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Faces Like Devils
The Bald Knobber Vigilantes in the Ozarks
By Matthew J. Hernando University of Missouri Press
Copyright © 2015 The Curators of the University of Missouri
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8262-7334-5
CHAPTER 1
Southwest Missouri from Settlement to Civil War
The Bald Knobbers of southwest Missouri, like all other American vigilance committees, existed to serve the needs of a particular community, time, and place. It follows that a full understanding of the Bald Knobbers requires an analysis of the people and the land that gave rise to them. The area on which this book focuses—Taney, Christian, and Douglas Counties—comprises part of a region known to geographers as the White River Hills. These hills themselves constitute a subregion of a larger tristate area known as the Ozarks. Shaped somewhat like a parallelogram, the Ozarks consists of roughly 60,000 square miles of terrain in northern Arkansas, southern Missouri, and a small part of Oklahoma. It is a hard land that sometimes gives the appearance of being made for hard people. The dominant geographical characteristics of the Ozarks are its hilly landscape, including "greater relief and steeper slopes than surrounding areas," as well as a tough, rocky soil with large quantities of dolomite, limestone, flint, and chert. An abundance of karstic features, including springs, caves, and sinkholes, formed by the slow erosion of water through rock, also distinguish the Ozarks from neighboring regions.
The White River Hills region consists of a long series of rocky hills and escarpments that envelop the upper portion of the White River. This river, which on the map looks somewhat like a fishhook, begins in Madison County in northwest Arkansas and flows north through Barry, Stone, and Taney Counties in Missouri. Then it drops back down through northeast Arkansas and empties into the Mississippi River near the town of De Witt in Arkansas County. The White River's tributaries—including the James River, Finley River, Bull Creek, Swan Creek, Big Beaver Creek, and others—drain rain and groundwater from the surrounding hill country and provide the region with a plentiful source of water for both animals and people. The White River region is conspicuous for its long, narrow ridges and its prominent limestone buttes that jut sharply upward from the earth's surface to form small hills. Often lacking trees near the summit, these small hills are commonly referred to as "knobs" or "balds" (or sometimes "bald knobs").
In 1682 the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, known to history as the Sieur de La Salle, led an expedition down the length of the Mississippi River. On reaching the terminus of the Mississippi, La Salle and his companions held a formal ceremony on April 9, 1682, in which they claimed possession of the entire Mississippi River Valley, including all the tributaries of the Mississippi River, for King Louis XIV of France. La Salle named this new territory "Louisiana," in honor the French monarch. Since the White River emptied into the Mississippi this meant that the lands it traversed also became part of the new French province of Louisiana. Thus, without ever navigating the White River or setting foot in the Ozarks, the French claimed the whole region more than a century before any white settlement of the area had taken place.
The French never did establish permanent settlements in the White River Hills, or any other part of the western Ozarks, primarily because of the area's metallurgical deficiencies. After establishing a permanent settlement at St. Genevieve in southeast Missouri around 1750, the French sent parties of voyageurs (i.e., trappers, traders, and woodsmen) into the Ozark hinterland to search for gold, silver, or other precious metals. Although the French found plenty of lead (often a strong indicator of silver deposits) they found no gold or silver. Thus, no white people settled permanently in this area under French rule, and this remained true after the French ceded the colony of Louisiana to Spain in 1762.
Despite European pretensions to "ownership" of the Ozark hinterland, for most of the eighteenth century white people with any knowledge of the region referred to what became southwest Missouri and northwest Arkansas as "Osage Country." The name came from the Osage Indians, an offshoot of the Dhegian-Souian–speaking group that had moved out of the Ohio Valley into the trans-Mississippi region in the early seventeenth century, where they settled near the Missouri, Osage, and Arkansas Rivers. A proud and militant people, the Osage dominated a territory that "was generally considered to be that great body of land embracing the Ozark Plateau."
