Marion W. Vail: Confederate Mail Smuggler

   Near the time Hattie Snodgrass (last week's subject) and her companions were steam boating for Dixie in mid-May 1863, another St. Louis woman, Marion W. Vail, clashed with Federal authorities in the city for activities similar to those that had gotten Hattie in trouble a week or so earlier. Like Hattie, Marion Vail actively supported the Confederate war effort in Missouri despite having no close relatives fighting for the cause.
   A native of Kentucky, Marion Owens married New Jersey-born Corra O. Vail in St. Louis on October 25, 1849, when she was nineteen. Corra Vail went into the clothing store business, and by 1860, the couple had two children.
   Marion began her clandestine activities on behalf of the Confederacy at least as early as the spring of 1862. In late March, she visited Confederate soldier Absalom Grimes, whom she’d known before the war, at Myrtle Street Prison. He escaped a few days later, and she soon became involved in the Confederate mail running operation that ultimately made him notorious. Marion and other Southern-sympathizing women would gather letters from St. Louis citizens for delivery by Grimes to their loved ones in the Confederate Army and, upon Grimes’s return, they would distribute the letters he brought back that had been written by Rebel soldiers to their families in St. Louis. Marion earned a reputation, according to one Union officer, as “the worst rebel in town,” but she did not become the subject of an official investigation until the spring of 1863 when it was alleged that she had harbored Grimes after a second prison escape in the fall of 1862.
   Arrested on or before May 18, Marion was taken to the provost marshal’s office for interrogation. She admitted she had visited Grimes at the Myrtle Street facility during his first imprisonment but denied that she visited him at Gratiot Street Prison during the fall of 1862. Marion also denied harboring him after his escape, but she admitted involvement in his mail running operation and described the scheme in some detail. She said the only reason she wasn’t even more active in support of the Confederate cause was because of her husband, who did not share her Southern sympathies.
   After her interrogation, Marion was ordered to be banished to the South and to be committed to the McLure Female Prison on Chestnut Street pending execution of the sentence. After appealing to high-ranking Union officials, she was temporarily paroled to her home and was about to have the terms of her banishment further mitigated when a St. Louis woman came forward to accuse Marion of making disparaging remarks about Federal officers and of being a Rebel spy. Mrs. Vail was re-arrested and ordered to be sent south at first opportunity. Shortly afterwards, the matron of the female prison where Marion was being held, also testified against her, saying that Marion was one of the worst and “most rebellious and insulting prisoners” in her charge.
   On June 1, Marion Vail, sixteen other prisoners, and five family members who requested to go along were sent south aboard the City of Alton steamboat.
   Marion was allowed to return to St. Louis just a few months later after her husband applied to Union authorities for leniency. She spent the rest of the war free on parole, although the terms of her parole were changed several times. For instance, she at first had to stay at her home in St. Louis, but then was allowed to move with her children to nearby Warren County as long as she reportedly periodically by letter. In late May of 1864, Corra Vail again appealed to Union authorities on his wife’s behalf, this time seeking to have her parole extended to include the entire state of Missouri, but the request was denied after several people testified to Marion’s continued disloyal activities even after returning to Missouri from the South. Then, in early 1865, when Marion’s husband asked that she be allowed to come back to St. Louis so that the family could be together and the kids would have better educational opportunities, the request was again denied because of Mrs. Vail’s alleged activities on behalf of the Confederacy, including aiding and abetting guerrillas, while living in Warren County.
   Marion finally returned to St. Louis at the end of the war and lived there the rest of her life. Long after the Civil War had ended, Mrs. Vail remained an ardent supporter of the South. According to Grimes, “Until the day of her death at the age of eighty-two years she never realized that the war was over, as her spirit of patriotism and warm love for the South never waned and she was fond of relating war stories in her interesting way to her many friends of all ages.”

   Like my other recent posts, this one is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri.

Hattie Snodgrass: Proud Spirit of a Southern Lady

   I’ve recently written on this blog about Addie Haynes and Lucie Nicholson, who were both banished from Missouri in May 1863. Another woman banished at the same time was twenty-eight-year-old Harriet “Hattie” Snodgrass of St. Louis. Hattie was a schoolteacher like the other women, and like Lucie, she had no close relatives in the Southern army, her closest kin being a brother-in-law. Yet, Miss Snodgrass, again like Lucie, was even more outspoken in her support of the Confederacy than most of the women of rural Missouri who were arrested primarily for feeding and harboring their loved ones in the bush.
   A native of Pennsylvania, Hattie moved to St. Louis with her family when she was a child. During the late 1850s and early 1860s she taught school in St. Louis.
   Hattie was living with her sister's family when her disloyal activities attracted the scrutiny of her neighbors in early 1863. One or more of her neighbors reported her to Federal authorities about the first of May, and officials began taking depositions against her. Lewis Vandewater testified, for instance, that he’d known Hattie for about eleven years and that, ever since the outbreak of the war, she had been “an open and avowed secessionist.” Vandewater said he’d heard Hattie hurrah for Jeff Davis and that he’d been told she kept a Secesh flag in her school room. 

   On Saturday, May 9, Hattie was ordered to report to the provost marshal’s office in St. Louis, where she was interrogated about the activities her neighbors had accused her of. Hattie admitted her sister’s husband, Joseph Clayton, was in the Southern army, but she started getting testy after that, refusing to answer certain questions or giving deceptive answers. When asked whether she ever kept a Rebel flag in her home, for instance, she replied no, because she “did not think it worthwhile" to correct her examiner and tell him it was a Confederate flag. She ended the interview by refusing to sign the examiner's deposition.
   A day or two after the interview, a letter Hattie had written to a Confederate soldier fell into Union hands, adding to the evidence against her. Accused of being a “rebel mail agent,” she was arrested and imprisoned at the former home of Margaret McClure to await banishment. McClure and Hattie had taught school together, and both were Southern sympathizers. McClure’s home on Chestnut Street had been confiscated by the Union and turned into a female prison because of Mrs. McClure’s disloyal activities. On May 13, Hattie was sent south with Lucie Nicholson, Addie Haynes, and company. Hattie’s sister Teresa Clayton accompanied Hattie at her own request. Others making the trip included Hattie’s former colleague Margaret McLure.
   Despite her banishment, Union authorities had not quite heard the last of Hattie Snodgrass. On June 23, 1863, Hattie wrote a letter from Mobile, Alabama, to Colonel John Q. Burbridge, who was somewhere in Arkansas. The letter, in which Hattie expressed some decidedly disloyal sentiments, fell into the hands of Union authorities when Burbridge was taken prisoner later in the year.
   As for Hattie, she slipped back into St. Louis in the summer of 1864, in defiance of the banishment order against her, bringing news and letters from Confederate soldiers to their loved ones in Missouri. Another reason for her visit was to see her aged mother, Jane Snodgrass. However, she intended to return south, and she recruited two other Southern ladies who wished to accompany her.
   Hattie adopted an alias, calling herself Miss Miller, but she was so well known in St. Louis that she still had to delegate certain errands to the other women for fear of being recognized on the streets. Prior to the trip, the women packed letters, gold, and other contraband into trunks. 
   During the trip south, Hattie acted as “captain” for the party of three women, as they made their way down the Mississippi. On more than one occasion, the three barely escaped detection, but they managed to get beyond the Federal lines mostly through Hattie’s duplicitous aplomb.
   Near the end of the war, Hattie traveled to Washington, DC, where she got her banishment order revoked and was allowed to return to St. Louis. After her mother died post-1880, Hattie moved to Texas and lived with her brother for a number of years, but she eventually returned to St. Louis. In 1911, her wartime adventures were briefly recounted in the History of St. Louis County. Hattie apparently died shortly afterward, having never married and having never forsaken her proud Southern spirit.
   This is a greatly condensed version of a chapter from my latest book, Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri.

Lucie Nicholson: A Mighty Pretty Girl

   Born in Maryland 1827, Lucie Nicholson came to Missouri with her family in the mid-1830s and settled in Cooper County a few miles from Boonville. As a young woman, Lucie was known as “the belle of Boonville” and “a mighty pretty girl.” Shortly before the Civil War, she became engaged to David Herndon Lindsay, a recent widower and principal of the Saline Female Institute in Miami, Missouri, but the couple decided to postpone the wedding because of the unsettled state of the country.
   From the very beginning of the war, Lucie was active in support of the Southern cause. After the Battle of Boonville in June 1861, she set up a field hospital near her hometown and tended to the needs of the wounded Southern soldiers. Shortly after the fight at Boonville, David Lindsay, Lucie’s fiancé, joined Price’s army, and he was later commissioned a major.
   In the fall of 1861, Lucie traveled to Osceola to rendezvous with General Sterling Price, bringing morphine and other drugs. She then accompanied his army to Springfield, where she and other young women sewed clothing for the soldiers. In early 1862, Lucie headed back to Cooper County, where she was arrested and held prisoner for eight weeks.
   After her release in the spring of 1862, Lucie taught school near Rocheport in Boone County. She was still there when she wrote a letter to her sister Gettie (Gertrude) on April 25, 1863, which would land her in a heap of trouble. Lucie expressed strong Confederate sympathies and told her sister of her service to Price’s army.
   She assured Gettie she was being very careful so as not to get their mother in trouble, but almost immediately after writing the letter, Lucie made a terrible blunder. Very near the time she wrote her letter to Gettie, she also wrote to a Boone County resident held prisoner at Gratiot Street Prison in St. Louis, and she inadvertently placed each letter in the wrong envelope. Gettie’s letter, mailed to the prisoner, was intercepted by Union authorities in St. Louis, and Lucie was arrested because of its contents. She was brought to St,. Louis and lodged the Gratiot Street Prison in early May.
   Charged with being “a volunteer in the rebel army,” Lucie was interrogated on May 5. She readily admitted that she had written the letter in question, and she further admitted helping Price’s army in the fall of 1861. A few days later, Lucie was transferred to Chestnut Street Female Prison. On May 13, she and ten other women were put aboard the Belle Memphis steamship and sent down the Mississippi River, banished to the South. In an article announcing the banishments, a St. Louis newspaper reprinted Lucie’s letter to her sister.
   In Arkansas, Lucie rendezvoused with Major Lindsay, and they were married on July 22, 1863. Lucie remained in the South throughout the rest of the war. When the conflict ended, she and her husband went to his native state of Kentucky, and Lindsay resumed his career as a schoolmaster. In 1876, the couple returned to Missouri and settled in Clinton County, where Lindsay was a prominent citizen for many years. After his death in 1902, Lucie lived with her daughter for several years. About 1912, she gave an interview to a woman who was collecting stories of Missouri women during the Civil War for the Daughters of the Confederacy. Around 1920, Lucie moved to St. Louis to stay with her sisters, and in 1923, the sisters’ house caught fire. One of Lucie’s sisters perished in the blaze, and Lucie, now ninety-five, died at a hospital a few hours later from her burns. Lucie’s body was taken back to Clinton County and buried in the Lathrop Cemetery beside her deceased husband.
   This post is a greatly condensed version of a chapter in my latest book, Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri.

