Douglas County Seat

Last time I said that changes in county seats were not unusual in the Ozarks during the formative years of the counties. Sometimes the changes happened for very practical reasons such as agreeing upon a more centrally located town as the county seat, and the changes took place with little dispute. Sometimes, however, intense rivalries developed between towns and resulted in "county seat wars."
Perhaps no county in the Ozarks (none that I can think of at least) had a harder time deciding on a permanent and final county seat than Douglas County, Missouri. When Douglas County was formed in 1857 from Ozark County, Red Bud in the eastern part of the county was named the county seat. The name of the settlement was changed to Vera Cruz two years later. During the Civil War, the county records were briefly moved to Rome in the southwest part of the county because of continual skirmishing around Vera Cruz. It was quickly decided, however, that Rome was no safer than Vera Cruz, and the seat was moved back to the latter place.
In 1869, three eastern townships of Douglas County were annexed to Howell County so that Vera Cruz was now less centrally located than it previously had been. An election resulted in the county seat being moved to Arno in the western part of the county. However, Arno was just as far west of the middle of the county as Vera Cruz was east of it, and dispute arose between the two sections of the county.
In 1871, a centrally located site was selected as a sort of compromise, and the town of Ava was laid out as the county seat. Some reports suggest that Militia Springs, a military training camp during the Civil War that continued as a government post office after the war and was located about a mile and a half north of the new town site, also served briefly as the county seat while Ava was being laid out and built. So, in all, the Douglas County seat has been located in at least four and perhaps five different places and has gone by at least five and maybe six different names.      

Multiple County Seats

A lot of counties in the Ozarks (and elsewhere) started out with a county seat different from the one they ended up with. In some cases, the move was prompted mostly because a more centrally located spot for the county seat was agreed on, and the move took place with little or no incident. In other cases, however, disputes arose over the location of the county seat and resulted in what might be called county seat wars.
One county seat dispute that comes readily to my mind is the one between Baxter Springs and Columbus that took place during the late 1860s over the location of the seat of Cherokee County, in the southeast corner of Kansas at the edge of the Ozarks. After a couple of disputed elections, Columbus was declared the county seat, but Baxter Springs, which had been the acting county seat, claimed the election was fraudulent and refused to relinquish the records. Officials from Columbus slipped into Baxter Springs one night and took the records back to Columbus, and for many years bitter Baxter Springs citizens recalled the time that Columbus "stole" the county seat.
The seat of some counties moved more than once and involved more than two towns, and the moves may or may not have involved disputes. Camden County, Missouri, for instance, comes to mind. The original county seat, when the county was known as Kinderhook, was Oregon. Oregon changed its name to Erie when the county changed its name to Camden in 1843. Erie was located where Linn Creek emptied into the Osage River and was prone to flooding; so in 1855, the town (and the county seat) moved up the creek about half a mile and took the name Linn Creek. Linn Creek served as county seat of Camden County until the town was destroyed during the building of Bagnell Dam and the Lake of the Ozarks. Old Linn Creek was covered with water, and two new towns, new Linn Creek and Camdenton, were built, with the latter town becoming the new county seat.

Crystal Cave

Growing up in Fair Grove during the 1950s and early 1960s, I was well aware of Crystal Cave, located about halfway between Fair Grove and Springfield on old Highway 65. (The segment between Springfield and Crystal Cave is now part of Highway H, and the segment between Fair Grove and Crystal Cave is, I believe, now called Shelby Road.) I went by the cave ever time I made a trip to Springfield. However, I never actually visited it until a few years ago when I did an article about it for the Ozarks Reader.
Crystal Cave was opened to the public in 1893 by Englishman Alfred Mann, and his three daughters took over the cave when he died in 1925. They ran it for over forty years (including the time I lived at Fair Grove), until the last one died in 1969 and willed it a family friend, Estel Funkhouser. She ran it until 1982, when her sister, Edith Richardson, and Edith's husband, Lloyd, took over. The Richardsons were still running the place in early 2005 when I visited. However, as far as I can tell, the cave is now closed to the public. Apparently the Richardsons either died or got too old to continue running it and could find no one to take their place. They were in their mid eighties at the time of my visit.
Crystal Cave was never highly commercialized. No drive-through trams or anything like that. No colored lights to try to enhance the beauty of the cave. As Lloyd Richardson told me during my visit, the cave was beautiful enough in its natural state and didn't need any artificial enhancement. Also, the cave was not particularly accessible. It had narrow pathways, several fairly steep climbs, and so forth. However, I have to say that Crystal Cave was one of the neatest caves I've ever seen and my visit to it was the most enjoyable cave tour I've ever taken (not that I've taken all that many).
So, it's kinda sad to see the old cave closed. It had been open to the public continuously (except for a very brief period in 1969) for well over 100 years. But now it's gone. Maybe someone will acquire it and reopen it one of these days.

