Missouri, residents of the area were in shock and disbelief. They knew little of the fighting that raged across Europe and threatened to involve America, but the rumblings of war were about to change their lives in ways they could never have foreseen.
Construction of the U.S. Army’s Seventh Corps Area Training Center began in early December of 1940. The camp was to encompass 65,000 acres. It would include 55 miles of road and 1,500 buildings. It was projected to employ about 13,000 workers during construction and cost about $10 million. About 25,000 soldiers would be billeted there when the project was complete in the spring of 1941.
The initial figures were quickly revised upward. The training center, which would come to be known as Fort Leonard Wood, ended up taking 93,000 acres out of southern Pulaski County. It employed about 15,000 workers, cost about $30 million, and was not completed until the late summer of 1941. About 37,000 Army personnel were eventually quartered there.
The immensity of the project overwhelmed local residents. “Everybody was stunned that something so big could happen around here,” one former resident of the area told this writer for a 1998 Ozarks Mountaineer article. “We were just backwoods country people.”
The local people were not just stunned. Some of them were angry. They would have to vacate land that, in many cases, had been in their families for a hundred years. The uprooted property owners were paid, on average, about $25 an acre for unimproved land, which was a fair price 75 years ago in the Ozarks. The catch was that they wouldn’t get their money immediately because of government red tape, and many of them didn’t have the ready cash for a down payment on a new home. Besides, some of them just didn’t want to move.
Most, however, eventually accepted the idea as their patriotic duty.
Work continued on the fort at a feverish pace throughout the winter and spring of 1941. Pearl Harbor was still almost a year away, but rumors of war infused the project with a sense of urgency. Work went on around the clock, seven days a week. Five hundred applicants a day passed through the Missouri State Employment Service for referral to contractors in charge of the project. The mostly unionized workers earned, counting overtime, as much as $75 a week, an excellent wage in 1941.
The tremendous influx of workers caused housing shortages as far away as Lebanon and Rolla. The population of Waynesville ballooned from about 400 to about 3,500. New businesses sprang up overnight.
In the immediate area of the fort, some workers rented rooms from local residents. Some stayed in barns. Others slept in tents or makeshift shelters fashioned from cardboard and other materials.
An unusually wet winter and early spring turned the area into a quagmire and hampered work on the army base. Truck after truck got buried to their axles in the mud, and loads of plywood had to be brought in just so workers would have a place to walk without sinking to their knees.
Construction of Fort Leonard Wood wiped villages like Bloodland, Cookville, Palace, Tribune, and Wharton off the face of the map. The largest of these was Bloodland, with a population of about 100. When construction of the fort began, the town had two general stores, three filling stations, a post office, a couple of churches, and a high school.
Cemeteries such as the one at Bloodland are about all that remain within the bounds of Fort Leonard Wood to suggest the area was ever used for anything other than a military base. For many years, former residents returned to those cemeteries on Memorial Day to decorate the graves of deceased loved ones and to gather in reunion. Now, even that ritual has virtually died out, as very few former residents remain.

The Communist Dream in Southern Missouri

I’ve written previously on this blog about Alcander Longley and his communist settlements in Jasper County near present-day Oronogo called the Reunion Community and in Dallas County just west of Buffalo called the Friendship Community. The former Community (Longley’s capitalization) existed from early 1868 to late 1870 and the latter from the spring of 1872 until the summer of 1877. However, Longley’s dream was far from over. He was nothing if not a true believer, and he spent the rest of his life trying to establish a successful communist settlement in Missouri. The son of a Universalist minister, Longley was born in Ohio in 1832 and was exposed to liberal views at an early age. As a young man he lived in several experimental settlements based on association and sharing. In his thirties, he embraced communism and came to St. Louis in 1867 to organize the Reunion Community. Longley thought of communism outside of politics and was not a fan of Karl Marx. He was, instead, an advocate of what he called practical communism, feeling that people should join together in mutual aid to form self-sustaining communes. Longley started publishing a newspaper called the Communist to promote his effort.
After the Reunion Community and the Friendship Community collapsed, Longley helped start a commune on forty acres near Lutesville in Bollinger County in May 1879. It was also called the Friendship Community, but it was even shorter lived than its like-named predecessor.
Longley lived in St. Louis at the time of the 1880 census, but by the spring of 1881 he was back living on the Dallas County property near Buffalo. On May 21, he and a few associates started the Principia Community in Polk County near present-day Halfway. Longley briefly joined the group but became disillusioned with way the community was being run and went back to Buffalo.
In July of 1883, Longley started another commune, called the Mutual Aid Society, on 160 acres about a mile north of the Glenallen railroad depot in Bollinger County. In June 1885, a woman left her home in Ohio in answer to a circular Longley sent out promoting the place. When she got to Glenallen, she found Longley the only person living on the farm. She left in anger, accusing him of trying to take her money.
Longley left Glenallen about April of 1885 and established yet another communist group, called the Altruist Community, at Sulphur Springs in Jefferson County. Longley himself stayed at the location only two months before once again going back to St. Louis.
But he never gave up on his dream. In the early to mid-1890s, he was involved in communist communities in Arkansas and northern Missouri. In late 1898 and early 1899 he helped organize a community called Altro about four miles northwest of Williamsville in Wayne County. He visited the place a few times but maintained his residence in St. Louis.
In 1901 Longley traded his land in Wayne County for an eight-acre plot at Sulphur Springs, where he once again proposed to start a new community. He spent the last seventeen years of his life promoting the Altruist Community, but his latest venture was hardly more successful than his earlier ones. He died at Chicago in 1918.

The Gads Hill Train Robbery

Gads Hill, Missouri, was named after Gads Hill, England, which served as the summer home of Charles Dickens and had earlier been immortalized by Shakespeare as the place where Falstaff committed a robbery in the opening scene of Henry IV. Ironically, the namesake American village was also the scene of a notorious holdup, the first train robbery in Missouri. Although it was not the same Gads Hill, the “Missouri cutthroats,” according to one account, “were quite as audacious” as the Shakespeare characters.
About 3:30 p.m. January 31, 1874, just two years after Gads Hill had been established along the Iron Mountain Railroad in northwest Wayne County, five desperadoes rode into the village and took over the place. Gads Hill consisted only of a general store, a sawmill, and a platform that served as the train depot. The gang robbed the storeowner and rounded up all the other people in the small community, amounting to about a dozen individuals. Each of the outlaws carried at least two Navy revolvers, and three had double-barreled shotguns. Flourishing their weapons, they compelled the captives to stand on the platform while they relieved them of their money. Meanwhile, one of the gang threw a switch on the railroad so that the next train would be shunted to a siding and have to stop.
The Little Rock Express from St. Louis was delayed, forcing the bandits and their hostages to wait more than an hour. To ward off the January chill, they huddled around a bonfire near the platform until the train finally came into sight about 4:45 p.m. One of the gang grabbed a red flag and started waving it as a signal for the train to stop. The train consisted of a combination express/baggage/mail car, two passenger coaches, a sleeper, and the locomotive. As the engineer slowed the train to a crawl, the conductor stepped onto the platform, and a large masked man immediately shoved a pistol in his face. One of the robbers took the conductor’s gold watch but handed it back upon orders from his “captain.”
Two outlaws jumped onto the locomotive and made the engineer and fireman get down, while two others hauled a brakeman and the baggage man out of the baggage car. Returning to the baggage car, a couple of the bandits rummaged through the mail, stealing registered letters. Then they turned their attention to the express messenger, forcing him at gunpoint to turn over his keys to the safe, from which they took over $1,000 in cash.
Next, the thieves went through the coaches accosting the passengers. They took all the money they could get but were more selective with the valuables they appropriated. Besides returning the conductor’s watch, the outlaws passed over another gold watch and several silver watches. The conductor later remarked that the bandits “didn’t seem to care for watches.”
After stealing all the money they could lay their hands on and all the valuables they took a fancy to, the outlaws mounted up and rode off toward the northwest. Initial reports put their total take anywhere from $2,000 to over $20,000. The best estimate seems to be somewhere around $3,000.
Reports also differed regarding the number of bandits. Some said seven, but most said five. The best evidence suggests the lower number is correct. The identity of the thieves was unknown at first as well, although within a day or two, a man named McCoy and two Younger brothers had been tentatively named as being with the gang. It has since been established that Frank and Jesse James, John Younger, and either Cole or Jim Younger composed four of the gang. The fifth member might have been the other Younger brother, Arthur McCoy, or one of several other men.
Pinkerton agents trailed the robbers to western Missouri, and one of the officers was found dead on March 11, just after visiting the James home in Clay County. On March 17, another Pinkerton agent and a local deputy were killed in St. Clair County by Jim and John Younger. The shootout also left John Younger dead.

