Vigilantes after the Civil War: The Baldknobbers of the Ozarks

The Civil War hit the Ozarks in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas especially hard. While the region was underpopulated, that made it a good home for guerrillas from both sides as well as simple bandits. Taney County in Missouri went from a prewar population of 3,500 to fewer than 1,000 by war's end.

Peace didn't come quickly to the Ozarks. When Confederate veterans returned home, many found their land occupied by Union men, confiscated for failure to pay taxes during the war. They couldn’t even vote thanks to a new state constitution that disenfranchised anyone who had supported the rebellion.

The local government became dominated by Union men, many of them newcomers who arrived to snap up cheap land. While some ex-Confederates did manage to get farms again, they had become an underclass. Some turned to lawlessness, usually targeting the wealthier Unionists.

The violence came to a head in the 1880s when a Union veteran named Nat Kinney formed the Baldknobbers, a vigilante group named after their practice of meeting on bald knobs, treeless hills where they could spot anyone coming to spy on their meetings. The Baldknobbers soon took to terrorizing the lawless element at night, wearing masks and whipping people. They soon graduated to lynching. In defense, the former rebels formed the Anti-Baldknobbers.

Soon the Civil War was being reenacted in the Ozarks. Many Baldknobbers were newcomers, Republicans, and ex-Union soldiers. Only a few kept farms, the main occupation of the general population, instead working in county government, law, or owning their own businesses. They looked on the native hill men as backward. The Anti-Baldknnobbers tended to be ex-Confederates and longtime residents, and most farmed for a living.

It's unclear how many died in the fighting. Estimates range from a dozen to more than thirty, with countless more beaten and driven from their land.

The lynchings, night riding, and shootouts were finally stamped out by Governor Marmaduke who, strangely enough, was a former Confederate general who came into power after the restrictions on ex-rebels holding public office was lifted. He didn't care who had fought for whom, he just wanted the killing to stop.

You can read more about the Baldknobbers in my book Outlaw Tales of Missouri.

This Wikimedia Commons photo is from the 1919 film, The Shepherd of the Hills and accurately depicts surviving Baldknobber masks.

Destroying a Confederate saltpeter works

The Civil War in Missouri and Arkansas was made up of mostly small skirmishes. Researcher Carolyn Bartels counted 1100 fights in Missouri alone, and suspects that estimate is low. Only a couple of dozen of them could rightly be called battles. As I've written before, there's no such thing as an insignificant skirmish. One small action in Arkansas in January of 1863 shows why.

At this time, northern Arkansas was a sort of No-Mans-Land between the two sides. There was little infrastructure in the Ozarks to support a large force, and the rough hills and thick brush made any supply wagons easy targets for ambush. The region was full of deserters and bushwhackers, sandwiched between the Union army to the north and the Confederates to the south.

There was one Confederate outpost, however. Along the Buffalo River in northern Arkansas was a large saltpeter works. Saltpeter, of course, is a key ingredient in gunpowder, something of which the rebels were always in short supply. While they didn't have the manpower to control the Buffalo River, they left a few men to run the saltpeter works in order to supply the beleaguered Arkansas Confederates.

Union troops learned of this operation and decided to put a stop to it. Major J.W. Caldwell of the First Iowa Cavalry took 300 men from Huntsville in northwestern Arkansas and rode out on the morning of January 9. That evening he camped in the general vicinity of the works and sent out scouts to find its exact location. Before dawn the next day, he set out and completely surprised the rebels. Of the 20 workers, only three escaped and the rest were captured.

In his report, Maj. Caldwell says he destroyed 14 buildings, 2 steam engines, 3 boilers, 7 large iron kettles, and half a ton of saltpeter. This was a large enterprise indeed. As a bonus, his men found a second, smaller works four miles downriver and destroyed that too. The workers there managed to escape but the Iowa boys had made a good haul. The expedition also netted 20 bushwhacker prisoners.

While military histories tend to focus on the big battles, these skirmishes had an accumulated effect far beyond any single battle. The works on the Buffalo River weren't the only supply of saltpeter for the rebels in Arkansas, but its loss exacerbated their supply problem and made them that much weaker. Losing all those men to Union prisons didn't help their cause either.


This Wikipedia photo shows a reproduction of Anderson Mill, built in the 1850s as a corn mill and cotton gin. It was converted to a gunpowder mill for the Civil War. After the war it resumed as corn, wheat, and cotton processing. It was bought by Pioneer Mills of San Antonio and idled at the turn of the century. This reproduction was built in 1965 in Anderson Mill, Texas when the original site was flooded by the Lake Travis reservoir. OK, so it isn't a saltpeter works. I couldn't find a good public domain photo of one! Here's one I couldn't use.