Addie Haynes: A Presumptuous Rebel

   In the spring of 1863, St. Louis resident Addie Haynes was accused of sending, receiving, and delivering Rebel mail, and she was banished to the South. Born Ada "Addie" Howard in Ireland in 1834, Addie came to the United States with her family in 1847 and married Christopher Haynes of St. Louis a couple of years later. The couple had three children, but Haynes died around 1855, about the same time the youngest child was born. Addie went back to live with her mother, and she supported herself and her family teaching in the St. Louis schools. She started corresponding with her brothers and other Confederate soldiers early in the Civil War, but it was not until early 1863 that she was finally arrested for her alleged disloyal activities.
   On May 13, 1863, Addie was among the first group of women shipped south from St. Louis during the Civil War for their disloyalty. Union authorities had previously been reluctant to be seen as "making war on women," but by the middle part of the war, it had become clear that, especially in border states like Missouri, women were an integral part of the resistance to Federal authority. 

   Addie and her fellow exiles were placed aboard a steamboat bound for Memphis, and after disembarking there, Addie eventually made her way to Mississippi and Alabama. While in the South, Addie heard from a third party that her children were suffering in her absence, and she wrote letters seeking permission to return to St. Louis to attend to them. When she received no answer to her letters, she determined to make the trip anyway, even though returning without permission was considered a serious offense.

   She made her way through Federal lines without being intercepted and reached St. Louis on March 28, 1864. She reported to the provost marshal's office the next day seeking permission to stay in St. Louis, but instead she was arrested for not abiding by the conditions of her banishment. Examined on April 1, exactly a year after she'd been interrogated on suspicion of being a Rebel mail agent, she said she still felt concern for her brothers in the Confederate army but otherwise cared nothing for the South or the Southern cause. She explained why she had come back to St. Louis and said she would strictly abide by the conditions of a parole if she were released upon taking an oath.
   Instead, she remained in the St. Charles Street Female Prison in St. Louis for the next three and a half months. In mid-July she was banished again, this time to New York City. In January 1865, her mother, Catherine Howard, wrote a letter to Union authorities asking them to allow Addie to return to St. Louis, and the request was granted. Addie came back home and lived the rest of her long life in St. Louis. She died there in 1924.

Very Good Rebels: Augusta and Zaidee Bagwill

   Early in the Civil War, James Bagwill of Macon County, Missouri, got into trouble with Union authorities and was arrested for allegedly killing a Federal soldier, but, despite the serious accusation against him, he was soon released. Later in the war, however, his wife and his daughter ended up suffering worse consequences for actions that were deemed disloyal but were far less grievous than murder.
   After Bagwill's brush with Union authorities, the family moved to St. Louis, and in early 1863, a number of letters written by Augusta and Zaidee Bagwill to Confederate soldiers and/or written by Rebel soldiers addressed to the two women were intercepted aboard a steamer on the Mississippi River at St. Louis. The women expressed various disloyal sentiments throughout the letters they had written. For instance, in one of Augusta's letters, she referred to Union soldiers as "Yankee vandals," and Zaidee called them "black-hearted villains" in one of her letters. Although the women denied writing the most incriminating letters and denied involvement in delivering Rebel mail, they were arrested and charged with corresponding with the enemy and encouraging rebellion against the United States.
   Both Augusta and her stepdaughter were found guilty at their trials by military commission in April 1863. Zaidee was sentenced to confinement at home for the duration of the war under oath and bond, while Augusta was sentenced to be banished to the South. The sentences were soon amended to allow Augusta to go to Canada instead of to the South and to allow Zaidee to accompany her. Imposition of the sentences was delayed because Augusta was ill, and before they could be imposed, they were amended again to allow both women to stay in Missouri under oath and bond.
   This post is greatly condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri.

Lizzie Powell: A Beautiful and Intelligent Young Lady Rebel

   Unlike most of the women arrested in Missouri by Federal authorities during the Civil War, whose stories we know almost exclusively from Union sources, Elizabeth "Lizzie" Powell kept a diary during her confinement, and it survives. The journal clearly shows Lizzie's feisty personality and her tenacious devotion to the Southern cause.
   Born and reared in northeast Missouri, Lizzie was about 24 years old when she first ran afoul of Union authorities in the fall of 1862. She and a friend, 29-year-old Maggie Creath, borrowed a carriage in Monroe County and drove to Hannibal in neighboring Marion County, where, "under the protection of the Petticoat Flag," they brought out a quantity of gun caps and other items important to the guerrillas. Both young women, being quite attractive and articulate, were accused of influencing young men to support the Confederacy.
   Lizzie was arrested on September 29 at her sister's home in Monroe County and taken to a nearby Federal camp. The officer in charge of the arresting party offered to introduce Lizzie to some other Union officers, but Lizzie demurred, telling her diary she had no desire "to be introduced to those whose acquaintance [she] had not sought and did not expect to cultivate."
   A Union order had recently been handed down requiring all able bodied young men to either enroll in Federal service or declare their disloyalty, and Lizzie was told she had been arrested for "discouraging enlistment." Taken at first to Macon, she was moved after one or two days to Palmyra and held under guard at a hotel. Later she was moved to the Palmyra home of Jacob Creath, her friend Maggie's father. There she and Maggie passed the time by talking, playing chess, and other diversions. Toward the end of the first week of October, Lizzie was officially charged with violating the laws of war, and it was recommended that she be banished from Missouri. Meanwhile, Lizzie continued to vent her anger in her diary against the "vile tyrants" infesting the state.
   By early December, Lizzie's health was failing, and she was granted a leave to return on parole to her Hannibal home. In late December, Lizzie was on the verge of being banished from Missouri when, instead, she was suddenly released from her parole altogether. Within a matter of two weeks, however, she was again in trouble for discouraging enlistments and telling her friends to join the Rebel army. She was re-arrested on January 12, 1863, but she refused the order of banishment that was drawn up against her. Since there was not good place to keep female prisoners, Union authorities paroled her to her sister's home in Hannibal until they could figure out what to do with her. A couple of days later, she was confined under guard in a Hannibal hotel. After another month and a half of debating what to do with Lizzie, authorities finally released her unconditionally in late February.
   In late April, Lizzie traveled to the West, where she met and married a young lawyer, and they later moved to Colorado. Lizzie died in 1877 after being thrown from a vehicle she was traveling in with the wife of the Colorado governor.
   My latest book, Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri, contains a much more detailed account of Lizzie's story.

Jane Haller, Mother of Guerrilla Leader Bill Haller

   My latest book is called Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri. It's more or less a follow-up to one of my previous books, Bushwhacker Belles, but with a slight difference. The first book concentrated almost exclusively on women in Missouri who got into trouble with Union authorities for helping guerrillas, mostly by feeding and harboring them. The new book, on the other hand, focuses more on women who got into trouble for other activities, such as spying or delivering Confederate mail, and a lot of those activities occurred in and around St. Louis. There are a few exceptions, however. A few women who got into trouble mainly for helping guerrillas were left out of the first book but included in this one. Jane Haller is one example.
   Jackson County guerrilla leader William Quantrill formed his band in late 1861, and William Haller (sometimes spelled Hallar) was made first lieutenant. Quantrill quickly drew the notice of Federal authorities, as did some of his lieutenants. We know from extant records, for instance, that Union officials were well aware of Bill Haller and his older brother Wash at least as early July 1862, when William Kerr, a Federal spy, reported to Lieutenant Colonel Buel, post commander at Independence, that he'd been held prisoner by Quantrill's guerrillas and that Wash Haller had argued that he (Kerr) should be executed. Quantrill overruled Haller and ordered that George Todd and Bill Haller take Kerr away from the guerrilla camp and turn him loose.
   In late August of 1862, a couple of weeks after the Battle of Independence, a detail of Federal soldiers were fired upon from the bush as they were traveling the road between Independence and Lexington, and one soldier was killed. Colonel William R. Penick, Buel's successor, thought "Captain Bill Haller," as he was called in Union records, was responsible for the killing. An incident that happened a month and a half later seemed to suggest that Penick might have been correct. In mid-October, near the exact same spot where the August ambush had occurred, Haller's mother, Jane, and two other women were arrested because the carriage they were traveling in "showed signs" that they had been taking food to the guerrillas, and one of the women had shouted to somebody in the bush to warn them of the Federals' approach.
   All three women were arrested and taken back to Independence, where they were held as prisoners. In late November, Jane, who was under investigation for subversion, was banished to Pennsylvania, where she stayed with her deceased husband's relatives. Sometime in the summer of 1863, she was allowed to come back to Missouri after taking an oath of allegiance to the Union. By this time, her son Bill had been killed in a skirmish with Federals the previous spring, but whether she got back before a second son, Abe, was killed in the late summer of 1863 is not clear.
   Jane died in 1868 and is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Independence.
   My new book contains a more detailed account of Jane Haller's clash with Union authorities.