Barker Gang and the Murder of Sheriff Kelly

Landlords nowadays often require folks wishing to rent a house or apartment to fill out applications so they can do background checks on the applicants before letting strangers move onto their property. Such was not the case in 1931 when an older couple, giving their names as Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Dunlop, showed up at Thayer, Missouri, about October 12 of that year and rented a farmhouse from Wellington McClelland in an out-of-the-way area about two miles east of town. The free-spending Dunlop, who let it be known that he was a retired farmer who’d made his money from oil lands in Oklahoma, just plunked down the cash and moved in. A day or two later, two young men, whom Dunlop introduced as his son and nephew, moved in with the couple. In an era before instant background checks, McClelland had no way of knowing that “Mrs. Dunlop” was actually Arizona Kate “Ma” Barker, that one of the young men was her murderous son Fred, and that the other was the notorious Alvin Karpis.
Over the next few weeks, Karpis and Fred Barker pulled off a string of crimes in the area, including the burglary of McCallon’s clothing store in West Plains on Thursday night, December 17. On Saturday morning the 19th, Karpis pulled his 1931 blue De Soto into Davidson’s garage in West Plains to have two flat tires repaired, with Fred Barker riding shotgun. The car matched the description of a vehicle seen near McCallon’s store on the night of the burglary, and garage owner Carac Davidson immediately relayed his suspicions to Howell County sheriff C.R. “Roy” Kelly. Still seated in the car when the sheriff showed up to investigate, Barker and Karpis immediately gunned the lawman down when he walked up to the driver’s side door of the De Soto. Accounts of the murder differ, but the best evidence suggests that Barker opened fire first with a .45 caliber automatic pistol and fired the fatal shots. He then jumped out of the vehicle and ran around to the other side to continue shooting as Kelly fell, while Karpis chimed in with a .38 caliber revolver.
After the shooting, Karpis roared out of the garage in the De Soto, and Barker escaped on foot through the streets of West Plains. Bloodhounds were put on Barker’s trail but to no avail. The De Soto was found later on Saturday a mile or so east of Thayer, where Karpis had abandoned it, and the gang was soon traced to the nearby McClelland farmhouse. Described as a four-room cottage on a high knoll back away from the road, the house reportedly offered a view of the surrounding countryside for miles around, and by the time authorities arrived, the birds had flown. In their haste to escape, the renters had left behind papers definitely identifying them as the Barker-Karpis gang, and photographs of most of the gang members, including Kate Barker, were also discovered. Much of the merchandise taken in the burglary of the McCallon store was recovered as well.
Funeral services for Sheriff Kelly were held on Monday, December 21. Shortly afterwards, his widow, Lulu Kelly, was selected to fill his unexpired term as sheriff of Howell County. One of her first actions was to offer, jointly with the West Plains police chief, rewards for the arrest and conviction of the Barker-Karpis gang members, including $100 for “Old Lady Arrie Barker, mother of Fred Barker.” This was apparently the first official notice by law enforcement of Ma Barker, who would go on to become infamous as a reputed leader of the gang, although she was, in fact, mostly just an overindulgent mother who felt her villainous sons could do no wrong.
Sources: FBI files, Howell County Gazette, West Plains Journal.

The Cost of Hanging a Man

I occasionally hear politicians as well as everyday citizens gripe about the slow turning of the wheels of justice in our modern legal system, and often the critics point to how much more swiftly punishment was meted out in the old days. There's some truth to this contention, of course, and in some cases nowadays the wheels have ground almost to a halt. However, complaints about the slow pace of justice are nothing new. In early 1895, the Missouri state auditor issued a report stating that the costs of prosecuting criminals in the state were increasing at the rate of $50,000 to $75,000 a year without a proportionate increase in crime, and the Jefferson City Tribune editorialized on the subject, claiming that most of the increase was a result of "unnecessary delays" occasioned by continuances and changes of venue. The case of Wils Howard, who had recently been hanged at Lebanon, was cited as an example. "There was never any question as to Howard's guilt," said the newspaper, "and yet it required two years and cost the state some $6,000 to hang him."
On the night of April 27, 1889, Thomas McMichael, whom newspapers identified as a deaf mute peddler, was murdered near Vienna, Missouri, presumably for his money. The Missouri governor promptly offered a $350 reward leading to the arrest of the guilty party or parties. Wilson ""Wils" Howard was soon identified as the assailant, but by then he had returned to his home state of Kentucky, where he had previously been involved in the notorious Howard-Turner feud of Harlan County and had earned a reputation as a desperate character. The feud dated back to 1882 when Bob Turner was shot to death by Wilks Howard, uncle of Wils. After Wilks was acquitted, the feud escalated over the next few years, and Wils Howard killed at least three Turner allies before absconding to Missouri in 1886.
But after killing Thomas McMichael, Wils was back in Harlan County, and he promptly took up leadership of the Howard faction as the feud continued to rage, reportedly involving almost everybody in the whole county. On October 19, 1889, John Howard, brother of Wils, was shot and badly wounded at Harlan Courthouse, the county seat. In response, Wils organized a party of about forty men and threatened to ride in and take over the town, which was held by the Turner faction under the leadership of a local judge named Lewis. On October 22, the Lewis group, numbering about 50, attacked the Howard faction about a mile outside town, killing one instantly and wounding six others, including Wils Howard. A few days later, the Howard bunch retaliated, killing two men of the Turner faction.
In the spring of 1890. Judge Lewis asked for and received state troops to help preserve order, and the Howard faction clashed briefly with the troops. When the state troops went out to try to arrest Wils Howard and some of the other leaders of the Howard faction, Wils again fled the territory, this time going to California.
In California, Wils Howard was promptly arrested under the name of John Brooks for robbing a Wells Fargo stage and sentenced to eight years in San Quentin. Detective Imboden of Missouri tracked him down there and, with permission from the California governor, brought him back here in December of 1890 to stand trial for murdering McMichael.
After four continuances and a change of venue from Maries to Laclede County, Howard was finally convicted of murder in early 1893 and sentenced to hang on April 7. In the meantime, he was taken to St. Louis for safekeeping. Appeals to the Missouri Supreme Court and to the governor delayed the carrying out of the sentence, but Howard finally reached the end of his rope, both figuratively and literally, on January 19, 1894, at Lebanon. Before he was hanged, Howard admitted killing several men in Kentucky, but he proclaimed his innocence in the McMichael murder. Thus ended the long ordeal of bringing a desperado to justice.