Civil War Photo Friday: Veterans of the Battle of Prairie Grove

Today is the 150th anniversary of the Union victory at the Battle of Prairie Grove. This was a brutal slugfest in northwestern Arkansas that spelled the end to Confederate hopes of invading Missouri and opened up Arkansas for Union invasion. It would take both sides some time to fully realize the significance of this battle.

The battle has been well described in many places, such as this official site and the awesome blog Civil War Daily Gazette. So I'll just give you this interesting photo of the veterans of Company K, 34th Arkansas Infantry, taken at a reunion at the battlefield sometime around 1905-1916. This public domain image comes courtesy Campsite Artifacts, a very cool website run by a metal detectorist who specializes in finding (and selling) Civil War artifacts.

Guest Post: The Red Legs

I'm always happy to take guest posts from writers and researchers of the Civil War and Old West, and so I'm pleased today to bring you Bill Hoyt, author of Good Hater: George Henry Hoyt's War on Slavery. He's here to tell us about Hoyt's role in the actions of the infamous Red Legs. Take it away Hoyt!


Depending upon who is telling the tale, the Red Legs of Kansas were either soldiers, scouts, and guides particularly fitted for service along the bloody border, or else they were pillagers as “full of the devil as a mackerel is of salt.” The truth was even more complicated.

The Kansas Seventh Volunteer Cavalry, known in Missouri as “Jennison's Jayhawkers,” began wearing red leggings as early as 1861. Quickly picking up the symbol, other Unionist Red Legs thereafter gained a reputation for thieving, looting, and even bank robbery. A number of such gangs pillaged both sides of the Missouri/Kansas border in late 1861 and early 1862, much to the chagrin of the general in charge at Fort Leavenworth, James G. Blunt of Kansas.

Another threat was rising in 1862 that scared Kansans even more than Red Legs: William Clarke Quantrill.  As the Confederate captain grew bolder, looting Shawneetown, Olathe, and a few other border towns that year, the cries grew for a protective force that could keep Quantrill at bay.

Enter Captain George Henry Hoyt, late of the Kansas Seventh Volunteer Cavalry. Though relatively new in Kansas, Hoyt was no stranger to the border. After serving as an attorney during John Brown’s 1859 trial in Virginia, Hoyt had come to Kansas in 1861 with John Brown, Jr., eventually replacing him as captain of Company K, perhaps the most fiercely abolitionist company in any Kansas regiment. As a member of Col. Charles R. “Doc” Jennison’s personal staff, Hoyt had led many raids on bushwhackers, raids from which any captured bushwhackers consistently died “trying to escape.”

While Hoyt’s poor health had forced his resignation from the Seventh, now serving in Mississippi, his July of 1862 return to Kansas made him available for a different kind of duty: running an irregular company of scouts and spies that would provide border “services” to Kansas regiments stationed in and around Kansas City.

He called his company the “Red Leg Scouts,” giving notice to Missourians that he intended to continue what Jennison’s boys had started the prior year. Into that company he gathered nearly three dozen men who knew the order, could not serve in the army for various reasons, and most importantly, were as fearless and as merciless as himself.

Book Review: The Lyon Campaign in Missouri

An excellent first-person account by a "90 day volunteer" in the early days of the fight for Missouri. He covers the years leading up to the war and includes lots of interesting anecdotes about life in Iowa back then. There's not much fighting in this book, but you get a good look at the daily misery of the soldiers with their bad or sometimes nonexistent rations, hard marches, adverse weather, and incompetent officers. A must-read for anyone interested in a private's eye view of war in the Trans-Miss.

I read the free version on Google Books. Google has scanned many public domain books and while the price is right (free) they have done no editing. While it's a treasure trove of otherwise hard-to-find titles, the books aren't the best reading quality. Often the scanner makes mistakes with these old books because of faded type and creased pages. At times there are obvious typos and occasionally complete gibberish. I'm almost tempted to shell out for the Camp Pope edition just to have this fine title on my shelf.

Firefight in a haystack: just another day hunting bushwhackers in Civil War Missouri

June of 1862 was a tough month for the Union forces occupying Missouri. The bushwhackers seemed to be everywhere, cutting telegraph wire, attacking outposts and patrols, killing mail couriers, and committing depredations on Unionist civilians.

Several major firefights are recorded for this month. The strangest occurred on the 18th, when a group of Union soldiers arrived at Hambright's Station near Independence in order to arrest some suspected guerrillas. As they made the arrest, a black man on the farm (presumably a slave) quietly took the soldiers aside and told them more guerrillas were hiding in a nearby haystack.

A skirmish ensued, in which the guerrillas fired out of the haystack and the soldiers fired into it. Hay doesn't provide much protection against bullets and so one guerrilla was killed and the other two wounded and captured. The soldiers completed their mission by burning Mr Barnes' grocery store, presumably for supporting the rebels.

