Nat Kinney in Springfield

Nat Kinney is best known in the Ozarks as the leader of the notorious Bald Knobbers of Taney County, but before he came to Taney County, he lived for a while in Springfield, where he worked as a bartender and briefly kept his own saloon. This fact, of course, opened him up to charges of hypocrisy once he relocated to Taney County and started conducting a Sunday school there and trying to enforce morality. One critic allowed, for instance, that an "ex-saloonkeeper from the slums of Springfield" was not "a proper censor of Taney County morals."
In fact, Kinney lived in Springfield less than a year. He came to Springfield about the end of February 1882 from Topeka, Kansas. In Topeka he had run the city's omnibus line for a number of years and had been a fairly respected citizen for a time. In the fall of 1880 Kansas voters passed a prohibition law that went into effect in January of 1881, and Kinney seems to have lost favor, at least among the prohibitionists, over the alcohol issue. For instance, in February of 1882, he was accused of selling liquor illegally. It was about the same time that he moved to Springfield, perhaps to avoid further repercussions over his alleged illegal activity.
By March of 1882, Kinney was working in A. F. Kinney's saloon on the northwest corner of the Springfield square. A. F. Kinney had several brothers who worked for him, but Nat Kinney was not one of them. It's not known whether Nat Kinney was more distantly related to A. F. Kinney.
By the late summer of 1882, Nat Kinney was running his own saloon a block or two off the square on Boonville Street. On the evening of September 16, Mike Ahern and Payton Parrish got into a fight at Nat Kinney's saloon, where they had been drinking throughout the day. Ahern reportedly got mad at the smaller Parrish, knocked him down, jumped on top of him, and pummeled him as he lay on the floor. Parrish managed to pull a knife out of his pocket and stab Ahern in the stomach several times in quick succession.
Ahern was taken to a nearby boardinghouse for medical attention, but he died about two weeks later. Parrish was arrested but released on bond, and the case was never prosecuted, because it was considered self-defense. When Nat Kinney was interviewed in November by a grand jury about the case, he said he "didn't know who done it." Kinney left Springfield very shortly after testifying to the grand jury. In December, he paid a visit to his old hometown of Topeka, and by early 1883 he had relocated to Taney County, Missouri.