Murder of Sheriff Cranmer and Hanging of John Turlington

On the evening of March 21, 1890, after a brakeman on the Missouri Pacific Railroad ejected John Oscar Turlington and another man from a train near Otterville, Missouri, Turlington took a pot shot at the brakeman. He was later arrested in Pettis County for carrying a concealed weapon and was jailed at Sedalia under the name of William West, but he was also charged in Cooper County for felonious assault and was scheduled to be transferred there on the more serious charge. While still in the Sedalia jail, Turlington met a young man named West Hensley, who was soon to be released, and he convinced Hensley to sneak a gun into him at the Cooper County jail in Boonville once he was transferred there. Hensley agreed to the desperate plan, and, after he was released and Turlington had been transferred and sentenced to six months in jail on the assault charge, he climbed a ladder at the Boonville jail on the night of June 13 and handed Turlington a pistol through the bars.
The next evening, June 14, Cooper County sheriff Thomas Cranmer and a trusty entered the jail to gather up the inmates' dinner dishes. When Cranmer opened Turlington's cell door, the prisoner walked up to the lawman, shot him point-blank with a .44 revolver, and made his escape out a rear door of the jail. The mortally wounded Cranmer managed to get the cell-block locked down so that others prisoners could not escape before staggering into his living quarters and collapsing. A large posse immediately formed, and Turlington, still going by the name William West, was recaptured later the same night.
After he was brought back to jail, there was much talk of lynching Turlington, but the sheriff had requested, before he died, that the people of Cooper County not take the law into their own hands, and a Baptist minister and other influential citizens were able to convince the mob that formed to honor the sheriff's wishes. A few days after his re-arrest, Turlington confessed his real identity and also admitted that he and man named Temple had held up a train at Pryor Creek, Indian Territory, the previous fall. In late July, Turlington was convicted in Cooper County Court of murdering Sheriff Cranmer, and his execution was set for September, later rescheduled for mid November.
The case was appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, but before the judges made a ruling, Turlington escaped on November 1, 1890, from the jail at Boonville by putting a dummy in his bed and tricking the jailer on duty into thinking he had retired for the night. He was able to sneak out and make his getaway before his absence was noticed. The fugitive was recaptured less than two weeks later in Caseyville, Kentucky, where, it was learned, he had killed two men about two years earlier. In fact, Turlington turned out to be a much more desperate character than Missouri authorities had at first realized, because he also had killed a man in Tennessee prior to the Kentucky killings.
Turlington was brought back to Boonville, where he again escaped on the evening of December 20 by soaping his body and slipping through a hole at the top of his cell and then rappelling to the ground using a rope fashioned from a blanket. He was recaptured the next afternoon.
In late January of 1891, the Supreme Court upheld the lower court's ruling, and Turlington was hanged in the jail yard at Boonville on March 6, 1891. Sources: Cooper County history, Sedalia Weekly Bazoo, and various other newspapers.

Murder of Sawyer Family and Hanging of Edward Perry

On Saturday morning, May 23, 1896, some people were passing the Sawyer residence about a mile east of Ava, Missouri, when they noticed an unusual number of flies swarming around the house's windows. Stepping closer to the dwelling, they smelled a terrible odor emanating from the home. Continuing on to Ava, they reported their findings, and the town constable and a deputy went out to the Sawyer home to investigate. Going inside, the two men were almost overcome by the smell of decaying human flesh, and they discovered the bodies of Lafayette Sawyer, his wife, and their grown son, Ernest E. Sawyer, stuffed under a bed and covered with bed clothing and a carpet.
Ernest Sawyer had been stabbed several times and had a broken jaw. It was determined that he had been killed in the barn after putting up a terrific struggle. It was thought the murderer had then gone to the house and killed the father with a blow to the head with an ax and a "second blow scattered the brains of Mrs. Sawyer over the bed." Ernest Sawyer's body was dragged to the house, and all three were placed under the bed. A note was found on the front window of the house saying that the family had gone to Ozark and would be back the following Monday or Tuesday. It was signed "E.E. Sawyer," but the theory was that the killer had probably written the note to try to allay the suspicions of anybody who might come to the door. Based on when the Sawyers had last been seen, it was thought the murders had probably taken place the previous Wednesday evening. The only motive anyone could come up with for the crime was robbery, although the Sawyers were not thought to have much money or other possessions. In reporting the story, newspapermen compared the crime in heinousness to the notorious murder of the Meeks family that had occurred in northern Missouri about two years earlier.
A young man named Edward W. Perry was immediately suspected of killing the Sawyers, because he had been seen late Wednesday in company with Ernest Sawyer and had not been seen since. "A worthless fellow," according to newspaper reports, Perry was originally from Bellville, Kansas, but he had an uncle who lived in the Douglas County area and he had "been loafing about Ava for several months."
On Sunday, May 24, the day after the bodies were found, Perry was arrested at his uncle's farm north of Ava. He was brought to Ava late that night and made a confession upon a promise of protection from the mob that was gathering and threatening vigilante justice. He admitted participating in the murders but also implicated two other young men, Louis Douglas and Jack Baker. He claimed Douglas killed the old man, that Baker killed the old lady, and that his only direct participation in the crime was in helping the other two gang up on and kill Ernest Sawyer. He said they had killed the family for their money, which amounted to about $80. They also stole the family wagon and team, according to Perry, and drove to Springfield, where they sold the wagon and horses for $45 and divided the proceeds.
Almost no one believed Perry's story, which one newspaper called a "bogus confession." Douglas was briefly arrested but was soon released when it was learned that he and Perry had only gotten together in Springfield after Perry had gone there following the crime, and Douglas had accompanied him back to Douglas County. There was still a lot of talk of lynching Perry, and on the morning of May 26, as talk mounted, Perry broke down and gave another confession, saying he might as well tell the whole truth, since it looked as if he was going to he hanged anyway. He said that he and his uncle had done the killings by themselves. However, when the uncle, Bill Yost, was arrested, he put up a convincing defense, and authorities felt that the second confession was just as bogus as the first and that both were just attempts on Perry's part to shift part of the blame for the heinous murders away from himself.
Perry and Perry alone was convicted of murder, and he was hanged about 2 p.m. on January 30, 1897, at Ava. According to one contemporaneous report, "The murderer's neck was broken by the fall," and "the execution was a success in every particular." At the time, this was the only legal hanging ever in Douglas County. I'm not sure whether there were any more legal hangings in Douglas County after this one, but I don't know of any.