As the traditional enemies of the Iroquois, the Osage had fought a long and ultimately unsuccessful war to prevent the Iroquois from moving into the Osage's previous homeland in present-day Kentucky. By the early nineteenth century almost all of the Osage had relocated west of the Mississippi River. A small contingent of the tribe made their way up the White River and settled in northwest Arkansas, southwest Missouri, and eastern Oklahoma, while a much larger group followed the Missouri and Osage Rivers and settled in central-western Missouri. The Osage tribe's dominance of the Ozarks did not last long, however. In 1803 the United States purchased the entire Louisiana territory from France. Five years later in 1808 the U.S. Government forced the Osage to sign a treaty ceding control of all of their territory east of a line running from Fort Osage near the Missouri River all the way south to the Arkansas River. This treaty opened up most of the Osage tribe's once vast domain to white settlement.
Although the Osage had officially relinquished control of this territory to the whites, for many years afterward they continued to hunt game east of the line established by the 1808 treaty. These forays brought them into occasional conflict with white settlers moving into the region. In response to white protests, the Osage argued that they had given up only their land, not their hunting rights. Still, in the 1820s and 1830s the federal government gradually compelled the Osage to relinquish control of their remaining territory in the Ozarks and move to reservation land in Kansas.
As the Osage and other Native American tribes slowly moved out of the Ozarks white settlers began to supplant them. In the first decade of the nineteenth century small bands of white Americans gradually moved up the White River planting settlements as they went. One of the first groups to settle in the White River Hills was the famous Coker clan, led by the enterprising pioneer William "Buck" Coker. In the 1630s the Coker family emigrated from County Cork in southern Ireland, and by 1635 they had arrived in Surry County, Virginia, where some of them prospered as tobacco growers. By the late eighteenth century many of them had made their way to present-day Montgomery County, Alabama. Between 1811 and 1815, William Coker led a convoy of his relatives up the White River into the area that became Boone and Marion Counties in Arkansas. In the ensuing years several of William Coker's descendants moved into present-day Taney County and other parts of southwest Missouri.
The first white settlers in southwest Missouri, however, most likely consisted of a group led by John P. Pettijohn, a Revolutionary War veteran born in Virginia. In the early 1800s Pettijohn and his family had settled in Ohio, but in 1818 they decided to leave the Buckeye State and try their luck farther west. After he had lived in Arkansas for a few years, wanderlust again afflicted John Pettijohn. In 1822 he led a small expedition of some two dozen people, including his family and some close friends. They set off by keelboat on a voyage up the White River into present-day southwest Missouri, a land Pettijohn described as flowing with "milk and honey," by which he meant the frontier equivalent: buffalo marrow and bear's grease. Pettijohn and his family settled near the banks of the James River close to the county line between modern Christian and Greene Counties.
Almost as soon as white settlement of southwest Missouri had commenced, however, the process came to an abrupt halt with the arrival of about five hundred members of the Delaware Tribe in the autumn of 1822. In an unusual twist of fate, the Delaware informed the bewildered white residents that they must abandon their new homes because the federal government had given the tribe most of southwest Missouri as a reservation. Not satisfied with this explanation, the whites sent one of their own, Thomas Patterson, to the federal land office in St. Louis to serve as their representative and to inquire as to the validity of the Indians' claim. When Patterson returned he reported that the Indians spoke the truth. As a result, almost all the white settlers who had arrived in the region up to that point departed. The Delaware did allow a few white men, such as the frontier traders William Gillis and James Wilson, to remain among them, either because they rented land from the Indians, sold them valuable goods, or because they had married Indian women. For the next eight years the Delaware Indians remained in possession of their new lands in southwest Missouri. However, in 1830 the U.S. Congress, in response to pressure from white Missourians, changed its mind and ordered the Delaware Indians to move to a new reservation farther west. Despite the capriciousness of this order, the Delaware promptly complied.