 

St. Joseph Prostitution, Part Three: Wayward Young Women

   My past two blog posts have been about prostitution in St. Joseph, Missouri, during the late 1800s, focusing respectively on madam Mollie Williams and on how the system worked. This time I thought I'd take a look at how young women in the late 1880s came to turn to prostitution, focusing still on St. Joseph and Mollie Williams's "palace of sin."
   On the evening of November 21, 1884, a merchant from King City, Missouri, showed up in St. Joseph looking for Leona Mann, a 17-year-old girl who had been enticed away from the home of her relatives near King City two weeks earlier by a 27-year-old paramour named Cay Craynor. The next day Craynor was located on the streets of St. Joseph and taken to police headquarters for questioning. He denied any knowledge of Leona's whereabouts at first, but when the police chief threatened to have him taken to jail and "chained to the floor," according to the St. Joseph Gazette-Herald, he instantly weakened and told the chief that the girl was "holding forth at Mollie Williams's bagnio."
   The chief went to Mollie's place and asked that all the girls in the place be brought to the parlor. "The request was complied with," said the newspaper, "and among those who put in an appearance was Miss Mann." Leona was taken to the marshal's office, where she was allowed to talk to Craynor before being interrogated by the police chief.
   Leona told the chief she had left King City two weeks earlier in company with Craynor, who had promised to marry her. They came to St. Joseph, where they stayed at the St. Charles Hotel, and "as a matter of course her ruin was accomplished." After a few days, they went to Kansas City, where Leona thought they would be married, but Craynor refused to keep his word. On November 20, they returned to St. Joe, where Craynor deposited her at Mollie Williams's place. Leona told the chief she was anxious to leave Mollie's but that she owed the landlady ten dollars. The King City merchant stepped in at this point and said he'd pay the ten dollars. Leona "declined to prosecute her seducer," but the chief ordered him out of town under threat of being arrested for vagrancy. Described as "an innocent country girl" with "considerable beauty..., large blue eyes and auburn hair," and a form that was "almost perfection," Miss Mann was taken to a secure house in St. Joseph to spend the night, but the Gazette-Herald reporter thought she would probably return to her relatives in King City the next day.
   On Wednesday morning, September 11, 1889, Frances Hammond, "a comely looking 16-year-old girl with black hair and eyes, five feet high and weighing 114 pounds," ran away from her St. Joseph home "with the avowed intention of entering on a life of shame," according to the St. Joseph Herald. She had confided her plans to a friend of hers and had complained of mistreatment at home. Her father and the police located her Thursday night, according to the St. Joseph News, "in the ranch of the notorious Molly Williams." They took her away, and the father took her back home. The girl was "glad enough to get away," said the News, and "apparently regretted the step she had taken." However, the father planned to have Frances placed in a reformatory "to make sure of her leading a virtuous life."
   On Friday morning, June 27, 1890, a man from Champaign, Illinois, named William Ross arrived in St. Joseph looking for his daughter, whom he had heard was living in "a sporting house" in St. Joe. That afternoon Ross set out to search all the prominent bawdy houses in town. At the second one he visited, Mollie Williams's place, all the girls in the house were ushered into the parlor, according to the Herald, and Mr. Ross found himself "face to face with his own daughter," who immediately began weeping.
   Few words passed between father and daughter, but she immediately promised to accompany her dad home. "The reprimands came afterwards," said the Herald. The father could not or would not say for sure why his daughter had left home, but he intimated that she had been "coaxed away by a traveling man" from Chicago. The girl, who had gone by the name Lillian Brown while at Mollie's place, was described as about 20 years old, "not beautiful but good looking." She had supposedly "repented of her past action." Friday evening, she left with her father for Kansas City, from where they planned to take a train for home.
   Illustrating that there might be at least some validity to the stereotype of the fallen woman "with the heart of gold," Mollie Williams came to the rescue in early January 1891 to take in a homeless baby when no one else seemed to care. On Sunday, January 4, a young woman, giving her name as Mila Myers, appeared at police headquarters with an infant that she said had been left in her care by a couple named Cornwall, who had adopted it out of a house of prostitution, where it had been born to one of the inmates. The police advised Mila to take the baby to the Home of the Friendless, but the supposed charitable organization refused admittance to the child when the young woman took it there. Turning sadly away, Mila started down the street with the infant in her arms and paused in front of Mollie Williams's bagnio to contemplate her sorrowful situation. The woman finally turned in at Mollie's place, and, according to the St. Joseph Gazette-Herald, the madam "agreed to keep the little waif and find a home for it."
   Later investigation revealed that the infant, in fact, was Mila's child and that Mila was a fictitious name. According the St. Joseph Weekly News, the young woman had come to St. Joseph from Marshall County, Kansas, in "an unfortunate condition, the victim of a prominent farmer in that district." As "a last resort," "Mila" had taken up residence at Maud Norris's house of ill fame, and when the baby was born, she determined to "give up her evil companionships." She induced the Cornwalls to take the baby, but they returned it to her shortly afterwards when they were getting ready to leave town. When she told her story to Mollie Williams, Mollie "took pity on her," according to the Daily Gazette, and was able to promptly find a home for the infant.
   Although I've continued to focus on St. Joseph in this post, I'm pretty sure some the examples I've cited about how young women ended up in houses of prostitution could just as well have been drawn from almost any other town where prostitution flourished during the late 1800s or from almost any other era, for that matter. In the 1880s, women who turned to prostitution often did so because of desperate circumstances. Often they were girls running away from abusive home environments, young women who had been "ruined" and cast adrift by fickle lovers, or divorced women with few other ways of supporting themselves. I suspect the same is still true today. And this is not even to mention women forced into prostitution through threats, intimidation, and physical assault.

St. Joseph Prostitution, Part Two: How It Worked

   Last time, in discussing Mollie Williams and St. Joseph prostitution, I mentioned, or at least implied, that, even though prostitution was nominally illegal, a sort of de facto licensing system existed whereby prostitutes and keepers of bawdy houses were periodically fined but then allowed to go right back to doing business as usual. I thought I might go into a little more detail this time about the extent of prostitution in St. Joseph in the late 1800s and how the ladies of the night were treated by law enforcement.
   A St. Joseph Herald newspaper article from February 1889 sheds quite a bit of light on this question. The reporter suggested that while St. Joe was rightfully proud of its educational institutions, churches, and charitable organizations, the town was also "cursed with a population that numbers into the hundreds, that are entirely without the pale of society--the courtesan." The reporter's estimate of the number of scarlet women is probably not an exaggeration, because nine years earlier the 1880 census listed at least 27 women with the occupation "prostitute." Not only had the number probably increased since 1880, but those listed in the census with the title "prostitute" obviously represented only those that openly practiced their profession and did not include those women who were still trying to maintain a veneer of respectability.
   The Herald reporter was not particularly alarmed by the fact that prostitution existed in the city. In fact, he thought the extent of prostitution in St. Joe was no greater than it was in almost any other city of comparable size. However, the fact that prostitution had spread throughout the entire city and was not confined to a certain area was an evil that called for a remedy.
   Only four established houses of prostitution existed in St. Joseph at the time of the article. The "landladies" of these places were Minnie Dixon at 777 Jule Street, Mollie Williams on Main Street between Francis and Jule, Ellen Hardy on Jule between Main and Second, and "Dutch Ella" at 317 Main Street. Minnie's place had eight or ten inmates, Mollie's had six or seven, Ellen's had between ten and twelve, and Ella's place housed ten girls.
   These women were arrested every three months. The keepers were fined $50 each, while the prostitutes were usually fined $8 each. This brought in a total of about $2,000 per year for the city coffers. The police chief told the reporter that these four places were "properly kept" with disturbances rarely occurring at them. In addition, these four houses were all located within a radius of one or two blocks of each other in an old, downtown part of the city where very few families resided and where not much business was transacted.
   The problem, as the reporter saw things, was that it was very difficult to confine prostitution just to this relatively small area. Although the four places mentioned above were the only ones openly doing business as places of prostitution, numerous boarding houses throughout the city had become assignation spots for freelance prostitutes who roomed in those houses. In fact, when the reporter asked a police official whether the prostitutes at the four downtown houses represented the bulk of St. Joe's scarlet women, the official replied, "No, not one-tenth of them. They are scattered from one end of the city to the other. They may be found next door to the millionaire, the minister and the merchant."
   The police official complained that it was difficult to control these freelance prostitutes disguised as "roomers" unless they engaged in boisterous conduct or broke the law in some other manner that drew police attention. The reporter thought the best way to deal with prostitution was by instituting a licensing system that legalized the "social evil" but confined it to a certain area of the city and cracked down on those who tried to expand it to other parts of the city.
   In 1890, there apparently was an attempt to crack down on prostitution in St. Joseph. First the amount of the fine that madams had to pay quarterly was increased to $200 instead of $50. Then, a local judge ruled that the "landladies" would no longer be allowed to simply plead guilty, pay their fines, and go back to the sporting life. Instead, they would have to face trial. The new law, however, had little practical effect in reducing prostitution or punishing offenders, because when the madams were tried for the first time after the judge issued his ruling, at the summer 1890 term of court, the jury assessed the same fine ($200) that the women had previously been accustomed to paying.
   In the fall of 1890, five madams, including the four mentioned above, were arrested and charged with keeping bawdy houses. Four of the five, including Mollie Williams, were allowed to plead guilty and pay fines of $262.50, while Ellen Hardy escaped having to pay a fine by dying. So much for the judge's new rule requiring that the madams face trial by jury.

