Youngers & Pinkertons

I mentioned in a previous post a few months ago that I passed through Roscoe on my way to the Sedalia State Fair, and I noted at that time that Roscoe is near where the infamous Younger brothers had a shootout in March of 1874 with agents of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. I co-wrote an article about the shootout that appeared in Wild West Magazine a few years ago, and a similar version of the article appears as a chapter in my book about notorious incidents of the Ozarks.
One of the difficulties I encountered in researching the article was in trying to determine the exact route of the Chalk Level Road, along which the shootout and the events leading up to the shootout occurred. The Chalk Level Road going north out of Roscoe followed roughly the route of present-day Highway E but definitely not exactly the same route. For example, while modern-day Highway E skirts the eastern edge of Roscoe and then angles back to the northwest, the old Chalk Level Road did just the opposite--that is, it started from the center of Roscoe and angled northeast past the Theodrick Snuffer home, which sat almost a mile east of present-day Highway E.
I am currently working on a book about the battles of Newtonia, and I find that I am once again encountering difficulty determining the exact routes of old roads. The routes of some of the roads in and out of Newtonia are fairly well established, but figuring out the routes of others is an inexact science. As I understand it, section lines in Newton County were not drawn until after the Civil War; so most of the old roads simply followed the path of least resistance. But determining exactly where they ran is not easy, since Missouri road maps from the Civil War era are almost nonexistent.

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.