Budgetown

Located on Short Creek just a mile or so west of the Missouri state line, Galena, Kansas, sprang up in the spring of 1877 as a booming lead mining town. Like most towns founded as mining camps, Galena, during its early years, was a wild, raucous place where whiskey flowed freely. A prohibition law that went into effect in Kansas in January 1881 put a damper on the liquor trade in Galena, as all ten of the town's saloons quickly went out of business. However, the new law couldn't slake the rowdy miners' thirst for liquor, and two enterprising saloon keepers found a way around the new law.
They simply moved a mile east and started a new town on the state line of Missouri, where liquor was legal. The original idea was to start a regular town where people would want to live, but that idea never quite got off the ground. Instead, the town became just a place for the miners to go and raise hell, and it mainly consisted of just a couple of saloons. At least one of the buildings, called a "double building," actually straddled the border, with the saloon portion in Missouri and the Kansas portion serving as a gambling hall, since gambling was still legal in the sunflower state but not in Missouri.
Officially named Dubuque, the new town became known as Budgetown or Budgeville, because "budge" was a slang term for liquor in the Old West. From the very beginning, Budgetown had a bad reputation, and the respectable citizens of Galena looked upon their new rival with disdain. Commenting on the new town in March of 1881, the Galena Miner suggested that the "b" in Dubuque be changed to a "p," and the name of the town would then "be about correct." A couple of months later, a resident of Neosho, Missouri, traveled to Galena and reported back to his hometown newspaper, the Miner and Mechanic, that there was not a drop of liquor to be found in Galena but that a new town named Budge had sprung up on the state line and the "eyes and feet of the thirsty Short Creekers turn that way as the sunflower expands its charms into the sun."
In late May 1881, just a week or so after the Neosho resident's visit, the Galena Miner gave its readers an update on Budgeville. According to the newspaper, the new town had failed to prosper as its founders had envisioned, and it was generally very dull. However, "There are seasons when there are wild times," the newspaperman allowed. The rural residents in the vicinity of Budgetown regularly complained to law enforcement of the indiscriminate discharge of firearms in and around the town, and they lived in fear that they might be hit by a stray bullet. The Miner concluded by reiterating that Budgetown as a business enterprise was a complete failure and would continue to be so as long as the sole object of those inhabiting the town was to "drink whisky and play cards."
 
Despite the negative publicity Budgetown received almost from its beginning, rumors persisted in the spring of 1881 that the new town on the border was booming and already had a population numbering as high as 2,000. In early June, the Miner once again felt called upon to dispel the rumors. The editor assured his readers that the only place in Budgetown where a person could buy groceries had recently closed and that there was nothing left in the town that was in the least attractive to anyone except those who desired to "get where they have almost unrestrained license. Budgetown will never be a place where men will want to take their families."
The Miner editor was right. Budgetown remained little more than a place to drink and raise hell for the next few years. In early 1884, Joe Thornton, whose brother ran a grocery store in Galena, took charge of the only remaining business in Budgetown, a "double building" straddling the state line. Unlike his brother, Joe had developed an unsavory reputation, and it didn't take him long to start getting into trouble again once he removed to the state line. His troubles culminated in the summer of 1885 when he shot and killed a Joplin city policeman and was hanged by a mob later the same evening. You can read more about Joe Thornton in by book Wicked Joplin. I also have another book in the works about notorious incidents in Jasper County history, and one chapter of that book will detail Thornton's noted criminal career.
Budgetown was still shown on maps as late as 1895 under its official name of Dubuque. It was located on the state line between present-day Seventh Street and Old Route 66, in the general area where the Phillips 66 State Line convenience store and gas station is situated.

A Galena Lynching

Last time I mentioned that, although Joplin may have been the most populous of the mining towns of the tri-state region and probably had the most notorious reputation, several of the smaller mining towns in the area also witnessed more than their share of crime and rowdy behavior, and I cited Webb City as an example. Galena, Kansas, was another prime example. From its founding in the spring of 1877, Galena was a rough town where fights and even killings were not uncommon, the first murder being the shooting death of William "Tiger Bill" St. Clair at the hands of Bob Layton and friends in June of '77.
Galena was still a rowdy place over twenty years later near the turn of the century. The town witnessed an especially large rash of crime during one two-day period near the end of April 1899. The Joplin Globe reported that Galena "has been 'going on' at a lively rate for the past day or so, the old town having been the scene of cutting scrapes, exhibitions of cowboys on a rampage, murder and lynching, as well as larceny and other things. A history of the city for the past two days could be dished up in such a way as to rival the slaughter of the most bloodthirsty pirates or the lawlessness depicted in the most sensational of the dime novels."
The most shocking crimes during the spree were the murder of a black woman named Laura Canafax by her lover, Charles Williams, and the subsequent lynching of Williams by a mob of black men. After Canafax's body was found strangled to death on April 24, a coroner's jury quickly declared that she had come to her death at the hands of Williams, and the suspect was lodged in the local jail. During the wee hours of the morning of April 25, the mob of about fifteen men formed at the jail, broke the lock to Williams's cell, and invited him to come out. When he refused, they fired four bullets into his body, killing him instantly.
In addition to the murder and lynching, there were also two knife fights and a couple of lesser crimes committed in Galena during the same two-day period.