St. Joseph Prostitution, Part One: Mollie Williams

   When I was researching and writing my Wicked Joplin book, I was struck by how much prostitution there was in Joplin during its early days, particularly the late 1880s, and how open it was. Joplin, though, wasn't the only town in Missouri where "the oldest profession" flourished. St. Louis and Kansas City, the state's largest cities, are two examples, but St. Joseph is perhaps a less obvious example. St. Joseph was about two to three times as populous as Joplin during the 1880s and 1890s, but it probably had at least two to three times as many prostitutes as well. And, if anything, prostitution was even more open in St. Joe than it was in Joplin. A whole slew of women were even listed with the occupation "prostitute" in St. Joseph in the 1880 census.
   Joplin, of course, was a rip-roaring mining town in its early days that drew a lot of young, single men, and anywhere there was a concentration of young, single men, whether it was a mining camp or a military post, women willing to entertain them for a fee were bound to follow. I suppose the prevalence of prostitution in St. Joseph was a carry-over from its early days as a bustling frontier town, when it was the western-most railroad terminus in the United States and a jumping off spot for people headed west on the Oregon Trail.
   One prominent St. Joseph lady of the night during the 1880s and 1890s was Mollie Williams. Mollie first made the news in November of 1879 when she and Mattie Leftwich, one of her fellow bauds, were mentioned in connection with a larceny charge against a man. In 1881, Mollie was cited for "keeping a bawdy house," and she was cited numerous times over the next ten years or so for the same offense or for being an inmate of a bawdy house. For the latter offense, she was usually fined about $10, while the former carried a stiffer fine of $100 to $262.50. In most cases, Mollie simply pled guilty, paid the fine, and went back to business. That's how it apparently worked. All the madams and prostitutes in St,. Joe were periodically fined (usually at each quarterly term of court) and then allowed to resume their sport. It was more or less a de facto system of licensing, which was similar to how Joplin officials also treated prostitution in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
   Occasionally, Mollie made the news for reasons other than being charged with prostitution or keeping a bawdy house. For instance, in May 1884, Zell, "an inmate of Mollie's "maison de joie," as the St. Joseph Gazette-Herald called her place at 118 Main Street, complained to police that she had been attacked with a wine bottle by a "sister in sin" named Vic, who also boarded with Mollie. In July 1885, Mollie was cited for disturbing the peace, and in November 1886, she was charged with selling liquor without a license.
   About six a.m. on the morning of January 16, 1888, "five bloods supposed to be from the wicked city of Leavenworth, entered the palace of sin run by Mollie Williams on Main Street," according to the Gazette-Herald, "and proceeded to wind up an all-night spree by tearing through the house and making mischief generally." Angered by the quintet's behavior, Mollie summoned authorities and caused the hell-raisers to be arrested. They paid fines of three dollars each and headed back across the river to Kansas.
   More to come next time about St. Joe prostitution.

Lizze Reed's Resort

   I recently read in the Joplin Globe that Len Rich, a Webb City marshal who was killed on August 10, 1902, at a place in Webb City called "Lizzie Reed's resort," was getting an additional marker installed 120 years later at his gravesite in Mount Hope Cemetery to memorialize the fact that he was killed in the line of duty. More about that incident later, but it turns out that Rich's murder was not the first notorious incident that happened at or in connection with Lizzie's place.
   A two-story structure located on Main Street (now Broadway), Lizzie's resort was a house of ill repute that catered to the rowdy young men populating the mining town of Webb City. Not all places that earned the moniker "house of ill repute" in the late 1880s and early 1900s were what many people today might think of as houses of prostitution. Many were merely boarding houses where some or all of the female tenants had questionable reputations but were not necessarily prostitutes in the professional sense of the word. It's not altogether clear exactly where Lizzie's place fell on this continuum of ill fame, but hers was apparently pretty close to an actual house of prostitution.
   In the early morning of July 27, 1900, about a year and a half before the marshal was killed at Lizzie's resort, "a young girl of questionable character" named Lillie Garrison (aka Pearl Smith), who boarded with Lizzie, killed herself by "putting a bullet through her brain" at a nearby restaurant. Not yet sixteen, Lillie was described as a small, neatly dressed, "rather good looking" girl at the time of her death. She had come to Webb City from Carthage about six months earlier, and her parents still lived at Carthage. She was reportedly despondent over an ill-fated romance with a Webb City boy and had informed Lizzie and others of her intent to kill herself. Lizzie had tried to get her to go home to Carthage and had given her some money to make the trip, but instead she had "gone to hell," as she phrased it in her suicide note.
   About noon on Saturday, February 8, 1902, a shot rang out from an upstairs room at the Commercial Hotel in Webb City followed immediately by a woman's scream. Diners on the first floor and other occupants of the hotel, rushing to the room to investigate, found a young man named Wheeler Snarr, lying dead on the bed with a bullet through his head and a young woman named Nettie Kelly, whose room it was, standing over him with a Bulldog pistol in her hand. To the first person to arrive on the scene, Nettie exclaimed, "My God! I shot him, and he said the gun was not loaded."
   Nettie had come to Webb City a couple of months earlier and taken a room at Lizzie's resort. Just three or four days before the shooting, she and some other girls at Lizzie's place had been arrested (presumably for prostitution), and Snarr, who managed a gambling room above Parker's saloon in Webb City, had paid Nettie's fine. She then moved to the Commercial, where Snarr stayed, and took a room just one or two doors from his room. Snarr had apparently stayed all night with Nettie on the night before the shooting, as his clothes were hanging on a bedside chair and his own bed appeared not to have been slept in.
   One of the people who hurried to Nettie's room to investigate the shooting was Constable Len Rich. Nettie explained to him and the others that Snarr had told her on more than one occasion that the gun was not loaded and she had even seen him remove the bullets from the weapon. She had picked up his gun and playfully pulled the trigger several times until the hammer had come down on a chamber that, unknown to her, still contained a bullet.
   Rich nonetheless placed her under arrest to await an inquiry. Very soon after the shooting, a coroner's jury convened at the scene. Lacking evidence to the contrary, the jury was convinced by Nettie's denials and what appeared to be her genuine shock, and they ruled that Snarr had died by accidental gunshot wound.
   Late on the night of Saturday, August 9, 1902, brothers Joe and Jim Gideon, 21 and 23 years of age respectively, were creating a disturbance at Lizzie Reed's place in the upstairs room of one of her girls. Lizzie tried to get them to leave or to settle down, but they refused to do either. Finally, Lizzie summoned authorities.
   When Marshal Rich and two other officers arrived shortly after midnight to try to arrest the unruly pair, they were immediately met by gunfire, and Rich fell dead. The other two officers returned fire, and in the melee that followed, Joe Gideon was shot and killed, one of the other officers was knocked down with a club, and Gideon's brother was shot and wounded and placed under arrest. It was reported at the time that the brothers had been feuding with some of the Webb City officers in recent weeks and had deliberately created the disturbance to try to lure the lawmen to the Lizzie's place so they could waylay them.
   In the aftermath of Marshal Rich's killing, Lizzie Reed was taken into custody. In reporting her arrest, one area newspaper said she had been "running a bad house...under the protection of the police and paying a license to the city and giving the policemen free beer." The reporter wondered whether Webb City officials would now protect her or send her to jail.
   How much time, if any, Lizzie spent in jail is unclear, but the newspaper charges were at least partially substantiated at Jim Gideon's trial in the fall of 1902. The defense claimed that when Marshal Rich went to Lizzie's place on the fateful night, he was not acting in an official capacity but rather was going there to protect Lizzie and her establishment. One of the officers who accompanied Rich when he was shot even testified that Lizzie turned to the Gideon brothers when the officers arrived and said, "Here is the law that protects me." The testifying officer also said he did not see Jim Gideon with a pistol on the night of the tragedy, and Gideon was acquitted of murdering Marshal Rich.

Judge Lynch Clubs William Woodward to Death

  In early June 1900, eighteen-year-old Lurena Thomas of Searcy County, Arkansas, swore out a complaint against her thirty-five-year-old stepfather, William Woodward, charging him with rape or, as one report phrased it at the time, "forcing her into improper relations with him." Woodward, who lived in Richland Township (the northwest part of the county), was arrested on or about June 8 and brought before a local justice of the peace for a preliminary hearing on the charge. The defendant, who had a prior reputation for mistreating both his stepdaughter and his wife, was bound over for trial, and an officer started with the prisoner for the county jail at Marshall, about 20 miles to the east. When the officer stopped to borrow a saddle from a neighbor, Woodward made a break for freedom. The officer fired a shot at him but missed, and Woodward made his escape. The fugitive managed to get loose from his handcuffs and hurried back to his home.
   Fetching a Winchester rifle, he went to a nearby field, where he found Lurena and her mother, thirty-nine-year-old Margaret (who was also the mother of six younger kids by Woodward), working in a cotton patch. Lurena started running when she saw her stepfather with the rifle, and he immediately opened fire at her. Two of the bullets took effect, mortally wounding her. Woodward then tried to give his wife the rifle, urging her to kill him. When Margaret refused to do so, Woodward shot himself in the breast. The wound likely would have proved fatal, but Woodward didn't live long enough to find out.
   Lurena died about 3:00 a.m. the next morning, and one hour later a mob of about fifteen men entered the Woodward home with clubs and beat her rapist and killer to a pulp. He was barely breathing when the mob departed, and he expired soon thereafter. Woodward had said after first shooting Lurena that he was not sorry for the heinous deed, but on his deathbed he reportedly expressed regret for killing her and claimed that he loved her. But few people had any sympathy for him.    