This was only the beginning. Missouri faced three long years of guerrilla warfare before it would be over.

Photo courtesy U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. It actually shows a haystack on an Indian reservation in 1941, but that's OK, it's a nice picture.

M is for Missouri in the Civil War

When I went to the University of Missouri-Columbia I became fascinated with the state's Civil War history. The war west of the Mississippi doesn't get much attention from historians and so I didn't know much about it. Soon I became hooked.

The Civil War in Missouri actually started years before it did in the rest of the country with Bleeding Kansas. This was a bitter border war over whether the Kansas Territory would become a free state or a slavery state. Proslavery Missouri bushwhackers raided Kansas, killing Kansans and wrecking abolitionists printing presses, while free-state Kansas Jayhawkers raided Missouri, killing slaveowners and stealing their slaves to freedom over the state line. As I've noted before, there were a lot of opportunists on both sides who used the chaos to plunder for their own benefit.

Missouri was an unusual case even when the war started in earnest in 1861. Within a year, Union forces pushed all major Confederate armies out of the state. They had a hard time holding it, though. While the urban areas supported the Union, rural areas tended to be secessionist. A nasty guerrilla war ensued and nobody was safe outside of town. This is reflected in my Civil War novel A Fine Likeness, in which a Union militia captain finds he can't even ride to the nearest town without losing men. Regular raids from Arkansas didn't help the Union position either.

The men fighting in Missouri were quite a mix. Soldiers from Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Illinois, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and the Indian Territory all fought there, and I'm probably forgetting a few states! Many Missouri Unionists were German immigrants, including some who didn't speak English, and the rebel side could boast having a young Frank and Jesse James.

All in all, a rich setting for a novel!

Engraving of the Charge of the First Iowa at Wilson's Creek courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Civil War Photo Friday: The Aftermath of the Battle of Pea Ridge

On this day 150 years ago, the Confederacy west of the Mississippi was reeling from its defeat in what was arguably the most important battle of the Civil War in the Trans-Mississippi Theater.

The Battle of Pea Ridge was fought from March 6-8 in northwestern Arkansas. Several good accounts of this battle are already online and in print, so I'm just going to look at its ramifications.

The Confederate thrust into Missouri by a rebel army led by Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn and numbering more than 16,500 had been stopped by Brig. Gen. Samuel Curtis' Union force of only 10,500. The Confederates suffered about 2,000 casualties during the battle, most notably the death of Brig. Gen. Benjamin McCulloch, pictured here.

Van Dorn had left his supplies far behind, and so for a week his troops, weary from forced marches and hard fighting, shambled their way south with little to eat but what they could scrounge or steal from the locals. Men deserted by the thousands.

It seems that after the battle the Confederate high command pretty much gave up on the region. Van Dorn and his Arkansas troops were transferred east of the river, and were shortly followed by General Price and his Missouri troops. There would be no major Confederate threat to Missouri for the rest of the war, unless you count Price's ill-fated 1864 raid/invasion, which provides the background to my Civil War novel.

The war west of the Mississippi was not finished, however. The Union high command was also hungry for troops to throw into the killing fields. Northern states west of the Mississippi were drained of many of their men, making what could have been a short campaign south through Arkansas and Louisiana a long and arduous struggle that was never completed.

With each side too weak to make a decisive impact on the other, much of the region was overtaken by guerrillas and bandits. The Battle of Pea Ridge was a victory for the Union, but a defeat for civilians of both sides.

Friendly fire in the Civil War

Civil War Missouri was a chaotic place. Combatants often wore no uniforms or the uniforms of the opposing side. Enemies sniped from the thick underbrush or attacked civilians in the dead of night. A sense of paranoia spread throughout the land. One good example of this paranoia is preserved in the pages of Turnbo's Tales of the Ozarks: War and Guerrilla Stories.

In the closing days of the war, four or five veterans of the Federal army were passing through the country, possibly headed home. Some had their wives and children with them. They stopped at an old vacant house near the base of Washington Bald Hill three miles northwest of Lutie, Missouri. Vacant homes were numerous by then as many of the civilians had fled the terrible guerrilla war that had ravaged the state for several years.

On the following morning, just before dawn, they were attacked by fifteen Federal soldiers returning from a scouting expedition. They began shooting through an opening or crack in the house, thinking Confederates were hiding inside. The men in the house fired back, thinking they were being attacked by Confederates.

As Turnbo related, "Directly the soldiers ordered the men in the house to come out and surrender which they refused to do. They not only thought they were Confederates, but the worst type of bushwhackers or guerrillas and they did not propose to surrender to them. . .it was cheaper to fight until they died rather than surrender and be put to death afterward like a lot of fattening hogs."