Murder of Conductor Percy

On Monday evening, October 21, 1872, a young man about 18 years old boarded the night express of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad at Springfield. When the conductor, identified only as B. Percy, passed through the passenger car collecting fares, the young man had no ticket and no money to pay for one but said he would be able to obtain some money at Marshfield. The conductor allowed the lad to ride to Marshfield, but when the train arrived there, the young man still showed no disposition to pay. The conductor then took the young man's hat and left it with the ticket agent, telling the lad he could get the hat back when he came up with the money for his ticket. A few moments later, Conductor Percy announced "all aboard" and stepped onto the platform of one of the rear cars as the train started up. The young man scaled the platform from the opposite direction, immediately pulled out a pistol, and shot the conductor through the head. The desperado then jumped from the train and disappeared into the darkness. Because of the noise created by the train starting up, the shooting was not discovered until the train had traveled from the passenger depot to the freight depot about a hundred yards distant. The confusion and excitement caused by the discovery further aided in the shooter's escape. Percy died within twenty minutes, and the next morning his body was taken to Springfield, where he had lived, and turned over to his family.
Although the murderer fled into the night without being immediately pursued, a posse soon started after him and trailed him to a residence about seven miles east of Springfield, where he had stopped and been allowed to rest. The posse found the young man sound asleep inside the home about midday on Tuesday, tied him with a rope, and started back to Marshfield with their prisoner, who identified himself as V.T. Cornwell of Illinois. The editor of the Springfield Missouri Weekly Patriot expressed satisfaction that the man who had killed Percy was taken back to Marshfield rather than brought to Springfield because "our people are slow to punish such heinous crimes" whereas "the people of Webster have had some experience in this line." The newspaperman said he looked to Webster County to give Cornwell justice and that he thought it could best be dispensed at the end of a rope. What ultimately happened to the young killer, however, is not known.

Hanging of William Roland

In the wee hours of the morning of April 17, 1934, two detectives for the Rock Island Railroad, J.W. Whitted and Edwin C. Shane, were killed when they interrupted five black men in the process of robbing a freight car in Bland, a small town in the southwest part of Gasconade County, Missouri. Shane's body was found near the depot in Bland about 7:00 a.m., just a few hours after the crime, and Whitted's body was found near the same time at Eldon, Missouri, seventy miles to the northwest, still lying on top of a railroad car. Both had been shot to death.
Later the same morning, three black men were arrested at Redbird, a few miles south of Bland, and one was arrested at Belle, a few miles west of Bland in northern Maries County. All four reportedly admitted their participation in the robbery, but they all claimed that a fifth black man, whom they knew only as Shorty, had planned the crime and had done the killing when the detectives caught them robbing the car and ordered them outside. The four accomplices were found guilty of burglary and sent to the penitentiary.
On May 14, the man known as Shorty, later identified as William Roland, was arrested in St. Louis. A "professional train robber" and an ex-convict who had served ten years in prison for killing two Mexicans, the 44-year-old Roland confessed to killing the two railroad detectives and was taken to the Gasconade County seat of Hermann and placed in jail. He was tried just a week later (with two of his accomplices testifying against him), found guilty of murder, and sentenced to hang on June 29. The case, however, was appealed to the state supreme court, thus postponing the execution. The high court finally ruled in March of 1935 that the verdict would stand, and the hanging was rescheduled for April 12, 1935.
On the appointed day, Roland reportedly ate a hearty breakfast and then was led calmly to the gallows inside the jail at Hermann. Asked if he had anything to say, he replied in a clear voice that he did not, and the trap was sprung by the county sheriff. A reporter for the Bland Courier remarked that among the 100 spectators who witnessed the affair, "Only four women saw the Negro die. Four men, who had lost courage, left the jail before the trap was sprung." The newspaperman also found it an interesting coincidence that there were 13 steps leading to the scaffold, there were 13 wraps in the rope, the Friday of the execution lacked but one day being the 13th day of the month, and it took the condemned man 13 minutes to die.
After the hanging, the public was invited inside the jail, and another 100 or so people went inside to gaze at the corpse. Bits of the hangman's rope were handed out, according to the local reporter, "as souvenirs of the execution of one of the most hardened criminals of all time who had committed a dastardly crime right here in the heart of our little city."

More on Lucy Vance

After posting the entry last time about the rape of Lucy Vance during the Civil War, I did a little more research on Lucy and came up with some additional information that I thought readers might find interesting as a follow-up to the previous post. Apparently she was a strong, pioneer woman, as last week's story would attest. Not every woman who was raped by Union soldiers would have had the strength and spunk to file a complaint about it to Union authorities.
Lucy was born in 1840 to J.S. and Martha (Noe) Huddlestone in Greene County, Missouri, near the James River bridge. The family moved to Taney County shortly afterwards and was living in Linn Township of Taney at the time of the 1850 census. Lucy's older brother was a merchant at Forsyth in the years just prior to the Civil War. Lucy married Calvin Vance around 1858, and at the time of the 1860 census, the couple was living in Ozark, Missouri, with a one-year-old-boy named John and an infant daughter named Viola who was less than a year old. Viola was probably the child who was in the house with Lucy when she was raped.
Calvin Vance apparently left home at or shortly after the outset of the Civil War, but whether he joined the Confederacy or the Union or simply took to the bush as a guerrilla is not known. In October of 1864, over a year and a half after his wife was raped by the Federal soldier, Calvin did join the Union Army at Springfield, but that doesn't necessarily mean he didn't also serve in the Confederacy early in the war. Switching sides late in the war, especially Southerners switching to the North as the tide turned toward the Union, was not unusual. Regardless, at some point near the beginning of the war, with her husband away from home, Lucy moved back to Taney County to be near her relatives, and it was during her sojourn in Taney County that she was violated by the brutish Union soldier.
Apparently, Calvin did not hold his wife's rape against her, which, of course, is only right, but some men might have. That's unfortunately probably still the case today. It's certainly still the case in many Middle Eastern countries. At any rate, Calvin and Lucy were living near Quincy, Missouri, in Fristoe Township of Benton County at the time of the 1870 census. They had two additional kids, younger siblings of John and Viola.
By the time of the 1880 census, the Vances were living in Sugar Loaf Township of Boone County, Arkansas, and they were still there twenty years later. Sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, Silas Turnbo, a folklorist and storyteller who gathered stories from early-day settlers in northern Arkansas and southern Missouri, interviewed Lucy about an incident involving a woman who lived on Bear Creek ten miles north of Forsyth when Lucy was growing up in Taney County. When Lucy was about twelve years old, the woman, the wife of Hiram Collier, killed a bear one day after she and her nearly grown daughter went out into their cornfield and, out of curiosity, looked into an abandoned cabin that sat in the middle of the cornfield. According to Lucy's story, they were surprised to see a bear perched on a ceiling joist. The bear was unalarmed, and Mrs. Collier and her daughter slipped out. The daughter ran back to the family's home and brought back a rifle. Mrs. Collier calmly loaded the weapon, stepped into the cabin, and shot the bear dead with a single shot. So, I guess Lucy wasn't the only strong, pioneer woman around in those days.
By 1910, Lucy was a widow and was living with her grandson in Sugar Loaf Township. She herself apparently died sometime before 1920.
Turnbo published some of his stories in two volumes printed in 1904 and 1907 but not nearly all of them. The entire collection is held at the Springfield-Greene County Library and is available on the library's website.