The Lynching of Andrew Springer

   On the evening of May 14, 1887, a man stopped at the home of William Montgomery in Lawrence County, Arkansas. The 32-year-old Montgomery, who lived at the head of Jeff Creek near the now-defunct community of Opposition, was away, but his 27-year-old wife, Patsy, was home with their six-week-old child. The young man asked for a drink of water, and it was provided. He then left, but he soon came back and ordered Mrs. Montgomery to lay her baby aside. When she refused, he wrested the infant from her and tossed it on the floor.
   Pulling a knife, he threatened to kill her unless she yielded to his desires, and he proceeded to outrage her "in a most horrible manner." Montgomery returned home shortly after the rape, and when Patsy told him what had happened, he "started in pursuit of the fiend." At Opposition, he was joined by several other men, including a local constable, and the posse soon overtook and captured the villain. The captive, who gave his name as Andrew Springer, was identified by Mrs. Montgomery as her attacker, and he also supposedly confessed to the crime, after first denying it.
   Montgomery reportedly wanted Judge Lynch to preside over the case right then and there, but instead Springer was taken to Powhatan, the Lawrence County seat at the time, and lodged in jail.
   Between one and two a.m. on the morning of May 21, a mob of about 25 men, thought to be from the vicinity where the rape occurred, descended on the county jail. A few men went to the door of the jailer's living quarters adjacent to the jail and told him they had a prisoner for him. Noticing a man with the group who had his hands tied, the jailer did not suspect anything. As soon as he opened the door, though, the rest of the mob, who had been concealed nearby, rushed in and forced the jailer, under a threat of violence, to turn over the keys to the jail.
   The vigilantes then dragged Springer from his cell. Resisting mightily, Springer begged the mob to shoot him and spare him the agony of being choked to death at the end of a rope, but they took him a short distance from the jail and strung him up to an oak tree. Not until after he'd swung a while did the mob oblige their victim's request and fire several shots into his body to make sure he was dead. The vigilantes then withdrew into the night.
   As was usually the case in instances of mob violence during the late 1800s and early 1900s, no one was ever charged in the extralegal hanging of Andrew Springer. Although all but one of the men who composed the mob were unmasked, the jailer said he did not recognize any of them. 

   Little is known about Springer's origins, although, after his death, a man named Bates wrote to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette to say that he had formerly employed Springer in the post office at Franklin (Arkansas). According to Bates, Springer was the son of a widow woman and was originally from Salem, Arkansas. Bates said Springer had always seemed like an "honest, obliging, and unassuming young man."
   Published in 1889, just two years after the Springer lynching, the Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Northeast Arkansas misidentified Springer, who was white, as a black man. This error was woven into the local mythology surrounding the rape of Mrs. Montgomery and the lynching of Springer, and it has since been repeated by at least one or two other writers.

Criticism of "Order No. 11" and the Artist's Response

   After notorious Confederate guerrilla leader William Quantrill and his men raided Lawrence, Kansas, in late August 1863, killing about 150 unarmed men, Union general Thomas Ewing, Jr., commanding the border area of Kansas and Missouri, proposed an order designed to stop such atrocities by requiring all residents living in Jackson, Cass, and Bates counties and the northern half of Vernon either to leave the area or move to within a mile of a Federal installation. Such a measure, Ewing reasoned, would cut the guerrillas off from their civilian support system and, thus, force them to leave as well.
   Even some Unionists considered the proposal harsh. One such person was well-known artist George Caleb Bingham, who vowed to make Ewing infamous if he carried out the order. Most Union observers, however, thought the stern measure was necessary, and Ewing went ahead and issued the order.
   The order had the intended effect. Many residents in the designated region complied with the order willingly, albeit grudgingly, but some had to be forced from their homes by squads of armed Union soldiers. The entire border on the Missouri side for a hundred miles south of Kansas City became desolated and depopulated almost overnight.
   True to his word, Bingham soon set out to make Ewing infamous for what the artist saw as the general's cruelty by undertaking a painting depicting a family brutally treated, forced off their land, and having their property burned by a band of irregular Federal soldiers, or Red Legs. The painting shows Ewing in the background calmly watching the carnage. Formally titled "The Civil War," the painting had an uneven reception when it was completed in 1868. Predictably enough, many ex-Confederates and Confederate sympathizers praised the painting, and the work did taint Ewing's legacy to some extent.

                                                             Image from Wikipedia.

   However, just as many, if not more, observers condemned the artist for reviving the bitterness of the recent war, and some critics thought Bingham had sacrificed his art for the sake of politics.

   One prominent critic of Bingham's painting was a writer for the St. Louis Democrat, who editorialized on March 11, 1869, that Bingham had "desecrated his art to perpetuate a diseased idea on an historical event. The picture is not true to the sentiment of the times nor to the facts." The critic thought the painting unfairly depicted Union soldiers in general as heartless villains.
   Bingham wrote a letter the very next day responding to the writer's criticism, calling it "grossly unjust." Bingham thought the critic either completely misunderstood the painting or willfully misrepresented it. Bingham said that he himself was a Union soldier during the war and that he would never disparage regular Federal soldiers. However, he contended that most of the work carrying out Order No. 11 was done by jayhawkers, Red Legs, and other irregular or outlaw Federal bands
   Although Bingham continued to forcefully defend his painting, his career as an artist, in the end, arguably suffered more because of the painting, which came to be called "Order No. 11," than Ewing's political career did. Ewing went on to serve two terms as a US congressman from Ohio and, running as a Democrat in 1879, he narrowly lost a bid to become the state's governor. Whether "Order No. 11" contributed to that defeat is a subject of some scholarly debate. Meanwhile, Bingham's career as an artist suffered after the release of "Order No. 11." During the remainder of his life, his work was never as highly regarded as it had been before the controversial painting, although interest in his art did enjoy a revival long after his death.

Murder of the Malcolm Logan Family and a Subsequent Lynching

   About 3:15 a.m. on Wednesday morning, September 22, 1886, the crew of an eastbound passenger train on the Frisco Railroad about four or five miles east of Cuba, Missouri, spotted a body stretched across the tracks in front of them, but too late to stop. The train passed over the body, severing the head, one foot, and one hand before coming to a stop. Investigation revealed that the victim was already dead when the train passed over him and that he had been murdered. Articles of the man's clothing were found nearby, including a hat. A deep gash in his head that appeared to have been inflicted by a hatchet or similar instrument matched the location of a slit or cut in the hat that had apparently been made by the same instrument.
   About 5 a.m., while investigation into the dead man's identity was still ongoing, a fire was discovered at the home of Malcolm Logan about a mile north of the murder scene on the old St. Louis to Springfield wagon road. Hurrying to the scene, neighbors found the house completely engulfed in flames. They could see the body of a woman inside the house, but the blaze was too intense for them to reach it. After the flames died down, the woman's body and those of four children were dragged from the embers. The woman was identified as 39-year-old Ann Logan. The children were identified as Ann's six-year-old son, her six-year-old adopted daughter, her two-year-old daughter, and her infant child ten months of age. Ann and her husband, Malcolm, also had an adopted son who'd spent the night with neighbors and was among those who discovered the fire. Found among the remains of the fire near where Ann Logan's body had been discovered was a hatchet.
   After the victim found on the Frisco tracks was identified later that morning as Malcolm Logan, it was theorized that the same person who killed him had also killed his family. It was thought that the murderer had somehow lured Logan away from his home, killed him with the hatchet, and then returned to his house and killed the rest of the Logan family with the same weapon, before discarding it and the setting the house on fire.
   Suspicion soon settled on 26-year-old Patrick Wallace, whose father lived near the railroad tracks where Logan's body was found. A witness came forward to say that he had seen Wallace with Malcolm Logan shortly before dark on the evening of September 21. When Wallace was arrested in St. Louis on Thursday, September 23, he claimed he'd been in St. Louis continuously since Monday, but the hotel register did not bear this out. It showed he'd spent Monday night in St. Louis but had been away on Tuesday, the night of the murder, and had come back on Wednesday. In addition, a witness came forward who had seen Wallace on a train bound for Cuba on Tuesday when he claimed he was in St. Louis.
   Authorities thought robbery was the motive for the crime. Logan was known, or at least rumored, to have a lot of money, and Wallace, a ne'er do-well with "an uncontrollable thirst for drink, was well acquainted with this fact.
   Wallace was brought back to Crawford County and lodged in the county jail at Steelville. Rumors of mob violence began to circulate almost immediately, and on the night of September 30, a mob took Wallace out of jail and strung him up until he was almost unconscious in an effort to get a confession out of him. He finally admitted he had come to Cuba on the evening of the murder, but he still insisted on his innocence, trying instead to cast suspicion on a young black man of his acquaintance named Sam Vaughn. Wallace said the reason he'd lied about his movements before was that Vaughn had paid him not to say anything about seeing him (Vaughn) on the night in question. The vigilantes did not believe Wallace's story, but they were not entirely sure of his guilt either, and a local judge and the county sheriff finally convinced them to cease and desist.
   Just a few days later, though, on the late night of October 4, a smaller but more determined mob came back to Steelville and broke the prisoner out of his cell. They took him about two miles north of Steelville and hung him to a railroad trestle over the Meramec River shortly after midnight on the 5th.
   A coroner's jury later on the 5th ruled, not surprisingly, that Wallace had come to his death "by hanging at the hand of parties to the jury unknown."

