Camdenton Bank Robbery

On Tuesday, May 5, 1931, three men held up the Bank of Camden County at Camdenton, escaping with an estimated $6,000-$7,000. At this time Camdenton was a new town that had recently replaced Linn Creek as the county seat after construction of Lake of the Ozarks had inundated Linn Creek, and the bank robbery, according to one newspaper report, gave the new town its "first taste of excitement." 

Two of the men who pulled off the robbery were white, and one was black. Two of the men entered the bank while the third stayed outside in the getaway car, but it's not clear whether the black man was one of those who entered the bank or the one who stayed outside. 

The two men who entered the bank held the cashier and assistant cashier at gunpoint, forced the assistant to open the vault, scooped up all the cash they could lay their hands on, and locked the two bank officers in the vault, along with a customer who wandered into the bank during the holdup. The bandits then took off, heading north in a small coupe. 

The Camdenton heist was just one of a whole rash of bank robberies that had recently occurred in the Ozarks. A Springfield newspaper reported that it was the sixteenth such robbery within the past six months. 

In mid-May, three men and a young woman were arrested in Bristow, Oklahoma, in connection with the Camdenton bank robbery. Buell Webb was one of the men arrested, and he was later identified as the ringleader of the gang. 

Webb was brought back to Missouri in late May, and he was lodged int he Laclede County Jail at Lebanon, because Camdenton did not yet have a jail. In late June, however, Webb and two companions escaped from the Lebanon jail by overpowering the sheriff and taking him with them as they made their getaway in his vehicle. The sheriff was released about eight miles east of Lebanon.

In mid-September Buell was recaptured near Sapulpa, Oklahoma. At the time, he was suspected of participating in a bank robbery in Oklahoma since his escape, but he was nonetheless returned to Missouri to face charges in the Camdenton job. 

At the October term of Camden County court, Buell's case was continued. In January 1932, he was brought to Camdenton for trial from the state prison where he had been held for safe keeping since his recapture. He pleaded not guilty, but he was convicted and sentenced to a 25-year term in the state prison. 

I have not tried to research what happened to Buell's two sidekicks in the Camdenton holdup.

Devil's Promenade

My latest book is about the famous Joplin or Tri-State Spook Light. Actually, Hornet Spook Light is probably the most accurate descriptor, since Hornet is the closest community to where the light appears, but it's known by various names, including the Quapaw Spook Light and others. For the purposes of my book, I called it the Ozarks Spook Light, because interest in the light reaches beyond the tri-state area, and even beyond the Ozarks for that matter. 

One of the chapters in my book relates some of the many supernatural legends about the Spook Light that have sprung up over the years as supposed explanations for it. One of the oldest legends, perhaps the very first, concerns the Devil's Promenade. 

According to this story, superstition held that if the old, wooden bridge across Spring River, about 3 1/2 miles east-southeast of Quapaw, was crossed a certain number of times or too many times, the Devil would appear. Thus, the bridge became known as the Devil's Promenade. 

Even though the old bridge has been replaced by a modern one, the current bridge still bears the name Devil's Promenade. The large rock located along the river near the bridge is sometimes also called Devil's Promenade, although it is more commonly known as Lover's Leap (because of another legend surrounding the Spook Light). In fact, the Devil's Promenade has lent its name to the entire Spook Light area. In particular, Spook Light Road, which runs west toward Quapaw from the Missouri-Oklahoma line is often referred to as the Devil's Promenade.  

    

Mary Jane Duncan: Sam Hildebrand’s “Sister"