A Civil War Rape

One of the tragedies of war is the mistreatment of women by conquering or occupying soldiers, and the Civil War, of course, was no exception. A case in point is the rape of twenty-three-year-old Lucy Vance, wife of Calvin Vance, in Taney County, Missouri, in late January of 1863.
On Tuesday evening, the 19th, three Federal soldiers came to Mrs. Vance's home and came inside uninvited. They asked about the whereabouts of her husband, and she told them he was in Arkansas. (He might well have been in the Confederate Army or in the bush as a guerrilla, but Mrs. Vance, of course, did not say so in her deposition about her ordeal a few days later.) The soldiers also asked about forage for their horses, and she told them she did not have any or know where any was. After a while two of the men left and went to a neighboring house to look for forage. Pretty soon, two different Union soldiers came into the house but stayed only a short while.
The man who had been there all along told Mrs. Vance he was from Iowa. Pacing back and forth across the floor, he looked out the door periodically and told Mrs. Vance he was looking for his company. Then, he began trying to get friendly with her, but she told him she wished he would leave and go next door to Mrs. Watson's and tell Mrs. Williams to come over and stay with her. It was nine o'clock, and she said was afraid to stay overnight alone. Instead of going next door, though, the man started trying to talk Mrs. Vance into having sexual intercourse with him. She told him no and ordered him out of the house. Instead of leaving, he apologized for having insulted her and offered her thirty dollars, which the woman apparently and, if so, understandably considered even more of an insult. She again refused and tried to get out of the house, but the man blocked the doorway.
Mrs. Vance then sat down with her baby in her lap, and when the man advanced toward her threateningly, she yelled. He told her, if she did not quit hollering, he would kill her. Then he pushed the child off her lap, put his arms around her waist, and picked her up. Carrying her to the nearby bed, he threw her on it and started choking her when she continued to cry out. As her cries subsided, he released her throat and put a hand over her mouth to muffle her sobs. "While in this condition on the bed," Mrs. Vance concluded in her deposition a few days later, "he had sexual intercourse with me."
As soon as the man left, Mrs. Vance went next door to Mrs. Watson's, and when she went back the next morning, she found that everything in her house had been carried off.
A week later, January 26, Mrs. Vance gave a statement to Federal authorities at Forsyth relating her nightmare. She described her assailant as a heavyset man about 5'11" tall with blue eyes, light complexion and hair, and short whiskers. He had a fat, round face with small eyes and a high forehead. He wore a blue Federal cap and overcoat. Despite the woman's relatively thorough description of her rapist, the man apparently was never apprehended or charged and probably never even identified.
Sources: Union provost marshals' papers and 1860 U.S. census.

Drake Constitution Again

I've written previously about the Drake Constitution that was passed in Missouri at the very end of the Civil War. Named after Charles Drake, its chief proponent in the legislature, it forbade anyone who had ever fought against the U.S. or openly sympathized with the South during the Civil War from voting or holding critical positions such as lawyer, teacher, and preacher without first taking an oath of allegiance to the U.S. Many unrepentant Rebels, of course, were unable in good conscience or unwilling to take such an oath, and it is hard to overestimate the level of resentment the law engendered among them. As I have stated previously on this blog, the Drake Constitution even led, indirectly at least, to a number of violent clashes in Missouri between ex-Union men and ex-Confederate men during the years immediately after the war.
The subject of the Drake Constitution was so controversial that it is hard to read more than a few issues of any Missouri newspaper published in the years immediately after the war without the subject appearing. This is especially the case if the editors of the particular newspaper you are reading happened to have held Southern sympathies. A case in point is the Jefferson City People's Tribune. I was browsing through issues of this newspaper from 1868 recently, and practically every issue had an article railing against the Radicals and/or the Drake Constitution they had passed at the end of the war. For instance, in one such article in the August 5 issue, the editor attacked Missouri governor Fletcher for a statement he had made at a recent Radical Congressional Convention declaring that every man "primia facia is not a voter and must satisfy the registrars that he is a qualified voter." In other words, the editor opined, every man who applies to vote is assumed to be a criminal until he can prove otherwise. "This is a strange declaration of law to proceed from the mouth of the Governor of a great state," continued the editor, since the whole history of democratic criminal justice was built on the premise that everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty.
"Doubtless the Governor thinks that inasmuch as very many persons presume him guilty of criminal complicity in many villainies that have been perpetrated in this State," the fiery editor went on, "that it would be well for him to declare the whole people of the State subject to a like presumption against them of criminal conduct." The newspaperman concluded that the fable of the fox that got his tail cut off in a steel trap and then endeavored to have all the other foxes agree to have their tails cut off, too, in order that he not appear abnormal was a good illustration of "his Excellency's deplorable situation."
This is just a small sample of the type of anti-Drake Constitution vitriol that was prevalent in Missouri among Southern sympathizers in the years after the Civil War. Indeed, the article I cited above was just one of several anti-Radical and anti-Drake Constitution columns that appeared in the August 5th issue of the People's Tribune.

Murder of Sheriff John W. Polk

Late Thursday afternoon, May 25, 1905, a young man named William Spaugh entered Rascher's restaurant in Ironton, Missouri, and started bedeviling some of the customers by throwing peanut shells at them and so forth. He then caught one of the customers, William Edgar, by the leg, pulled him from his seat, and started dancing around the floor taunting Edgar and trying to get him to dance, too. After Edgar reclaimed his seat, Spaugh told him (Edgar) that the more he looked at his face, the more he hated it and struck him in the eye, inflicting a cut. He again jerked Edgar by the foot, pulling him to the floor. Here Rascher interceded and put Spaugh out of the restaurant.
Spaugh went to his home in Ironton, and the Iron County sheriff, John W. Polk, informed of the outrages on Edgar, went to the Spaugh home to arrest the assailant. William Spaugh was sitting on the front porch with his younger brother, Arthur, and another young man, William Brown, when Polk arrived. William Spaugh, according to Brown's later testimony, announced to the other two young men that the sheriff was there to arrest him, and Arthur got up and went inside the house. At the gate leading into the front yard, Polk hollered to William Spaugh that he needed to see him and for Spaugh to come to the fence. Spaugh demanded to know whether the sheriff had a warrant, and when Polk admitted he didn't, Spaugh got up and followed his brother inside.
Sheriff Polk then went inside the gate, stepped onto the front porch, opened the door to the house, and started to walk across the threshold when four or five shots rang out. One of them was a shotgun blast that reportedly blew a hole in Polk's side big enough to stick a fist in. Polk was also shot with a ball to the heart and one to the head, and he was given yet another wound with some sort of sharp instrument, apparently after he had already fallen dead to the floor.
The Spaugh brothers left the premises immediately after the shooting, and search parties sent out in pursuit of them finally brought them to bay, with the help of bloodhounds, at an isolated cabin in Madison County about five days later. After a gun battle that lasted several minutes, the two fugitives finally surrendered and were arrested and charged with murder. Their mother had previously been arrested, and she also was charged with murder for allegedly urging her sons to resist Sheriff Polk.
In early July, a mob broke into the Iron County jail where the brothers were being held, tied up the newly appointed sheriff, and shot the brothers several times in their legs. By order of the Missouri governor, the Spaughs were then transferred to St. Louis for safekeeping while awaiting trial.
The three Spaughs were scheduled for trial in late 1905 in Reynolds County on a change of venue from Iron County. William Spaugh was tried, convicted of first degree murder, and sentenced to hang. Arthur's trial and his mother's trial were postponed until the following summer. In mid-1906 Arthur was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to 55 years in prison, and the mother was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to ten years in prison.
All three convictions were appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, but the verdicts were upheld in each case. However, the mother was later granted a new trial and was acquitted upon retrial. Also, William Spaugh's death sentence was later commuted to life in prison.
In 1913, when William Spaugh was dying of tuberculosis, Arthur tried to take the blame for the killings in order to secure a parole for William so that he might die at home, but the request was denied and William Spaugh died in prison in mid-1913. Arthur also later died in prison of tuberculosis after serving just a few years.