SMS Bears' NAIA Championships

   I wrote on this blog a year or so ago about listening to the Southwest Missouri State College Bears' basketball games on KWTO radio in Springfield when I was a little kid. That post was mainly a tribute to Vern Hawkins, the primary broadcaster I remember listening to. I noted in that post that one of the highlights of Hawkins's tenure was the back-to-back national championships that the Bears won in 1952 and 1953.
   This was when SMS was affiliated with the NAIA or National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics. Actually, it was the NAIB (National Association of Intercollegiate Basketball) in 1952, but the NAIB was transformed into the NAIA during the 1952-1953 school year. The NAIA tournament was always played in Kansas City in those days. Actually it is back in KC now, but there were a few years there for a while when it was played in Tulsa.
   Anyway, those two championship years were a remarkable run for the Bears, because they were underdogs and had to overcome some big obstacles both years. In 1952, 8th seeded SMS upset top-ranked and previously undefeated Southwest Texas 70-67 in double overtime in the semifinals and then beat Murray State 73-64 in the finals.
   If I listened the those games on radio, I don't remember them. I would have been only 5 years old at the time. But I do vaguely remember the 1953 championship. In the semifinals that year, the Bears and Indiana State were tied 72-72 with three minutes to play when the fifth Bears player of the game fouled out, leaving the team with just four players. The ten-man roster was already short one player because Jerry Lumpe, who went on to play Major League Baseball, had been called to minor league spring training camp. With their three leading scorers on the bench and playing with just four players, the Bears took the lead and held on for an 84-78 victory. Later dubbed the Fabulous Four, the four players who finished off the victory were Bill "Jinx" Thomas (later a longtime coach at SMS), Don Duckworth, Bill Price, and Ray Birdsong. Then, in the finals the next night, the Bears won their second championship in a row by knocking off Hamline 79-71.
   The 1952 and 1953 championship teams were both inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in 2015.

Memorial High School Burns

   When I first started concentrating my writing on local and regional history about 30 years ago (previously I'd written about first one thing and then another), I didn't like to write about anything that I could remember happening, because it just didn't seem as much like history to me. However, as I've gotten older, I've had to reassess and modify my definition of history. Otherwise, I'd have to exclude, as topics for my writing, a lot of events that happened when people who are now 50-60 years old weren't even alive. I still prefer not to write about recent events (things that happened in the past 10-20 years), but I no longer use my own lifetime as a litmus test as to whether something is history or not. With that in mind, today I'm going to write about something that happened "only" forty years ago, the time Memorial High School in Joplin burned down.
   Well, it didn't actually burn down, but it suffered considerable damage. And this is not actually history but more of a personal reminiscence, because I was there.
   It was Thursday, January 28, 1982, around noon. If I recall correctly, it was the fourth hour of the day. The room where I taught was located in the northeast corner of the three-story building on the second floor. I was standing or maybe sitting at my desk at the front of the room, where I had a clear view of the hallway that ran west from my room on the north side of the building. The offices and a central stairway leading outside through the front exit were located on the north side of this hallway, and the auditorium was on the south side of this east-west hallway, taking up the entire middle part of the square-shaped building, with hallways surrounding the auditorium on every side. The main entrance to the auditorium was located on the hallway that I could see from my room, while the stage was at the south side of the auditorium.
   As I stood there in front of my class, I happened to glance down the hallway and saw smoke seeping from underneath the double doors leading into the auditorium. It wasn't a lot of smoke, but it was enough that I could tell that most of the auditorium was probably filled with smoke. Why else would smoke, which normally rises, be coming out beneath the doors unless there was so much of it that there was nowhere else for it go?
   "Class," I announced in a voice that I tried to keep as calm as possible, "we need to get out of here. I think the school is on fire." Even though we had fire drills periodically throughout the school year, I quickly reminded the students how they should exit the building and where they should reassemble on the far side of the street that ran along the east side of the building.
   Some of the kids may have been a little skeptical at first, thinking I could be pulling some kind of weird joke, but they got up and started filing out of the room in orderly, if somewhat aimless, fashion. As the ones in front started through the door, they could see the smoke coming from beneath the auditorium doors, just as I did, and they knew now that this was no joke. If any doubt remained, it was quickly erased when the fire alarm sounded about the time the last of my students filed through the door. They quickly shifted gears from a desultory promenade to a determined march, but they still proceeded in an orderly fashion, because we could clearly see we were in no immediate danger and had plenty of time to exit the building.
   Not true for some of the Memorial students and teachers that day. Those in two or three classrooms on the second and third floors in the southwest section of the building, where the fire originated, barely got out of their rooms in time, before the intensifying blaze would have blocked their exit.
   Fortunately, though everyone got out okay, and students and teachers huddled together in groups on grounds across the various streets surrounding the building to watch the fire in awe. The fire department arrived within a minute or two after every one was out of the building and soon had the fire under control. But not before smoke and water had inflicted extensive damage to the building. Enough that some of us had already guessed we would not be going back to school in the Memorial building any time soon, even before administrators came around and announced that school had been canceled for the rest of Thursday and all day Friday. Even though the fire was now under control, we were told to go on home without reentering the building. Only if we absolutely needed to retrieve something from the building were we allowed to reenter the building and then only with an escort.
   Over the weekend a plan was announced to hold Memorial High School classes at crosstown Parkwood High starting on Monday. From about 6:30 a.m. until approximately 11:30 a.m. Parkwood students would attend classes in the building, and then after a half-hour break to allow Parkwood students to vacate the premises, Memorial would hold its classes from about noon until about 5:30 p.m. Both schools would run on an abbreviated schedule with classes lasting 45 minutes or so instead of the usual 55 and no lunch break for either school.
   We (Memorial) stayed at Parkwood for about two months while remediation and renovation work on the Memorial building took place. Looking back on that time now, I recall it as one of the best periods of my teaching career. I've never been an early riser; so, I liked the idea of being able to sleep in and not have to be at work until almost noon. And I liked the shorter periods and shorter school day. Partly because it meant working fewer hours, of course, but also it seemed easier to keep the kids motivated to study and learn. Going to school seemed to take on almost a sense of adventure. Maybe that's just me looking at the experience through rose-colored glasses, but that's how I seem to remember it.
   We went back to the Memorial building in the early spring, but some of the repairs that had been done were just temporary until we could finish out the school year. The rest of the work was completed over the summer, and we started a new school year in the fall of 1982 with the old building almost as good as new.
   In the meantime, an investigation into the fire had determined that it started in a hallway closet on the second floor just off the stage at the rear or south side of the building where drama students stored costumes. Investigators said the fire had been intentionally set, and, as I remember, the culprit was tentatively identified because he'd supposedly set another fire in downtown Joplin just a week or so before the Memorial fire and his teacher stated that he was absent from class with a hall pass at the time the fire was thought to have been set. However, I don't recall the kid's name, if I ever knew it. I do remember some of the other teachers calling him Freddy the Firebug, but I don't know whether Freddy was his real name. And I don't know whether he was ever positively identified as the arsonist or what punishment he might have received, if any.

The Killing of Deputy William Hibler

   Sometimes initial reports about certain incidents, especially those in which crimes are alleged, differ markedly from later reports. In many cases, the later reports are more accurate, having the benefit of additional testimony and evidence. That might be what happened in the killing of Deputy William Hibler of Crawford County, Missouri, in 1934, although it's hard to say for sure, since the later reports came from the alleged killer's hometown newspaper.
   In late February of that year, nineteen-year-old Edith Johnson of Cuba, Missouri, left her husband, thirty-one-year-old Walter, after the couple got into a serious argument. On Saturday the 24th, she returned to the Johnson home, accompanied by her brother and Deputy Hibler, to retrieve some of her belongings, and a confrontation ensued between her husband and the deputy. According to a report filed soon after the incident happened, Hibler was attempting to serve a subpoena on Johnson when the man pulled a rifle and shot the deputy as soon as the lawman announced his mission. Hibler died on the way to a hospital at St. James, and the sheriff came to Cuba, arrested Johnson, and took him back to the county seat at Steelville.
   A report from later that night gave additional details. Shortly after being lodged in jail, Johnson tried to kill himself by slashing his wrists with a tin can, but the physician who treated him said the wounds were not life threatening, despite a considerable loss of blood. Then, that evening, a coroner's jury rendered a verdict that Hibler came to his death from a gunshot wound inflicted by Walter Johnson and recommended that the accused be held for a preliminary hearing on a charge of murder. Soon after the jury rendered its verdict, the sheriff took the prisoner away from Steelville to a more secure jail in a neighboring county in response to "quiet rumors" of mob action. This second report on the night of the 24th, citing both Mrs. Johnson and her brother, agreed with the first report that Johnson was angered by the deputy's visit, but it made no mention of Hibler attempting to serve a subpoena. It implied instead that he was just accompanying Edith for her safety.
   However, the Cuba Review, a weekly newspaper at Cuba, where Johnson's father was a prominent businessman, gave a markedly different account of the fatal incident a few days later. The Review declared that the shooting was accidental, even though a preliminary hearing had not yet been held. According to this account, when Edith arrived at her residence with her brother and the deputy, her husband wanted to talk with her in private, and when the request was denied, he grabbed a rifle and threatened to "end it all." Edith immediately grabbed hold of her estranged husband from behind to try to prevent him from shooting himself, and Deputy Hibler, standing in front of Johnson, grabbed hold of the barrel of the weapon. During the ensuing struggle, the rifle accidentally discharged, with the bullet striking Hibler in the abdomen. When Mrs. Johnson and her two companions first arrived, according to this report, Johnson even thanked Hibler for accompanying his wife home. This despite the fact that he supposedly did not know that Hibler was a deputy.
   Two weeks later the Cuba Review reported that, after his preliminary hearing, Johnson was released on $7,500 bond. Apparently, the judge was lenient because he was inclined to believe the defendant's claim that the shooting was accidental, and the newspaper predicted that Johnson would be found not guilty at trial. The charges might even have been dropped prior to trial, since I have been unable to find any later reports on this incident. Either way, Walter and Edith, who was Johnson's second wife, apparently reconciled, because six years later, at the time of the 1940 census, they were back living together in Crawford County. So, it seems the later reports might have been closer to the truth than the initial ones, even though they originated from the accused assailant's hometown.