"The outside men now said, 'We will burn you out if you do not give up your arms.'"

"The inside party replied, 'Burn the house if you want to. We will fight you by the light of the fire.' The inside party continued, 'Who are you fellows?'"

"'We are Federal soldiers,' the spokesman answered."

"'Good! We are all of the same stripe,' said one of the insiders, 'and there is no need of us fighting.'"

"An explanation followed and peace was made between the two parties."

Nobody was killed in this affair. As we'll see tomorrow, these incidents were common and didn't always end so happily.

Northern Arkansas in chaos during the Civil War

In my last post about foot burning in the Civil War, I talked about how northern Arkansas was a No Man's Land during the late Civil War.

For the first two years of the war, most of Arkansas was firmly in Confederate hands. The Ozarks in the northern part of the state, however, went their own way as they always have. Some people were for the south, others for the north, and many simply wanted to stay out of it. When Little Rock fell on 10 September 1863, central Arkansas came under the control of the Union. The rebel armies retreated to southern Arkansas and were too weak to challenge the Union troops in the center of the state.

The Union troops in Arkansas were undermanned, and could do little more than hold the line. Large swaths of the Arkansas Ozarks were left unguarded and soon became prey to roving bands who robbed civilians. Some of these groups claimed to be on one side or the other, but many were simply bandits.

In the fall of 1864, Confederate General Sterling Price decided to launch an ambitious plan to march north from southern Arkansas and invade Missouri. This is the setting for my Missouri Civil War novel A Fine Likeness. In preparation for the invasion, Price sent Confederate cavalry raider J.O. Shelby and his Iron Brigade to slip across the Arkansas River into northern Arkansas to round up deserters and conscript locals. Shelby reported “the entire country overrun with able-bodied men; recruiting officers quarreling or sunk in total apathy; predatory bands of thieves roaming over the country at will, killing some, burning the feet of others, and all hungering with the lust of robbery; one officer refusing to report to another, no organizations, no discipline, no arms, no leader, no desire to fight, no anything.”

Currently I'm writing another book in the House Divided series that is loosely tired to A Fine Likeness. One of the protagonists is a member of Shelby's Iron Brigade who deserts after Price is defeated and retreats south. He finds himself hiding out in this chaotic region. It's a great setting for a historical novel because anything can happen there, and everything does.

For more on Shelby and his Iron Brigade, check out my book Ride Around Missouri: Shelby's Great Raid 1863.

Foot burning in the Civil War

As I've noted before in my post about scalping (Warning: graphic image) the Civil War was anything but civil in some parts. One common method of torture in the Trans-Mississippi theater was foot burning.

An example from Turnbo's Tales of the Ozarks: War and Guerrilla Stories is typical. Silas Claborn Turnbo was born in Taney County, Missouri in 1844 and fought with the 27th Arkansas Confederate Infantry. After the war he collected many tales from the Ozarks about the chaotic times that region experienced. In one story, he relates how a man named John Sights or Sykes living in Madison County, Arkansas, lived alone in a sparsely populated region. Two of his sons were in the Federal army and two in the Confederate army. He himself was for the South. Sights/Sykes sent his daughter and slaves to Texas for the duration of the war and sent all his valuables with her.

Turnbo relates: "One night in the fall of 1864, a set of cut-throats rode up to Sight's house and told Mr. Sights in a threatening way to give up his money. His answer was, 'I won't do it, you devils.' They told him they would make him do it.

"'Well,' said he, 'go to work if you think you can make me do it, you heathenish set of scoundrels.'"

The gang then strung him up as if to hang him, then let him drop. They did this twice but he refused to tell them anything. Interestingly, this is the same method of interrogation used on Reuben Samuel, the father-in-law of Jesse James in an attempt to learn the whereabouts of Frank James and his guerrilla buddies.

When hanging didn't work on poor Sights, they "tied his feet fast together and his hands behind his back and took his shoes and socks off his feet, and when this was accomplished, the wretches picked him up and poked him feet foremost into the fire and pulled him back, then jabbed them into the fire again." They continued this torture until "the flesh on his feet was burned to a crisp and the flesh on his legs was cooked half way to the knees."

Eventually they left him for dead. Later one of his few neighbors happened by and summoned a doctor from the Federal army, who had no choice but to amputate both legs. Sights survived the war for four years and all his children survived too, but they must have all been forever traumatized by what had happened.

Note that Turnbo doesn't state which side the ruthless gang was on. Chances are they weren't on either side. Northern Arkansas was sort of a No Man's Land at that time, filled with deserters from both sides, bushwhackers who claimed to fight for the South, Jayhawkers who claimed to fight for the North, and simple bandits. More on that next time.