Sarcoxie War

Last time I wrote about the so-called Osage War that occurred in southwest Missouri during the winter of 1836-1837 when some Greene County militia drove a party of Osage Indians out of the state without bloodshed and with only minimal protestations from the Indians. Another bloodless confrontation between white settlers and Indians, called the Sarcoxie War, occurred in southwest Missouri only a few months later, in the summer of 1837.

During frontier days, white settlers were always on guard that the "savages" might go on the warpath, and the least provocation would get the settlers up in arms. In June of 1837, a Seneca Indian visited a settler in that part of Polk County that later became Dade County and, according to Holcombe's 1883 History of Greene County, wanted to "trade 'squaws' with him." The settler knocked the Indian down and drove him off his premises, but the next day a shot was fired at the settler as he worked in his field. An alarm was given, and the Polk County militia was called out to drive the Seneca Indians out of the state.

Shortly after the Polk County militia had accomplished its purpose, however, a large group of Osage Indians were reported to be "acting suspiciously" in the Sarcoxie area, and they were suspected of having stolen some horses and other property of white settlers in the area. In response to the report, the entire southwest Missouri militia was called out to meet the supposed threat. The Indians were located near Sarcoxie and escorted back across the state line without incident. There was "little negotiating and parleying," and the Osages gave their solemn promise not to return without permission. They said they had no evil intent, had only come into Missouri to hunt and fish, and didn't know anything about any stolen horses or other goods taken from white settlers.

Holcombe summed up the so-called Sarcoxie War by saying that it was "a very nice sort of war, being one in which no human blood was shed or any serious casualties suffered. The reports of the outbreak were greatly exaggerated from the start. The Indians had done nothing, and doubtless intended doing nothing to harm the settlers, and all of the alarm and uneasiness, the mustering, the arming, and the marching, were for nothing."

The Osage War

The so-called Osage War was a bloodless confrontation between Osage Indians and a company of Greene County (Missouri) militia under Colonel Charles Yancey in the winter of 1836-1837. The Osage had been removed to reservations in Kansas and Indian Territory through a series of treaties in the early 1800s, but some of them persisted in drifting back into their former homeland. Their presence in southwest Missouri, according to R.I. Holcombe's 1883 History of Greene County, was "distasteful to the settlers," and Governor Lilburn Boggs ordered them removed.
Yancey, who was also presiding judge of the county court, decided to go out and negotiate personally with the Indians and only call out his troops if it should prove necessary. Two other men, Chesley Cannefax and Henry Fulbright, accompanied him on his mission. Taking along a young black man, who had been raised among the Delaware and spoke several Indian dialects, as an interpreter, the trio set out to the south and southwest of Springfield and, after a couple of days travel, met a party of Osage Indians mounted on ponies near Flat Creek in what later became Stone County. Yancey was dressed in full military regalia, with plumes and epaulets, and the white men hoped that his "imposing appearance" would make a favorable impression on "the display-loving savages." The Indians were impressed enough to let out a shrill yell and gallop away without speaking a word.
Their fear somewhat aroused by the reaction of the Indians, the white men followed uneasily and soon came upon an Indian camp of about 100 men and an equal number of women and children. Apparently assuming Yancey was some sort of "great chief," the Indians met the white men with beads and other Indian finery as tokens of their goodwill, and the Osage chief, Nawpawiter, sat down with Yancey and his party to talk. Newpawiter agreed to remove from the area but asked, because of the inclement weather and the condition of some of his people, that he not have to do so until the weather got better. Yancey granted the request, issuing a written permission for the Indians to stay where they were for a few days until the weather improved, and then he and his small party continued on their way, looking for other Indians in the region.
About 35 miles south Springfield in Barry County, Yancey and his men came upon a large assemblage of Indians that they thought might be a war council, as one brave reportedly rode out brandishing a tomahawk and making indecent gestures toward the white men. Although Yancey and Fulbright thought they could parley with the Indians as they had done with Newpawiter and induce them to leave, Cannefax argued for a stronger course of action. His advice finally prevailed, and the white men returned to Springfield to call out the militia.
More than a hundred men were soon armed and mounted, and the militia met the Indians again in present-day Christian County, on the Finley River. The Indians greatly outnumbered the whites, but they were poorly armed, mainly with just bows and arrows. The Indians retreated, and Yancey pursued them to the west side of the James River, where the two sides drew up facing each other. The Indians at first refused Yancey's demand that they give up their arms and remove across the state line, but they soon acquiesced, although a few young braves continued to grumble as they laid down their weapons. According to Holcombe, some of the white men "behaved very rudely" toward the Indian women, but Yancey supposedly put a quick stop to the misbehavior. Over the next couple of days, which were bitterly cold, the militia escorted the Indians to the state line, where they were admonished not to come back into Missouri.
When the militia got back to Springfield, they found the townspeople almost in a panic because of rumors they had heard that a general Indian uprising had begun. No hostilities ensued, however, and thus ended the so-called Osage War.
As a footnote to this story, it might be interesting to mention that later in 1837 Judge Yancey killed a man on the square in Springfield. The first person to be put on trial for murder in Greene County, he was acquitted and later was appointed a circuit judge.