The Lynching of Mose Kirkendall

   I don't know whether I've ever written on this blog specifically about the Harrison (AR) race riots of the early 1900s or not, but I think maybe I've at least mentioned them. Anyway, that was not the first time that Harrison experienced racial violence. There was a lynching in Harrison more than 25 years earlier.
   On Tuesday night, July 16, 1878, a young woman living at Bellefonte, about five miles southeast of Harrison, awoke from her sleep to discover 22-year-old Mose Kirkendall, her father's black hired hand, standing in her room. She screamed, and Kirkendall ran off. Answering the young woman's calls for help, her brother rushed to the scene and fired a shotgun at the retreating figure, wounding him in the right arm.
   The next morning, Kirkendall was located in Harrison, arrested, and taken back to Bellefonte for a preliminary hearing. He waived examination and was placed in the calaboose at Bellefonte. It was reported that mob violence that very night was prevented only by a heavily armed guard.
The prisoner was taken back to Harrison, presumably on Thursday, and lodged in the county jail to await trial.
   On Saturday night, July 20, a mob of about 30 disguised men made an attack on the jail and after about two hours of labor with an ax and a battering ram managed to break into Kirkendall's cell and took him into the street. Looping a rope around his neck, they started off on horseback, leading Kirkendall by the rope, and he was forced to run along behind them to try to keep from being dragged. After about a half mile, he fell down exhausted, and the vigilantes promptly threw the other end of the rope over a tree limb and drew him up. They tied their end of the rope to the trunk of the tree or some other anchor and left their victim hanging. Kirkendall's body was still hanging on Sunday morning about 9 a.m. when a deputy placed a guard around it to prevent mutilation and sent for the coroner.
   One interesting tidbit about this case clearly shows the typical mindset of white men in the late 1800s and early 1900s concerning any encounter or interaction between black men and white women. Even though Kirkendall's offense apparently was only that he appeared in the young woman's room or at her doorway, his action was described in newspaper reports as an attempted rape.

The Murder of Willie Gaines

   Most people probably think of white mobs hanging black men when the subject of lynching in the late 1800s and early 1900s comes up. However, it wasn't unheard of for a black mob to lynch a black man. That almost happened in the case of Tobe Lanagan.
   On Saturday morning, December 26,1896, the body of Willie Gaines, a 14-year-old black girl, was found at the rear of Stampfli's furniture and undertaking establishment in Jefferson City by an employee of the place. The body was in "terrible condition." The girl had been "ravished," her head was cut as if struck by a blunt instrument, and her stomach was "cut almost entirely away."
   Tobe Lanagan, who was also an employee of the undertaking firm, was immediately suspected of the crime. He'd been seen walking with Willie about 5:30 the previous evening toward the alley that ran behind Stamplfi's, and that was the last time the girl had been seen alive. Described as "half-witted," Lanagan was arrested and lodged in the Cole County Jail. He said he had left the undertaking office about 6 p.m. and did not return, but his claim was contradicted by a white man who said he'd seen Lanagan coming out of the alley about 9 p.m. In addition, Lanagan's past record was against him, because he'd previously been charged with attempting to rape a 9-year-old girl and he'd been in jail a couple of other times on minor charges. It was reported later that traces of blood were also found on Lanagan's clothing and that he had given away a knife, thought to be the murder weapon, on the morning Willie's body was discovered before he was taken into custody.
   The "excitement among the negroes" was at fever pitch throughout the day on the 26th, while, according to one report, "the white people of the city did not seem to take much interest in the case." Early Saturday evening, the knots of men who'd been on the streets discussing the crime all day grew larger and soon formed into a mob that moved toward the jail. Before any actual effort to lynch the prisoner had been made, Missouri governor William J. Stone arrived on the scene and managed to talk the mob down. Most of them dispersed after receiving an assurance that Lanagan would get his just deserts if he was found guilty of the crime. Lanagan was then taken under guard to the nearby state prison for safekeeping and was kept there for some time before it was thought safe to bring him back to the jail.

    Lanagan was convicted of first degree murder in Cole County on May 1, 1897, and sentenced to death a couple of days later. He was originally scheduled to hang on October 1, but the execution was stayed until June 22, 1898, when Lanagan and another black man were hanged together from a scaffold erected inside a stockade on the yard outside the Cole County Jail. It was reported that Lanagan "held his nerve well" but that the other man had to be dragged to the scaffold.

Another Lynching in Pemiscot County

   Last week I wrote about the May 1927 lynching of Will Sherrod at Braggadocio in Pemiscot County, Missouri. Several reports at the time, including one in the Democrat-Argus of Caruthersville, the county seat, claimed Sherrod's hanging was the first lynching in the county's history. However, this apparently was not true, because another extralegal killing of a black man had occurred in the county less than sixteen years earlier.
   During the first week of October 1911, a black man was arrested in Caruthersville for allegedly attacking two white men with a knife. For safekeeping, the prisoner was taken to the Kennett jail in neighboring Dunklin County. A mob formed at Caruthersville and took a train to Kennett but found, upon arrival, that the prisoner had been spirited out of the jail and hidden at an undisclosed location, thus thwarting the vigilante action.
   This incident and a rash of other petty crimes allegedly committed by "troublesome" blacks from the cities who'd arrived in Pemiscot County in recent weeks for the fall cotton picking season had aroused the white citizens of the county. One report claimed that many of the migrant blacks who came to the county were there ostensibly to work in the cotton fields but in reality were there only to prey on those who did work.
   In this atmosphere of racial animosity, a black man named Ben "High Pockets" Woods followed two young white women home from work in Caruthersville on the evening of October 10. Frightened by the man's behavior, the women gave an alarm, and High Pockets was found hiding in some shrubbery not far from where the young women lived. At least one exaggerated report claimed High Pockets had assaulted the women. At any rate, he was arrested and taken to the Pemiscot County Jail in Caruthersville.
   Later the same night, another black man, A. B. Rich, was arrested for possession of stolen merchandise and lodged in the jail alongside Woods. It was thought Rich had stolen the merchandise himself, and he was also suspected of other petty crimes. He was considered "a worthless character" who was "insulting to white people."
   As word of High Pockets's alleged stalking of the young women spread, a mob quickly formed. Shortly after midnight, the vigilantes broke into the county jail and took both prisoners from their cells. The black men were taken to the local baseball field, from where sounds of the two men being whipped could be heard.
   A short time later, an abandoned "negro boarding house" in Caruthersville, with a reputation as a place where gambling and other vices flourished, was set ablaze, and it quickly went up in flames.
   The next morning, Rich's body was found lodged on the near bank of the Mississippi River about a half mile north of Caruthersville. The body bore numerous cuts, bruises, and abrasions. Reports in the immediate wake of the incident also said Rich had been shot. High Pockets's body was not found, but it was concluded that he very likely suffered the same fate as Rich but that his body floated away down the river. Therefore, initial headlines mentioned the lynching of two black men.
   The next day, however, High Pockets turned up at the farm where he worked a few miles outside Caruthersville. According to his employer, he gathered up his things and took off for Tennessee. He said he'd been whipped, but he had not been shot or thrown in the river. Whether Rich was shot was also called into question when a coroner's jury convened after his body was pulled from the river. The body had several holes or cuts, at least one or two that looked like bullet holes. On closer inspection, however, the coroner concluded that the wounds had probably been made by the spike on the end of a pole that had been used to help drag the body from the river. The jury, therefore, ruled that Rich had come to his death by unknown means. It wasn't even definite that he had died as a direct result of the mob action.
   Whether the findings of the coroner's jury were part of an orchestrated cover-up is speculation, but little was done to try to bring to justice the mob who broke the two black men out of jail. Local authorities declined to pursue the matter, and even the Missouri governor, who initially offered a reward for the arrest of the vigilantes, withdrew his call for the mob to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law after he learned of the coroner's verdict.
   Many blacks fled Pemiscot County in the wake of the mob action, and as far as many white citizens were concerned, it was good riddance, although local observers took pains to distinguish between honest, law-abiding black citizens and the "worthless characters of their race." And apparently the whole incident was soon forgotten, so much so that editors of the Caruthersville Democrat-Argus, a local newspaper that gave the lynching of A. B. Rich extensive coverage, could not recall just sixteen years later, at the time of Will Sherrod's lynching, that a previous lynching had ever occurred in the county. Perhaps it was just a matter of nomenclature, because it's true that Rich was not lynched in the sense of being hanged, but the true definition of lynching involves any extralegal killing, regardless of the means. Or maybe the editor who asserted in 1927 that no previous lynching had ever occurred in Pemiscot County was falling back on the coroner's dubious 1911 verdict that Rich might not have died as a result of the mob action.