Galena and Empire City

Galena, Kansas, is pretty tame nowadays compared to what it was during its early days. Like several of the towns in the tri-state region of Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma that got their start as mining camps, Galena was a rough and rowdy place in its infancy. During the spring of 1877, lead was discovered on Short Creek just across the Missouri state line in southeast Kansas, and miners and other adventurers flocked to the area throughout the spring and summer.
Two towns, Galena and Empire City, sprang up on opposite sides of Short Creek, and a bitter rivalry between the two fledgling communities quickly developed. Empire City resented the fact that Red Hot Street at the north edge of Galena quickly became a center of saloons and other entertainment for the miners, drawing them away from their own town, and, during the summer of 1877, the city fathers began constructing a long, tall wall to separate the two towns, claiming its purpose was to retard the filthy stench emanating from Galena. Violence erupted and the citizens of Galena burned the wall down before things finally began to settle down when the cool weather of fall approached. The rivalry continued with less intensity, though, for several years, until Empire City was finally annexed into Galena during the early 1900s.

Lynchings

Last time, I mentioned vigilantism in the Ozarks, a topic that brings to mind lynchings, since extra-legal execution was the most extreme form, yet a fairly common form, of vigilantism in early Ozarks history, as well as in the history of America as a whole.
Many people automatically associate lynching in this country with racism. Extra-legal execution, especially hanging, was, in fact, often employed by whites against blacks who had supposedly committed one crime or another, even though in many cases the evidence for such crimes was scant. In this racist sense, lynching was not as common in Missouri and other parts of the Ozarks as it was in the deep South. Of course, this was partly because the concentration of blacks in this area was not as great. Even so, we definitely had some high-profile cases of racial lynching, such as the notorious Pierce City lynchings of 1901 and the equally infamous Springfield lynchings of 1906, but overall such lynchings weren't as common in this area as they were in the deep South.
White men lynching other white men, though, I'm not so sure about. I have a hunch that the Ozarks witnessed at least its share and very likely more than its share of this type of lynching. I don't have any statistics to back up my assumption, but I've read enough old newspaper accounts and so forth to know that a lot of such extra-legal hangings occurred in this area.
This area also saw a rare instance of black men lynching another black man. In the wee hours of the morning on April 25, 1899, Charles Williams, "a disreputable negro," as a Joplin newspaper called him, was dragged from his jail cell at Galena, Kansas, at the edge of the Ozarks, by a mob of black men and shot four times when he "showed fight." Williams's girlfriend had been found dead in her bed the day before, and Williams was suspected of having strangled her to death in a fit of rage.

Bob Layton

Yet another of the nest of villains inhabiting Granby, Missouri, during the latter half of the nineteenth century was Bob Layton. Bob and his family, consisting of his parents and several sisters, came to Granby from Tennessee near the start of the Civil War when he was a young boy five or six years old. Layton first etched his name in the annals of outlawry on the evening of June 16, 1877, at the fledgling mining town of Galena just across the Kansas state line. Nursing an old grudge, he and three other Granby men burst into Dykeman's Restaurant and opened fire on William St. Clair and Harry Campbell while the latter were seated at a table taking dinner. The ambush mortally wounded St. Clair and left Campbell with a flesh wound. A hastily formed posse pursued the attackers and briefly exchanged shots with them, but Layton and his cohorts made a clean escape. St. Clair was known as "Tiger Bill" because of his reputation in the area as a rough character, but it's not known what supposed wrong the Granby boys were avenging. Around this same time, Layton became a part-time sidekick of the notorious George Hudson, but it's also not known with any certainty whether Hudson came along on the Galena escapade.
What is known is that Layton and Hudson, along with Hudson's brother Jack, were passing through Batesville, Arkansas, on the evening of November 7, 1879, and tarried in town long enough to get into a barroom brawl. They conked one man over the head with a pistol and fired a shot at another one. A posse followed them to their camp outside town and captured George Hudson after an exchange of lead, but the other two men escaped. Layton came back to Batesville the next night to try to break George Hudson out of jail and was shot and killed after he was recognized and ordered to halt but went for his gun instead. Thus was cut short the promising criminal career of Robert Layton.

Desperate Characters of Joplin, Granby, and Galena

Before I moved to the Joplin area from the Springfield area many years ago, I had occasionally heard mention of what a wild, wide-open town Joplin used to be back in its mining heyday, and my study of local history during the years since I've lived in Joplin has confirmed this to be the case. During the Old West era, the James gang and the Youngers visited the Joplin area at least once or twice for sure and probably other times as well, and a passel of lesser-known desperadoes frequented the town with some regularity. During the gangster era of the 20s and 30s, outlaws like Bonnie and Clyde, the Barkers, and Arkansas Tom of Doolin gang fame used Joplin as a hideout. Not until lead and zinc mining started petering out around the middle of the 20th century did the town finally begin to lose its reputation as an anything-goes type of place.
What I have learned in recent years, however, is that, for being a rough-and-tumble mining town in its early days, Joplin had nothing on either Granby or Galena (Kansas). Granby in particular, was home to an unusual number of murderers and assorted other rough characters. I'll be writing about some of them in more detail in future posts.