Kinch West

I've written quite a bit (on this blog and elsewhere) about the guerrilla conflict in Missouri during the Civil War. I don't consider myself an apologist for the Confederate guerrillas, because I think that they (and the South in general) were ultimately on the wrong side of history, but I can see the Southern side of the story. I think that much of the story that America has traditionally been told about the guerrillas has been skewed in favor of the Union because it was generally told by the victorious Union side. For instance, the Missouri guerrillas have often been portrayed as murderous outlaws who had no military legitimacy and whose only goal was plunder. My book Other Noted Guerrillas of the Civil War in Missouri contains a fairly thorough discussion of how I see the guerrillas, but suffice it to say here that this simplistic Union portrayal of the guerrillas as opportunist brigands is far from the truth in most cases. 
On the other hand, Southern apologists often go too far in the other direction and try to portray the guerrillas as gallant knights who were driven to take up arms only in response to the horrible maltreatment that they and their families received at the hands of the federal government. In many cases, there was some truth to this generalization, but it, too, is an oversimplification.
Take Dade County, Missouri, guerrilla Kincheon "Kinch" West (who was a first cousin of one of my great grandmothers, by the way), for example. Kinch is probably most famous for his raid on Melville (now Dadeville), in 1864. The Union side of the story seems to suggest that Kinch was nothing but an outlaw looking for plunder, whereas the Southern side of the story suggests that Kinch was a peaceful young man at the beginning of the war who only took to the bush on the Confederate side after his father was mercilessly killed without provocation by Union troops in 1863.
The truth is almost certainly somewhere in the middle. In all likelihood, Kinch joined the Confederate-allied Missouri State Guard near the outset of the war, although, as is often the case, no documentation of his military service has survived. What is known is that Kinch was later affiliated in his guerrilla activities with Lafayette "Fate" Roberts, who is known to have been an officer in the 8th Division of the Missouri State Guard during the early part of the war. So, Kinch, like most guerrilla leaders, probably did have some military standing or legitimacy, at least as far as the Southern side was concerned. However, it is also known that Kinch began his marauding activities before his father was killed by Union soldiers. In fact, his father was probably killed at least in part in retaliation for Kinch's activities. Of course, nothing would justify killing a father for what one of his sons had done, but the point I'm making is that Kinch was almost certainly not a peaceful young man who was staying home minding his own business at the time his father was killed, as the Southern side of the story would have us believe. In short, Kinch West was a desperate character, as the Union side of the story suggests, but he probably did not start out to be an outlaw and he did have personal reasons that helped drive him to desperation.
For anybody interested in more detailed information about Kinch West, I'm providing a link to a website dedicated to info about him:
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cspowell/researchpages/Kinch.html

Bears in the Ozarks

When white men first started settling the Ozarks in the 1810s and 1820s, black bears were common in the region. They were killed at such a rate during the first 20 or 30 years of white settlement, however, that they were virtually gone by the time of the Civil War, or at least they were thought to be nearly gone. During the 1960s, Arkansas began reintroducing black bears to that state, and some of them have now roamed northward into the Missouri Ozarks. Also, there is some evidence that black bears never completely left southern Missouri. However, they are still nowhere near as prevalent as they were during the first half of the 19th century. In fact, they are probably still not as prevalent as they were during the years shortly after the Civil War.
For instance, in June of 1870, two black bears were killed in the Springfield vicinity within a week. The first one, as reported by the Springfield Missouri Weekly Patriot, was killed by a farmer living about nine miles east of town when the bear "strayed from his native forests too close to the habituations of the white man" and scattered some rails the farmer had used to enclose a spring. The farmer put his hounds on the trail of the bruin, they treed it, and he filled it full of lead. The next week, the same newspaper reported that another black bear had been killed by a man living about seven miles south of Springfield. The newspaperman remarked that he had thought, after chronicling the first bear's demise the previous week, he would probably never have occasion to report a similar story again. It's clear from his statement that the sighting and killing of two bears in such a short span of time and in the same general vicinity of the Ozarks was a rare instance in 1870, but the fact that two bears were, in fact, killed within a week not more than fifteen miles apart is also an indication that they were probably more common in 1870 than they are now.   