Even in the late winter and early spring of 1865, as it became increasingly obvious that a Union victory in the Civil War was just a matter of time, Missouri women with Southern sympathies continued to come into the clutches of Union justice. Mary Jane Duncan of Madison County was just one example. Although Mary had been outspoken in her support of the Confederacy for a long time, no one turned her in for her disloyalty until some of her neighbors were robbed by guerrillas in early 1865, and the neighbors suspected that Mary might have somehow abetted the bushwhackers.
   Victims of the mid-February raid included Mary’s neighbors Andrew Bray and James Duncan. (It’s not clear whether James Duncan was related to Mary’s husband, Jonathan.) The bushwhackers held up Bray and his family at gunpoint and threatened to blow their brains out. Duncan was away from the house when they came to his place, but they robbed his wife, Elizabeth, and told her they’d kill her husband if they could find him.
   Based on statements Mary had previously made in support of guerrillas, she quickly came under suspicion of having somehow aided or encouraged the guerrillas in the raid. On March 1, several of her neighbors gave statements to W. C. Shattuck, assistant provost marshal at Fredericktown, swearing to Mary’s disloyalty. One of them even claimed she’d heard Mary say that she was Sam Hildebrand’s “sister,” which the woman took to mean “friend.” Hildebrand was a notorious guerrilla leader in southeast Missouri, but it’s not certain whether his band carried out the mid-February 1865 raid in the Duncan neighborhood west of Fredericktown.
   On March 9, General Grenville Dodge ordered that Mary Duncan be brought to St. Louis and then banished to the South. Arrested on the 17th, she was taken to Pilot Knob and forwarded to St. Louis the next day, where she was committed to the Gratiot Street Female Prison.
   The officer who sent Mary to St. Louis asked General Dodge that, if she were banned, her husband and children be allowed to go with her so that the children would not experience a hardship in her absence. The officer was hardly the only person who petitioned for special consideration in her case. Mary herself wrote a letter asking for a speedy trial so that she might return to her children, and a number of citizens of Madison County swore out affidavits vindicating her loyalty.
   On May 1, General Dodge finally revoked Mary’s banishment order, 
and she was allowed to to home.
   This is a considerably shortened version of a chapter in my Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri book (https://amzn.to/4dDoisS).

Amanda Cranwill: A Fair and Buxom Widow of the South

   Born in Georgia about 1827, Amanda Winchester married Samuel Cranwill in New Orleans in 1846. By 1850 the couple was living in St. Louis, where Cranwill was a merchant. In 1861, the couple separated because of “unfortunate difficulties between them.” Amanda remained in St. Louis for a short while before returning to her native Georgia. She also spent time in New Orleans and Florida before teaching school for a year in Alabama.
   In August 1864, Amanda determined to come back to St. Louis, because, according to her story, she’d heard that Cranwill was dead and she wanted to check on any inheritance she might be entitled to. She crossed into Federal territory without a Union pass, laid over in Memphis a while, and arrived in St. Louis in mid to late October.
   During her five-week sojourn in St. Louis, Amanda stayed first in the Planter’s Hotel and later at a boarding house. She rented a piano and practiced playing it, and she took voice lessons from Madame Carlotta Pozzoni, a nationally known operatic performer, who was a St. Louis resident. She also found time to go shopping and purchased a number of articles, including a pistol.
   Sometime in early November, Amanda hired a St. Louis carpenter to make a secret compartment in the bottom of her trunk. After doing the work, the shopkeeper reported the suspicious job to Union authorities, and they began keeping an eye on Amanda. On November 28, Amanda went to see Judge John Crumm and learned, according to her story, that she had no settlement forthcoming from her husband’s estate. About the same time as her visit to the judge, she attempted to obtain a pass to return south, but Colonel Joseph Darr, Jr. was “very busy and excited” when she called at the provost marshal general’s office. She also went to General William Rosecrans’s office but was unable to see him. Nevertheless, on November 30, she had her luggage sent to the steamboat Graham. When she boarded later the same day, US policeman Augustus Coring was there waiting for her.
   Coring searched Amanda’s trunk and discovered the false bottom containing the pistol, some Confederate money, and other items of contraband. Considering the circumstances of her arrest, Union authorities obviously did not believe her story that she’d come to St. Louis only to check on property she might be entitled to from her husband, and she was immediately lodged in the Gratiot Street Female Prison on suspicion of smuggling.
   In describing Amanda’s arrest the next day, the Daily Missouri Democrat called her “a fair and buxom widow of the South.”
   Amanda was examined on November 30 and again on December 19. During the first interview, she told her examiner she had lost her husband, letting him assume that she was a widow but, when pressed, finally admitted that her husband had sued her for divorce and she’d gone to Judge Crumm to see whether the divorce was final. She’d heard her estranged husband was dead, but she didn’t know for sure. Amanda said she could not take an oath of allegiance to the United States because it would mean “forswearing the country of my birth.” During the second examination, Amanda explained that she’d bought the gun so that she would have it for personal protection when she got to the South and gave somewhat plausible explanations for the other suspicious circumstances of her stay in St. Louis and her arrest.
   On December 19, Amanda’s estranged husband, who was very much alive, wrote to Judge Crumm from Canada offering to help Amanda in any way he could, despite the “disgrace” she’d brought on him, because he thought she might truly be innocent of the charges against her.
   Amanda didn’t help her case, however, by her actions on January 14, 1865, when she knocked down a US flag that had been suspended from the window of her cell at the female prison.
   The star witness against Amanda at her trial by military commission on December 23 was Augustus Coring, the policeman who’d searched her belongings aboard the steamboat. The defense argued that Amanda had not been uncooperative, as Coring suggested, and that she had tried repeatedly to get a pass and only decided to start south without one because she was running low on money. Little swayed by her arguments, the commission found her guilty and sentenced her to imprisonment for the duration of the war. In mid-January 1865, however, General Grenville Dodge disapproved the sentence and banished her to Dixie.
   Once the war ended, Amanda Cranwill promptly resumed her artistic pursuits, performing in concert and teaching music throughout the South. In the late 1800s, she wrote a book of poetry entitled Scattered Leaves.