Lynching of Will Sherrod

   I've written quite a bit about lynchings in Missouri, including a book called Yanked Into Eternity: Lynchings and Hangings in Missouri. There are still quite a few lynchings that occurred in the state, however, that I have never previously written about. One is the lynching of a black man named Will Sherrod in 1927 at the small community of Braggadocio in Pemiscot County (in the bootheel). As was common when African-Americans were lynched in the United States during the late 1800s and early 1900s, the cause of the mob action was an alleged attack on a white woman.
   On Saturday night, May 21, 1927, a black man entered the home of 31-year-old widow Mary Ella Hendershot in Braggadocio and, according to the Caruthersville Democrat-Argus, "subdued her by threats of death and by clubbing her with a revolver he carried." He "forced her to submit to his evil desires," allegedly raping her repeatedly over the next three or four hours in the presence of her two young children. The assailant reportedly threatened the oldest child, a 7-year-old boy, with death if he tried to notify neighbors or otherwise go for help. At one point he supposedly knocked the boy across the room when the lad tried to come to his mother's aid. At some point during the man's attack on the woman, she bit him on the arm, leaving an imprint of her teeth, a clue that was later used to help identify the assailant.
   After her ordeal was over, in the wee hours of Sunday morning, Mrs. Hendershot notified local constable Aubrey Dye of the attack and described her assailant. Based on her description, Dye suspected that the rapist was Will Sherrod, a black man in his early thirties who was already in custody, having been arrested just a short time earlier for breaking into the home of another Braggadocio resident, R. D. Kersey, and firing shots at the man early Saturday night, before the attack on Ella Hendershot. The teeth mark on Sherrod's arm seemed to confirm the constable's suspicion, and, when the suspect was taken before a local justice of the peace for the Kersey crime, he supposedly admitted the criminal assault on the woman as well.
   While still at the justice of the peace's house, Sherrod tried to escape. Dye gave chase and shot the fleeing man twice, inflicting a dangerous wound that entered his shoulder and penetrated into the chest. The wounded prisoner was then forwarded to the Pemiscot County Jail at Caruthersville early Sunday morning.
    In response to rumors of mob action, Sheriff J. Ham Smith considered moving Sherrod to jail in a neighboring county, but a doctor who examined the prisoner said his condition was too serious for him to be moved. Late Sunday night, May 22, the rumored mob from Braggadocio showed up at the Caruthersville jail, and some of its leaders went to the door and called for the sheriff. The men were so orderly and quiet that the sheriff didn't suspect anything amiss, but when he opened the door, the men promptly got the drop on him and forced him to surrender the keys. I

After gaining possession of the prisoner, the vigilantes, numbering about 100, loaded him into a car, and drove in a procession back to Braggadocio, the scene of the crime, where Mrs. Hendershot readily identified him as her attacker. Sherrod was then hanged from a crude scaffold that had already been erected for that purpose. While he was hanging, several shots were fired into his body, and it was left hanging all night and into the next day.

As was the case in most lynchings during the late 1800s and early 1900s, little effort was made to bring the mob to justice. The sheriff, for instance, said that most of the vigilantes wore masks and that he didn't recognize any of the ones who didn't. And no one else came forward to identify any of the mob.

Your Cheatin' Hart: A Murder in Palmyra

   In the early afternoon of August 2, 1849, John S. Wise stopped at the post office in Palmyra, Missouri, and asked whether there were any letters there for his wife, Mary Ann Wise. The postmaster handed over three letters, one addressed to Mary Ann Wise and two addressed to a Mrs. Wallenstein. The postman explained that the same woman, whom he assumed to be Wise's wife, had previously called for letters under both names. Wise seemed shocked by the letters, especially after he opened one of them and glanced at its contents. Assuming the worst, the postmaster asked him whether someone was dead. "No, but there will be soon," Wise replied in a low, threatening voice.
   The letters confirmed for Wise what he'd begun to suspect some weeks earlier but had not let himself believe at first. But he now knew his young wife was carrying on a love affair with Thomas Benton Hart, whom the couple had gotten to know in St. Louis the previous year.
   In the summer of 1848, the Wises lived in a boardinghouse in St. Louis, and two of Mary Ann's female cousins (her stepfather's nieces) occasionally visited her at the Wise residence. Thomas B. Hart, who was acquainted with the cousins, started accompanying them on their visits, and he became friends with the Wises.
   A veteran of Doniphan's expedition to Chihuahua during the Mexican War, Hart was strong and handsome and had a reputation as a ladies' man. Some people called him Lord Byron because of his admiration of the romantic poet and the parallel between Hart and the protagonist of one of Byron's most famous poems, The Pilgrimage of Childe Harold.
   In the spring of 1849, Hart, knowing the Wises were not entirely happy with their present living quarters, invited them to move to the Mudge boardinghouse, where Hart lived. After dining with Hart several times at the Mudge place and finding the surroundings pleasant, John Wise agreed to the move, and about the 30th of May he and his wife took up residence in the same building where Thomas Hart lived. Little did Wise suspect that Hart might have had ulterior motives in helping him and Mary Ann find new accommodations, and it's not altogether clear that Hart did have designs on Wise's wife when he first invited the couple to the Mudges's. Suffice it to say, though, that Mary Ann Wise and Thomas Hart quickly became much more than just near neighbors.
   There was an outbreak of cholera raging through St. Louis at this time, and in order to get Mary away from the city so that she might not get the disease, John took her in late June to his brother's place in Marion County, not far from Palmyra. After staying a week or ten days, Wise returned to St. Louis but left his wife with his brother. There's also some evidence that Wise, despite his later protestations to the contrary, might have already begun to suspect something more than friendship existed between Mary and Thomas Hart and he wanted to separate the pair. Upon his return to the city, however, he and Hart greeted each other as old friends. And later, when a woman who boarded at the Mudge place told Wise that Hart had gotten into a dispute with some other boarders while Wise was gone and had also offended the landlady, Wise came to Hart's defense. The woman informed Wise that he was taking the side of someone he didn't really know and that Hart would soon ruin him or his wife. The woman also told Wise, who was a clerk at the post office, that, before Mary Ann went to Marion County, she and Hart were in the habit of spending nearly all their time together while Wise was at work.
   Not until July 31, when Hart left St. Louis, telling Wise that he was going to Carrolton, Illinois, did Wise begin seriously to suspect an illicit relationship between his wife and Hart. Later that day, Wise intercepted a letter at the St. Louis post office, mailed just prior to Hart's departure, that seemed to confirm the husband's worst fears. It was addressed to H. Sappho of Palmyra, and the oddity of the name caught Wise's attention, because he had previously lived in the Palmyra area for several years and did not know anyone by that name. In addition, he thought he recognized the handwriting as Thomas Hart's. Opening the letter, he learned that it was, in fact, written by Hart and that Hart was going to Quincy, Illinois, just across the river from Palmyra, not to Carrolton, as he'd told Wise. In addition, despite the alias given on the outside of the letter, the content and context of the letter convinced Wise that the intended recipient was his wife.
   The next day, Wise armed himself and started for Palmyra to get to the bottom of what appeared him to be a terrible betrayal. On the morning of August 2, during the trip into Palmyra from the Mississippi landing used by steamboat travelers on their way to that town, Wise learned from the hack driver that another man had come up from St. Louis on his way to Palmyra the day before bearing a letter to Wise's wife. Even though the driver's description of the man fit Hart, Wise played dumb, but he was fuming inside.
   After calling at the Palmyra post office and obtaining three more incriminating letters, including the two addressed to "Mrs. Wallenstein," Wise walked on into downtown Palmyra, where he saw Thomas Hart sitting in front of the Overton Hotel. Hart's presence in town and the letters Wise had already read was all the proof he needed. Knowing that Hart went armed at all times and that he was much bigger and stronger than he was, Wise immediately walked up to man, drew his pistol, and fired. The bullet struck Hart in the shoulder but only wounded him, and he rose and started fleeing. Pursuing Hart, Wise struck him with his pistol and then pulled a large knife and proceed to cut and stab him until he was beyond help. Hart died a few minutes later.
   Wise's preliminary hearing in Marion County in late August turned into a scandalous sensation with big crowds witnessing the proceedings every day. At least eight confiscated love letters between Hart and Mary Ann Wise were read in open court, with many of them containing romantic poems and undying declarations of love. Wise was indicted for murder, but he later received a change of venue to neighboring Monroe County, where he was acquitted at trial in the summer of 1850. His estranged wife, meanwhile, had reportedly moved to San Francisco.
   There's much more to this story, but the account given above is a basic outline of what happened.

Hot Temperatures

   We've been having some hot weather here lately. As I write this, at approximately 3 p.m. on Friday July 22, the temperature is currently 100 degrees in the Joplin area, and this marks the fourth day in a row that the thermometer reading has topped out at 100 degrees or more. The weekly forecast shows the temperature continuing to reach 100 or greater each of the next five days. If that happens, we will have had nine consecutive days with temperatures of 100 or more. Plus we had three days in July prior to the current streak in which we reached at least 100. So, we might have at least twelve days this month of triple digit temperatures. That's hot, but there have been at least a couple of Julys in the Ozarks during my lifetime that were hotter.
   One of those years was 1980. The exact figures vary, depending on the source, but according to Weather Underground, Joplin had 19 consecutive days and 22 total days in July of 1980 on which the thermometer reached triple digits. It continued to be hot that summer into August and early September. I was teaching school at the time, and I recall how terribly hot it was during the first few weeks of school in late August and early September. The school I taught at did not have air conditioning at that time, and by afternoon the building was sweltering. The heat was draining on both teachers and students, and by afternoon, it was hard get much teaching and learning done.
   July 1954, when I was a little kid, was even hotter than 1980. Although the total number of days (18) and the consecutive number of days (12) of triple digit temperatures during the month were both fewer than in July 1980, the overall average temperature was hotter. That's because the very hot days in July 1954 were more extreme, with several days reaching into the one hundred and teens, and even the "cooler" days were hotter than the cool days of July 1980. Only once or twice during the entire month of July 1954 did the maximum temperature top out at less than 95, whereas there were several such days in July 1980.
   So far this July, the average daily high temperature has been 91.29 degrees in Joplin, the average daily low has been 66.44, and the overall average temperature has been 83.77. By comparison, the same figures for July 1980 were 93.86, 77.5, and 88.2, and the figures for July 1954 were 98.2, 81.63, and 89.06. As you can see, even though we are having a hot July this year, the overall average has been considerably lower than either 1980 or 1954, mainly because it has tended to cool off more in the evening this year than it did in either of the other two years. But we still have over a week of this month left, and if the forecast is correct, those average figures for 2022 could rise considerably.
   I should probably add that I don't mean to suggest, by pointing out that we have had summers in the past hotter than the current one, that the average global temperature is not rising. The scientific data says that it is. Something like 17 or 18 of hottest years on record worldwide have occurred during the past twenty years. So, I definitely believe that global warming is real; it's just a matter of how much of it is because of human activity, as opposed to the normal cycles of nature. The scientific consensus is that a considerable amount of it is due to human activity, and I tend to agree with that. It just stands to reason that putting smoke and other pollutants into the atmosphere year after year can't be good for the overall health of the planet.