Belle Starr's 35-Mile Dash

According to legend, sixteen-year-old Myra Maybelle Shirley (later known as Belle Starr) was out on a scout from Carthage on behalf of her brother Bud and his guerrilla buddies in early 1862 when she was captured at Newtonia on February 3, which happened to be her sixteenth birthday, by Major Edwin Eno, who was stationed there in command of Union forces, and held in the Ritchey mansion because Eno had sent out a detachment in pursuit of Bud Shirley and his guerrilla band and he knew that Myra would warn her brother if she were not detained. Personally guarded by Eno, Myra paced the floor cursing and ranting against the major or pounded out songs on the piano to release her pent up emotions, but he merely laughed at her anger and frustration, further incensing the young woman and finally driving her to tears.
After a suitable elapse of time, Eno became satisfied that his men had an ample head start on Myra and that he could safely release her. She rushed through the door, cut several switches from a cherry bush to use as riding whips, and sprang into the saddle of her trusty steed. Plying the cherry switches with vigor, she sped away and, a short distance from the house, left the road and cut across fields, leaping over ditches and fences and making a bee line for Carthage thirty-five miles away aboard her speedy horse. Major Eno pulled out his field glass and climbed to an upper room of the Ritchey mansion to watch as Myra raced away like the wind. "I'll be damned," he said with a hint of admiration. "If she doesn't reach Carthage ahead of my troopers, I'm a fool."
Sure enough, Myra reached her hometown in time to warn her brother of the Federal troops sent out to capture him, and when the soldiers reached Carthage shortly afterwards, she was there to greet them and inform them with a smirk that Bud Shirley and his men had left town half an hour ago and were probably in Lawrence County by now.
The problem with this story is that it almost certainly didn't happen. The legend was first propagated by S.W. Harman in his book Hell on the Border, published in 1898, almost ten years after Belle Starr's death. The story, as related by Harman, was full of errors. Myra Shirley would have turned fourteen in 1862, not sixteen, and in addition the idea that the incident supposedly happened on her birthday seems like a bit of romantic nonsense. Harman misspelled the major's name as Enos instead of Eno and misspelled the name of Mathew Ritchey as Ritchery. Also, Eno was not stationed at Newtonia until 1863. These factual errors, the fantastic notion of a fifteen or sixteen-year-old girl off on a scout by herself 35 miles from home, and the fact that the story was not heard of until almost ten years after Belle's death make one suspect that the whole incident was probably manufactured or at least highly fictionalized to embellish the infamous reputation she had gained long after she had left Carthage.
A different version of the legend holds that Myra was not detained by Eno but instead came to the Ritchey home of her own accord as a spy to try to gather information for her brother and his guerrilla friends. Mr. Ritchey, a strong Union man, knew the Shirley family and did not like them, but out of courtesy he admitted the girl and let her spend the night. While she was there, Myra made herself very agreeable and entertained her hosts and the other guests, including Major Eno, by playing the piano. The next morning, having obtained vital information about Union forces in Newtonia, Myra cut some cherry switches and rode off side-saddle toward Carthage, but she had ridden only a couple of miles when Confederate forces launched a surprise attack on the Union troops at Newtonia. The cutting of the switches had been a signal that the place was vulnerable to attack.
While this second version of Belle's visit to Newtonia is somewhat more believable than the first, it, too, probably has very little basis in fact.

Tri-State Tornado

I've written on this blog about the 2011 Joplin tornado and the 1880 Marshfield tornado, but I don't think I've ever written about the 1925 Tri-State tornado, other than perhaps just to mention it in passing.
The Tri-State tornado was first sighted in Shannon County, Missouri, about 12:40 p.m. on March 18, 1925, and the first fatality occurred about twenty minutes later north-northwest of Ellington. The storm virtually annihilated the town of Annapolis in Iron County, killing two people there. Two more people were killed at the small community of Leadanna, also in Iron County. The twister then crossed Bollinger County and entered Perry County, where it struck the town of Biehle, destroying many homes and killing four people. At least eleven people were killed in Missouri before the tornado continued its deadly path through Illinois and into Indiana.
The storm cut a swath 235 miles long and about 1,200 yards wide on average. Altogether it killed 695 people, making it by far the deadliest single tornado in U.S. history. Although not officially rated at the time, it is considered an EF5 tornado.
The Tri State tornado was part of a whole series of tornadoes that broke out on the same day, and the total number of deaths for all the storms that day was 747.

The Railroad Comes to Springfield

The years immediately before the Civil War and especially the years immediately after the war were a time of great activity in the building of railroads across the Ozarks (and the whole country, for that matter). The history of railroad building in the Ozarks is a vast subject that is beyond the scope of a brief blog entry, but I'll briefly outline the events that led to Springfield, Missouri, finally getting a railroad in 1870.
The Pacific Railroad was chartered in 1849 to extend from St. Louis to Missouri's western border and thence to the Pacific Ocean. In 1852, an amendment to the law authorizing the Pacific Railroad created a Southwest Branch, which would diverge from the main branch at Franklin (appropriately renamed Pacific) and head southwest toward Rolla and Springfield while the main Pacific Railroad continued due west toward Jefferson City and Tipton.
By 1861, almost eighty miles of track had been completed along the Southwest Branch from Pacific to Rolla before the Civil War interrupted almost all railroad construction in the United States. Thus, work was halted on both branches of the Pacific Railroad.
Work resumed after the war, and by 1866, another twelve miles of roadbed for the Southwest Branch had been completed to Arlington. However, the Southwest Branch defaulted on its bonds, and the track from Pacific to Rolla and the roadbed to Arlington were seized by the state and sold to John C. Fremont, a Civil War general who had originally made his name as an explorer and had been the 1856 Republican presidential candidate. Fremont renamed the Southwest Branch the Southwest Pacific Railroad. (The main line of the Pacific Railroad was not sold, and it later became the Missouri Pacific.)
In 1866, the same year Fremont bought the Southwest Pacific, Congress incorporated the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad under his control with authority to build a railroad from Springfield to the Pacific Ocean. An entity of the Atlantic and Pacific purchased the Southwest Pacific in 1867, and rails were laid to Arlington on the already-existing roadbed the same year. However, that company, too, defaulted on its payments (although the main Atlantic and Pacific was still operating), and the state again seized the property in June of that year. Citizens of Springfield were eagerly anticipating the arrival of the railroad, but all the difficulty in getting a road built across the state made some people doubt whether Springfield would ever get a railroad. A St. Louis newspaperman supposedly remarked that the people who were working to get a road to Springfield were just as likely to get a railroad built to the moon as to Springfield. In 1868, the state sold the old Southwest Pacific property to a new company, the South Pacific Railroad, and it was under this name that the railroad finally reached Springfield in April of 1870. Thus the town was facetiously dubbed Moon City, and the name is still occasionally used today. For instance, the press of Missouri State University is known as Moon City Press.
Later in 1870, tracks were completed as far as Pierce City. The same year, the Atlantic and Pacific acquired the South Pacific, and the A&P was, in turn, acquired in 1878 by the St. Louis-San Francisco Railroad. The Frisco remained the dominant railroad in the Ozarks until 1980, when it merged with Burlington Northern.