   This is a condensed version of a chapter in my book Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri.https://amzn.to/3AyGkOx

Pretty Miss Jane Hancock

   Saying that the Civil War often pitted neighbor against neighbor has become a cliche, but the statement’s frequent use makes it no less true. It applies especially to Missouri, a border state that was occupied by the Union throughout most of the war but where Southern sympathies remained strong, particularly in the rural areas. Not only did people clash over divergent political opinions, but they sometimes used the war as an excuse to discharge personal grudges. That may have been what happened in the case of Miss Jane Hancock of Mississippi County.
   Twenty-two years old in 1864, Jane lived in Twapitty Township of Mississippi County, about mile a from the Mississippi River opposite Cairo, Illinois. One of her friends or acquaintances, Mary “Polly” Ann Bryant, lived in the same vicinity. However, on August 18, 1864, Polly Ann appeared at the Union post in Charleston, the seat of Mississippi County, to give a statement against Jane.
   Exactly what caused Polly Ann to turn against her friend is not clear, but she said had been at Jane’s home about a year earlier, during the month of August 1863, when Jane came home from Cairo. Mr. Hancock asked his daughter whether she had gotten caps and powder, and she replied that she had about a gross of caps and four pounds of powder. Jane’s clothes were muddy from riding horseback, and her father told her she should go change.
   Polly Ann accompanied Jane into the bedroom and saw her undress. Polly Ann saw a piece of calico fastened around Jane’s waist containing percussion caps and four calico sacks fastened to her hoops containing gunpowder. Polly Ann asked who they were for, and Jane replied that they were for her sweetheart, James Fugate, and another friend. She cautioned Polly Ann not to tell anyone or she would know who did. Miss Bryant kept her peace for a year, but now she’d decided to tell what she knew.
   Fugate was a suspected bushwhacker, who was on parole after a run-in with Union authorities. In late August, both he and Jane Hancock were arrested and questioned. Charged with smuggling, Jane was sent to St. Louis, and she was committed to Gratiot Street Prison on the evening of September 1. Griffin Frost, held prisoner at the same location, noted her arrival in his journal, saying, “She is rather good looking, and seems to be intelligent.” Frost heard the black man who cooked for the prison officers say about Jane, “When they get to be putting such pretty young ladies as she in prison, they must be nearly played out.”
   Jane was interrogated on September 2, the day after she was committed to the prison. Se denied smuggling supplies across the river from Cairo for the use of bushwhackers. In fact, she didn’t even know any guerrillas. She had known some young men before the war whom she’d heard had become bushwhackers, but she had not seen them since they left home. The only things she’d ever brought back from Cairo were items for her own family and friends like sugar, calico cloth, needles, and shoes. She admitted she had one brother in the Confederate army, but she said she herself was a Unionist and wanted to see the South whipped.
   After learning that Jane Hancock had been arrested and sent to St. Louis as a prisoner, over thirty citizens of Cairo signed a petition asking for leniency for the young woman. The men said they believed Jane to be a loyal citizen and that the charges against her were false, having been made “through malice, hatred, and ill-will.” They thought that Jane should be released and “returned to her friends.” The petition reached St. Louis on September 3 and was added to her file.
   It was almost a month later, however, before Union authorities took any action in her case. On September 28, judge advocate Lucien Eaton, noting that the charge against Jane was an old one and was “hardly sustainable” in view of her apparent good character, recommended her immediate release. The provost marshal general seconded the recommendation, and on October 1 General William Rosecrans ordered Jane released upon her taking an oath.
   Jane walked out of prison the same day and presumably returned home, but what happened to her after that has not been traced. Some of her relatives, however, still lived in Mississippi County years later.