More About Ozarks' Feuds

I have previously mentioned several old-time Ozarks' feuds, including the Turk-Jones feud that led to the infamous Slicker Wars in Benton County and Hickory County, Missouri, in the 1840s; the Meadows-Bilyeu feud that led to the killing of three Bilyeu men by Bud Meadows in southern Christian County in 1898; the Matthews-Payton feud that predated the Meadows-Bilyeu feud, took place in the same general vicinity, and involved at least one of the same men (Bud Meadows); and the Alsup-Hatfield feud in Douglas County in the years right after the Civil War.
The Alsups were also involved in a pre-war feud with the Fleetwoods that was supposedly even bigger than their subsequent one with Hatfield and his allies, although very little can be documented about the Fleetwood feud. I suspect that the Fleetwood feud was probably not as violent as the oral legend would have one believe (e.g. as many as 200 men suppposedly killed over a period of many years) and that some of the information or misinformation that has been handed down about it may have actually grown out of the post-war feud. In other words, the two have probably become mixed together in the retelling.
Another notorious Ozarks feud, one that I believe I have not previously mentioned on this blog, was the Tutt-Everett feud of Marion County, Arkansas. Like the so-called Slicker Wars, the Tutt-Everett feud also took place mainly in the 1840s. Davis Tutt, who was killed by Wild Bill Hickok on the square in Springfield in 1865, was a descendant of the Tutt family that was involved in this feud.
Part of the hillbilly image that used to be attached (and sometimes still is attached) to the Ozarks by outsiders was a perception that the region, because of the clannishness of its people, was rife with family feuds that often erupted in violence. There was some truth to this perception, I suppose, but I also think that the number of family feuds in the Ozarks was probably not all that much greater, allowing for differences in population, than in some other parts of the country.
Even the Ozarks' own journalists, though, sometimes bought into the hillbilly image and helped propagate it. For instance, in 1915, after a murder in Douglas County awoke the memory of previous feuds in that county and elsewhere, the Springfield Daily Leader declared that, while not as common as they used to be, feuds "are still carried on in the Ozarks. Many times each year the thunder of a rifle or shotgun rings out from a blind, and the unsuspecting victim tumbles to the earth, knowing that some deed committed either by himself or his family, has been avenged, according to the old ethics of vengeance.
"Although never as notorious as the hills of Kentucky for feuds," the newspaper allowed, "the Ozarks of Missouri have been the scene of several bloody ones; man after man has been toppled from his horse as he wound his way through the seemingly peaceful hills; vengeance has been vowed over still forms as they lay in the roadside; families have clanned together against others and feuds have extended for miles around."
Although there is obviously a grain of truth to the Leader reporter's claims, most of this story strikes me as romantic nonsense. For instance, the idea that people still died in the Ozarks "many times each year" as late as the 1910s as a result of feuds seems incredible, but it probably made for good newspaper copy.

      

Thomas Covington Kills Sidney Norcross

In a recent post, I remarked on the frequency with which summary justice, such as lynching, was employed during the Wild West days in cases of violent crime. Because this was, indeed, the case, there is a tendency on the part of many people, I think, to assume that perpetrators of violent crime seldom got away with their crimes during the days of the Old West. Ironically, however, this latter assumption is not true. Murderers often got off scot free, especially if the crime was not premeditated but was instead committed during a heated argument. This tended to be true regardless of which party was the aggressor in the argument.
A case in point is the murder of Sidney F. Norcross by Thomas Covington in Bolivar, Missouri, on Saturday night, May 27, 1871. The two young men, along with two or three other pals, had been drinking at Gracey's saloon. Between ten and eleven o'clock, they left the saloon and went into Garrett's barber shop (which, like many businesses back then, kept late Saturday night hours). After the men took seats, Norcross asked Covington for some tobacco, and Covington handed Norcross his tobacco box. Norcross made a snide remark about the tobacco box, and Covington gave him a sharp reply. When Norcross retorted in anger, Covington picked up a nearby chair and struck Norcross across the head with it, knocking him to the floor. Norcross was taken home, where he died the next morning.
Meanwhile, Covington fled but turned himself in a few months later at the start of the fall term of the Polk County Circuit Court, and he was tried for second degree murder. However, the jury failed to reach a verdict, and he was released on bond, pending a new trial.
On Friday evening, March 8, 1872, while Covington was still out on bond, he got into a scuffle with another lad named William Stallings at a school exhibition in Bolivar. The two young men and a couple of others had been jabbing at each other playfully, mussing each other's hair, and so forth when Covington took offense to a shove from Stallings that he apparently thought was too rough. He suddenly pulled out a two-edged dirk knife and stabbed Stallings in the breast. Stallings's wound was serious but not considered life-threatening. Covington was arrested and transported to the Cedar County jail at Stockton for safekeeping.
"It now remains to be seen," observed the skeptical editor of the Bolivar Free Press, "whether killing and stabbing is a crime punishable in our courts of law, or must the lives of peaceful citizens be placed in constant jeopardy at the hands of the assassin emboldened by the prospect of escaping punishment."
Covington did, in fact, escape punishment once again, at least temporarily. He and a couple of other inmates broke out of the Cedar County jail in late March. I've thus far been unable to trace whether he was ever apprehended and, if so, what happened to him after that.