Killing of Aeneas Ridge

Again it's been quite a while since my last blog entry, but this time the delay has nothing to do with lack of ideas, which was the primary reason I gave last time. I've received several ideas from readers since that last post; so I can't use that excuse again for a while. The reason this time is simply that I've been too busy with other things, mainly moving. My wife and I have been moving from one house to another here in Joplin, but in some ways it seems worse than if we were moving across country, because we're doing a lot of the moving ourselves. You can accumulate a lot of stuff in 25 years (the length of time we lived at the previous house). Anyway, that's my excuse and I'm sticking with it.
One of the suggestions I received had to do with the death of Aeneas Ridge, Jr. in Christian County, Missouri, in 1883; so that's what I'm going to write about today. Aeneas Ridge, Jr. was the grandson of Major Ridge, a Cherokee Indian leader who was killed in the late 1830s, along with two other leaders of the Treaty Party, by the Anti-Treaty faction in the wake of the tribe's forced removal from the Southeast along the infamous Trail of Tears.
In the fall of 1882, the grandson, who was one-fourth Cherokee, had shot two black men in Indian Territory and fled to Christian County, where he stayed with the family of Joe Danforth, to whom he was related by marriage. On June 12, 1883, Danforth and young Ridge were doing some lumber work at a sawmill Danforth owned along Piedlow Creek in northern Christian County when four law officers arrived with a warrant for his arrest for shooting the black men. The posse consisted of George Whiteside, ex-sheriff of Dade County and then a deputy in Christian County; Jim Armstrong, a deputy from Dade County; Jim White, the marshal of Greenfield; and a black man named Taylor Smith from Springfield. The four men, according to a Springfield newspaper report of the incident, went to the sawmill expecting trouble because of the "reckless and desperate character" of the man they sought. Danforth, Ridge, and some other men were seated on a pile of wood engaged in conversation when the lawmen arrived and Whiteside leveled a shotgun at the group and told them all to put up their hands. Instead the men scrambled for cover, and Ridge supposedly pulled out his pistol and fired two shots from behind a tree, the first one at Armstrong and the second at Whiteside.
Whiteside returned fire, continued the newspaper report, striking Ridge in the arm, which caused him to come out from behind the tree far enough for Whiteside to get a clean second shot, which struck the fugitive in the face. Ridge then sprang out from behind the tree completely with his hands raised in surrender and took a few steps toward the lawmen before collapsing and dying within minutes.
Ridge's body was taken to Springfield, where a coroner's jury held later the same day exonerated Whiteside on the grounds of justifiable homicide. The charges against the lawmen were later revived, however, when witnesses who had been on the scene at the time told a grand jury that the lawmen started shooting immediately as soon as Whiteside told Ridge and his friends to hold up their hands and that Ridge only took cover behind the tree and pulled out his pistol after he had already been shot. Whiteside was arrested in early February of 1884 and taken to Ozark and charged with murder. The other three members of the posse were also charged with murder, but all of them were eventually acquitted, despite the best efforts of an all-star prosecution team that included Ridge's kinsman Elias Boudinot, Jr.

Doc Jennison in Joplin, Revisted

I haven't been posting on this blog quite as often lately as I normally do. There are at least a couple of reasons, including the fact that I've been busy with other projects, but one of the main reasons is that I've been having trouble coming up with good topics to write about. After almost 7 years of doing this blog, it's starting to get a little difficult to find things to write about that I haven't previously covered, or at least harder than it used to be. So, if anyone has a topic to suggest, I would be glad to consider it. Just let me know by posting in response to this entry or by sending an email to larryewood@mail.com.
Even today's topic is a bit of duplication. A few years ago I briefly wrote about Charles "Doc" Jennison's time in Joplin, especially his involvement in helping organize a relief effort after Marshfield suffered a tornado in April 1880. However, I thought I'd go into a little more detail this time.
I might start by noting that Jennison's residence is Joplin is apparently not common knowledge. There is an entire book written about Jennison and his 7th Kansas Cavalry, which also covers his time after the Civil War, but I don't believe it even mentions Jennison's time in Joplin.
Jennison, as Civil War buffs know, came to Kansas from New York a few years prior to the Civil War and aligned himself with rabid abolitionists like James Montgomery. At the outset of the war, he was named colonel of the 7th Kansas and gained a reputation among Missourians, especially Southern sympathizers, as a notorious jayhawker for his raids across the border.
After the war, he served two terms in the Kansas legislature. He came to the booming mining town of Joplin about the spring of 1877. Like most people who came to Joplin, he tried his hand at mining, but what he really enjoyed was gambling. He established a restaurant and saloon on Main Street called the Saratoga and installed a faro device. Jennison was known for serving good food, including occasional complimentary meals, and for hobnobbing with city leaders, but he also got into trouble late in 1877 for keeping an illegal gambling device.
In April of 1878, he opened a second establishment called the Bon Ton. It also served food but was mainly a gambling place. It closed after only a couple of months, but about the time it closed, a man named Day brought a suit against Jennison in an effort to regain $600 he had lost to the old jayhawker at a different establishment. In an ironic twist, Day claimed Jennison wasn't entitled to the cash because he'd won it in an "illegal gambling" operation, as though Day himself had not also been involved.
Jennison had received medical training as a young man in New York but seldom used it. In December of 1878, however, he was called upon to treat a saloonkeeper and acquaintance of his named Basset. Early the next year, Jennison was keeping faro devices at two different establishments, neither of which was the Saratoga. In the summer of '79, he was charged with gambling in two or three separate cases.
Although Jennison was civic minded and socialized with the leaders of Joplin, he was also the butt of jokes, especially from newspapermen. Sometime around the summer of 1879, Jennison joined a gun club, and after he and two other men went out shooting glass balls for target practice, one reporter joked that none of the three hit a single ball.
In the fall of '79, Jennison became involved in organizing an exposition that was scheduled to come to Joplin the following year. One of the main draws of the fair was horse racing, and Jennison had a gray mare that he entered in a demonstration race that fall as a prelude to the real thing. He also showed some visiting dignitaries around the fairgrounds, which were located just northeast of the present-day intersection of 20th and Maiden Lane.
In early 1880, Jennison and some other men went fishing on Shoal Creek near the falls, and Jennison was again the butt of jokes when he came back with only a small sunfish while all the others caught good sized bass. In April of 1880, Jennison organized the Marshfield relief effort and trekked to Marshfield to inspect the damage of the tornado.
In May of 1880 the heavyset Jennison fell down some steps in Joplin and, according to a local newspaperman, made a dent in the sidewalk but inflicted no damage on himself. The same month, Joplin law enforcement cracked down on gambling; so Jennison absconded to Galena, Kansas, just across the border with two of his gambling buddies, Bud Fagg and Boston Joe. He came back after just a few days, though, and turned a room above the Miner's Drift Saloon (located at the corner of Main and 2nd, where the Bon Ton had likely also been located) into a reading room. About the same time he also planned to set up a free soup kitchen in the basement of the Golden Gate Saloon, but he soon gave up his civic-minded efforts and went back to gambling. He was cited seven separate times for gambling during the summer of 1880. After paying two fines and getting the other cases continued, he again hightailed it to Galena but again didn't stay long.
Back in Joplin in September of 1880, Jennison turned his reading room back into a gambling establishment. In October he made the news when he beat one of his customers about the head when the man became unruly.
In early '81, Jennison was back in Galena, where he briefly tried mining again but, as usual, was mainly involved in gambling. He organized some trotting races and took bets on the outcome and also took bets on who could throw a baseball the farthest.
Not long after this Jennison returned to Leavenworth, where he had previously lived, and he died there in 1884.
I will be speaking at the Christian County Library in Ozark at 6 p.m. on Thursday June 18 about my Ozark Gunfights book, and I'll be having a book signing for my latest book, A Concise Encyclopedia of the Ozarks at 1 p.m. on Saturday, June 27 at Half Price Books of the Ozarks in Springfield.