This is a condensed version of a chapter in my Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri book. https://amzn.to/3AyGkOx   

 

Emily Weaver: Sentenced to Hang

   The story of Emily Weaver, the young woman who escaped from the St. Charles Street Female Prison with Missouri Wood (see last week’s post), is even more intriguing than Mrs. Wood’s. In the fall of 1862, twenty-two-year-old Wilson L. Tilley, a former Rebel soldier, came to Batesville (AR), where Emily lived, took up residence there, and made Emily’s acquaintance. He became a government contractor, and he and Emily were both on friendly terms with many Federal officers.
   In late May 1864, the Federals abandoned Batesville, and part of Confederate general Joseph Orville “Jo” Shelby’s command occupied the place. A couple days after the Confederates came, Emily, her fifteen-year-old cousin Charles, Tilley, and a friend of Tilley’s named Eleanor King left Batesville and traveled to St. Louis.
   Arriving in early June, Charles continued east to go to school, while Mrs. King went home to Rolla. Meanwhile, Emily and Tilley moved back and forth between various places, staying mainly at the home of Mary Jane Lingow, an acquaintance of Tilley, who lived in the St. Louis suburb of Carondelet.
   Emily and Tilley were arrested at the Lingow home in late June and charged with spying. Asked to account for her movements, Emily said she was traveling to Memphis but had come by way of St. Louis so that she could accompany her young cousin and to have the protection of traveling in a group. She had gone to Rolla with Mrs. King just to keep her company and because Tilley was temporarily in Illinois on business.
   Not much incriminating evidence was found at Mrs. Lingow’s, and the testimony taken in the first few days after Emily’s arrest did not yield a lot of solid evidence either. However, after Emily was lodged in the St. Charles Street Female Prison, a woman named Mary Ann Pitman was imprisoned there under an alias. Calling herself Molly Hayes, Pitman was actually a captured Confederate spy who had recently been cooperating with Federal authorities and had been placed in the prison as an undercover agent.
   When Ms. Pitman gave her testimony in mid to late-July, it was very damning. She claimed Emily had admitted to being a spy, said she’d been sent into Missouri by General Shelby, and that she would “hang higher than Haman” if Union authorities knew everything she’d done.
   Arraigned for trial by military commission on August 2, Emily was charged with being a spy and with violating the laws of war by coming within Federal lines and lurking about Missouri for the purpose of obtaining military information for the rebel enemies of the US. Specifically, she had spied on Union forces at Pilot Knob and St. Louis. Emily pleaded not guilty to both charges and to the specifications. The St. Louis Daily Missouri Democrat called Emily at the time “a deceiver of the gayest kind.”
   At Emily’s trial, Mary Pitman was the star prosecution witness, testifying largely to the same facts she’d related in her earlier statement. The defense attorney, on the other hand, blamed Emily’s arrest on “a stupid detective” and called Mary Pittman a “traitor of the worst type” whose testimony was unworthy of credit. If Emily, an admitted Southern sympathizer, actually said the things Pitman claimed, she only did so to try to impress someone she might have looked up to. Far from being a spy, Emily was just a naïve girl.
   On August 9, Emily was found guilty and sentenced “to be hanged by the neck until she is dead.” Brigadier General Thomas Ewing, Jr., commanding the District of St. Louis, approved the proceedings but with a recommendation to department commander General Williams Rosecrans that the verdict be mitigated. However, Rosecrans did not immediately act on the case, and, as opposing forces continued to spar over the question of Emily Weaver’s guilt, something happened that rendered Rosecrans’s looming decision almost irrelevant. Emily, following Missouri Wood’s lead, escaped from the St. Charles Street Prison on the morning of September 25.
   The verdict condemning Emily to death was finally promulgated in her absence in early November, but General Rosecrans immediately disapproved the proceedings. “The evidence of the guilt of the accused is not sufficiently conclusive,” he declared. “The prisoner will be released from prison under the direction of the Provost Marshal General.”
   Of course, Emily couldn’t be released, because she’d already released herself. Her father, who had come to St. Louis to try to help her and had been arrested, was released, however, on the condition that he report Emily’s whereabouts if and when he learned it.
   Note: The chapter in my book Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri https://amzn.to/3AyGkOx on Emily Weaver is by far the longest one. So, this is a greatly condensed version or summary of that chapter.

