The Civil War Story of George P. B. Gatewood

    George Phillip Braxton Gatewood was born in Pike County, Missouri, in June 1842 to James M. and Malinda (Hardin) Gatewood. The family moved to Montevallo in Vernon County about 1858, where James M. Gatewood soon became a prominent citizen and was elected to the state legislature in 1860. When civil war looked inevitable in early 1861, the elder Gatewood organized one of the first Southern-allied companies in the region. After the Civil War officially started, Gatewood's company joined the newly organized Missouri State Guard with Gatewood commissioned as a captain in Colonel Dewitt C. Hunter's regiment. Among the members of his company was his nineteen-year-old son, George P. B. Gatewood.
    Young Gatewood came down with camp fever, an ailment similar to typhoid fever, about the first of August 1861, and he returned home on sick leave. At the expiration of his six-month term of enlistment in the fall of 1861, Gatewood traveled to Osceola, where the Missouri State Guard was then headquartered under General Sterling Price, and received his discharge. He then went back to Montevallo and enlisted in a company being raised by former Vernon County sheriff Henry Taylor. The company was sworn into service in February 1862 by Colonel John T. Coffee for the ostensible purpose of going south to join the Confederate Army, even though Coffee was still officially a member of the Missouri State Guard.
    About the same time George was sworn into Confederate service or shortly afterward, his father, James M. Gatewood, accidentally shot and mortally wounded himself at his home near Montevallo as he was returning his pistol to a saddle holster on his horse. (Destroyed during the war, old Montevallo was located about a mile and a half northwest of present-day Montevallo). On April 11, 1862, Captain Taylor was wounded and captured during a skirmish with Federal troops near Montevallo. Two days later, on the 13th, Lieutenant Charles Moss came down to Montevallo from Osceola with a detachment of the 1st Iowa Cavalry and spent the night at the Scobey Hotel. A couple of hours before daylight on the morning of the 14th, Taylor's company (or a part of it) under one of his lieutenants attacked the Federals at the hotel with two or three killed on each side. One of the rebels killed was the notorious Dan "Wild Irishman" Henley. After sunup, a squad of Moss's men chased after and skirmished with some of the rebels, killing another one or two guerrillas and capturing George Gatewood.
    Moss took Gatewood back to Osceola as a prisoner and prepared charges against him for being a bushwhacker, with the intention of sending him to the Union's department headquarters in St. Louis for trial. In his statement against Gatewood, Moss said he lost two men killed and four wounded in the skirmish at the hotel. He mentioned specifically one James Whitford of the First Iowa who was shot dead while coming down a ladder from a barn loft.
    To back up Moss's charges against Gatewood, the provost marshal at Osceola then took a statement from Private Charles Granger, a soldier in Moss's command who had been on the scout to Montevallo. Granger said he and a fellow solider named Bowman did not sleep in the Montevallo hotel with most of their comrades on the night of April 13 because it was too crowded but instead took quarters in a different building about a hundred yards away from the hotel. He and Bowman were awakened around three o'clock in the morning by a squad of about sixteen well-armed men who barged into the building and leveled their guns at the two Iowans. Granger and Bowman were disarmed, ordered to get dressed, and then left in the hands of four guards, while the rest of the guerrillas went on to the hotel to join the attack on the Iowa troops quartered there. Granger did not see the fight, but, judging from the sounds of the firing, he estimated the skirmish lasted about twenty minutes. After the firing died down, several of the guerrillas came back to where Granger and Bowman were being guarded. They retrieved the prisoners' horses from a nearby stable and ordered the two captives to come with them. The guerrillas escaped with their prisoners into some woods and rode about eight or nine miles to a private home, where they stopped for breakfast.
    A number of other guerrillas who had been in the hotel fight, including George Gatewood, were already at the house when Granger and Bowman arrived. From the conversation of his captors, Granger judged that they were "a marauding party" with "no regular organization." Granger heard the men bragging about killing "five or six" Federals, and he heard Gatewood, in particular, say that he had shot and killed one Federal as he was coming out of a barn and that he had watched him fall. Gatewood "seemed to exult in it and was glad he had killed him.” He said he'd like to "finish a few more." The guerrillas claimed the only reason they hadn't killed more Federals at the hotel fight was because they ran low on ammunition. After conferring a while, some of the guerrillas came up to Granger and Bowman and said they had decided to let the two men go. They then led the captives about four miles through a field and some woods, took their horses, and left them on foot. After about an hour, Granger and Bowman spotted a foraging team from the First Iowa and reunited with their unit.
    Shortly after Granger's deposition was taken on April 21, just as Moss was preparing to forward Gatewood to St. Louis, the prisoner escaped from the guardhouse at Osceola and was not seen or heard from again by Union officials for over a year.

    To be continued...