A Murder in Dallas County

The Civil War in Missouri often degenerated into a bitter, guerrilla conflict that pitted neighbor against neighbor and was fueled by personal grudges as much as political sentiment. Even after treaties were signed officially ending the war, the lawlessness carried over into the succeeding years in many places in the state. 

Dallas County saw less guerrilla warfare during the war than many other counties, and it also avoided the post-war violence, at least for the first few years, as the opening lines of a July 21, 1871, story in the Buffalo Reflex will attest: 

     Of all the shooting and killing that has been done in South-west Missouri for the few past years, 

   Dallas County has up to last week been spared the ignominy of being the scene of any bloodshed.       While each county on her border has, within two years past, been the theatre of from one to a half       dozen murders, Dallas has stood out alone with her reputation unstained by blood. We have on           several occasions referred to this fact as an evidence of the peace and harmony that prevailed and       the general law-abiding disposition that exists among her citizens.  

"But the day of humiliation has come at last," continued the Reflex. "A citizen has been shot and killed while following the peaceful pursuit of his avocation."

The victim was William Bassham, who lived on a farm about fifteen miles north of Buffalo near where the Linn Creek road crossed the Little Niangua River. (This would probably be not far from the present-day community of Tunas.) On Friday morning, July 14, Bassham went to a neighbor's farm with his son, his son-in-law, and a hired hand to cut hay in a field he worked on a sharecropping basis. He was leaning on his pitchfork and giving directions to his son, a mere lad, about fetching some water when a loud gunshot rang out. Bassham staggered and fell, and the son-in-law and the hired hand fled in panic. The boy, apparently less frightened than the two men, hurried to his father's side and found him still breathing but unable to speak. His body was riddled with buckshot, and he died after just a short time. 

The report of the gun and the shouts of the hired hand and son-in-law attracted the attention of neighbors, and some of the witnesses saw two men skulking along a fence that enclosed the field, about twenty-six paces from where Bassham fell. When someone called out for them to halt, they rushed into the brush, mounted horses, and galloped away. A posse of men hastily organized and trailed after the two suspects for several miles, but all sign of them was soon lost. 

A closer examination of Bassham's body revealed that he'd been hit by at least nine buckshot. Four balls had entered his chest, any one of which might have proved fatal, and four had hit one of his arms, breaking the bone in two places. It was thought the murder weapon was a double barrel shotgun and that both barrels had been discharged simultaneously. Footprints suggested that only one assassin had approached the fence and fired the gun while his accomplice stayed back a few feet at the edge of the woods. 

No one knew any reason anyone would want to harm Bassham, and it was generally thought that the shooting was the result of some old resentment that had been festering since the war. Bassham had been a Union soldier during the war and had been on several raids through Dallas and surrounding counties in search of bushwhackers. Just why it had taken six years for someone to enact their revenge, though, was not clear. "Time may unravel the mystery," the Reflex suggested, but apparently it never did.