Missouri Wood Buys Her Way Out of Prison

   Union justice in Civil War Missouri wasn’t always blind. Beautiful or charming women sometimes received preferential treatment. So, too, did women from well-to-do families. Perhaps in no case was a woman’s wealth more influential in winning her freedom than that of Mrs. Missouri Wood, who simply bought her way out of prison.
   Thirty-seven-year-old Missouri first came to the attention of Union authorities in late February 1864 for helping her friend Mary Doyle, an accused Rebel spy, get out of St. Louis undetected. The previous summer, Mrs. Doyle had gone south at her own request with a group of banished St. Louis citizens. She’d returned to St. Louis without a pass in early February and stayed initially with a friend. Mary’s four sisters also lived in the city, but they did not share her political sentiments. However, after a few days, she went to stay with one of them, and somewhere along the line, Mary and Missouri, who had known each other since before the war, also re-united.
   Union authorities somehow learned of Mary Doyle’s presence in the city, but before they could locate and arrest her, she left St. Louis on February 17 aboard a steamboat headed back to the South. On Saturday, February 20, Union authorities questioned a number of people, including three of Mary’s sisters, from whom they learned that Missouri Wood had helped procure Mary’s passage through her acquaintance with the boat clerk. When Missouri was arrested later the same day, she denied even knowing Mary Doyle, her sisters, or anyone on the steamboat. She suggested she was a victim of mistaken identity, and she was released after questioning.
   Now that she was under suspicion from Federal authorities, though, she had to do something about the stash of money she had hidden at her house. It amounted to over $5,000, money her husband had given her for safekeeping a couple of weeks earlier before leaving for New Orleans. She decided to deposit the cash in a bank, but on Monday morning Missouri was re-arrested at her home as she was getting ready to start downtown with the money. She had it in her pocket as she was taken to the police office for additional questioning. She again denied any knowledge of Mary Doyle, but Mary’s sisters, brought to the office for re-examination, confirmed that Missouri was the same woman who had helped Mary leave St. Louis. Missouri was officially charged with harboring a spy, and she was taken under guard to an unspecified place of detention. During the trip, she mentioned to the officer escorting her that she had some money and asked whether she could take it with her. Without asking the amount, he replied that she could. Little did the officer know that she was carrying $5,300, a small fortune in 1864!
   Once inside the lockup, Missouri hid the money in the folds of her skirt, and a few weeks later, she was transferred to the St. Charles Street Female Military Prison. The file containing the evidence gathered against Missouri when she was first arrested was lost, delaying the proceedings against her, and she had still not come to trial by mid-September 1864.
   Tiring of life inside the St. Charles Street Female Prison, Missouri decided to leverage her wealth to try to gain her freedom. Around the first of September, she’d watched another young woman escape, and, based on conversations she’d overheard, she thought the prison keeper, William Dickson, was corrupt and might have been in on the escape. Although Dickson didn’t know Missouri had a slew of money on her person, he knew she was wealthy, and she let him know she was willing to pay him if he could help get her released. According to Missouri’s later story, Dickson told her he might be able to help but that it would cost her $4,000. She soon produced the $4,000, but a week or so later he told her he’d been unsuccessful in swaying the authorities. However, if she could come up with another $1,000, he might find a more direct way for her to get her freedom.
   On the evening of September 24, she handed over the additional $1,000, and he slipped her a key to an alley door. Missouri let herself and fellow inmate Emily Weaver out of the prison early the next morning, just after the overnight guards had gone off duty. Hastily making her way through the streets, Mrs. Wood immediately crossed the Mississippi River into Illinois and started north, reaching Windsor, Canada, four days later.
   In a letter written from Canada a couple of months after her escape, Missouri maintained that she had escaped because of the deplorable conditions in the prison and because she despaired of her case ever coming to trial, not because she was guilty of any wrongdoing. She claimed not even to know why she’d been arrested.
   Several women who’d previously sworn to Missouri Wood’s involvement in procuring passage south for Mary Doyle gave additional statements after Missouri’s escape reiterating her participation, but it hardly mattered since Missouri remained out of reach of Union military authority and did not return to Missouri until after the war. She and her husband later moved to Colorado, and she died there in 1894 but was brought back to St. Louis for burial.
   This post is condensed from a chapter in my book Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri. https://amzn.to/3AyGkOx