The removal of the Delaware signaled the beginning of a new influx of white settlers into the region, including some (like John Pettijohn and his family) who had left the region eight years earlier in order to make way for the Delaware. Other families arriving in southwest Missouri in the years after 1830 would later play key roles in the tumultuous events of the 1880s. For example, in the early 1840s several members of the Layton family of Spotsylvania County, Virginia, arrived in the area. The family patriarch, Horace Layton, had made the family prosperous operating a freight company in eastern Virginia. After his death in 1841 his sons—Charles, John, and Thomas F. Layton—and their families, moved to Greene County, Missouri. As Ozarks pioneers, the Laytons stood out both for their considerable wealth and because they brought with them a few slaves. During the Civil War many of the Laytons, including Thomas F. Layton and his wife, Julia, moved from Greene County to Taney County. Their son, Thomas A. Layton, would become a staunch Anti-Bald Knobber.
Around the same time that the Layton Family arrived in Greene County, Harrison Snapp came to Taney County. Born in 1812 in Rockingham County, Virginia, Harrison Snapp moved to Missouri in 1839 with three of his brothers: Madison, Peachy, and Alexander Snapp. Harrison's brothers ended up living in other parts of Missouri, while he alone settled in Taney County. There he became a substantial landowner. In January 1849, he purchased from the U.S. General Land Office four land patents, totaling roughly 160 acres, on the banks of the White River, followed by two more patents in April 1849 and July 1852 for seventy-one and thirty-four acres, respectively. Snapp married twice and raised nine children. Three of his sons—David J., Lafayette D., and Andrew J. Snapp—fought in the Confederate army. One of his younger sons, Samuel H. Snapp, would die at the hands of the Bald Knobber George Washington Middleton in 1886.
Andrew J. Coggburn, a friend of Samuel Snapp, also met a violent end during the turbulent days of the Bald Knobber strife in the 1880s. His grandparents, James and Jane Coggburn, knew nothing of that when they left their home in Roane County, Tennessee, to seek a new life in Missouri sometime in the early 1840s. By 1845 they had settled in Miller County in central Missouri, where in 1856 James Coggburn purchased a land patent for forty acres. The couple raised a family of ten children, eight of whom accompanied them when they relocated to Taney County in 1865. That year one of their sons, James A. Coggburn, married a Taney County woman named Frances S. Springer, who gave birth to three sons, including the ill-fated Andrew in 1866. James Coggburn did not get to see his children reach adulthood, because in the late 1870s he volunteered to serve as a deputy sheriff of Taney County. In 1879, he led a posse down Bee Creek near the Missouri-Arkansas border in search of a group of horse thieves. When they overtook the thieves, a gunfight ensued in which Coggburn and one other lawman lost their lives.
Aside from their obvious significance as pioneers and trailblazing settlers, families like the Cokers, Pettijohns, Laytons, Coggburns, and Snapps represented a type of settler most commonly seen in the early stages of white settlement in the Ozarks. One writer has observed that the "settlement of the Ozarks progressed in three phases." The first phase, the "Old Ozarks Frontier," lasted roughly from the colonial period to the Civil War, with the great bulk of white settlers arriving after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. This wave of emigrants came overwhelmingly from the upper South—places like Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia. Many of these southern emigrants were of Scotch-Irish descent (i.e., Irish Protestants), and most of them were "of the yeoman farmer type, mainly poor, [and] non-slaveholders."
The figures collected for the 1860 and 1870 U.S. Census counts reinforce these observations. For example, in 1870, the first year in which the census office compiled this sort of information, more than thirty-eight hundred residents of Christian, Taney, and Douglas Counties—the future bastions of the Bald Knobber movement—listed the upper South states of Tennessee, Virginia (including West Virginia), and Kentucky as their place of birth. These people represented more than one-quarter of the total population of these counties and by far the largest bloc of those residents not born in Missouri.
The vast majority of people settling in these counties came from poor farm families that relied upon agriculture for their livelihood. Indeed, the 1860 census recorded that only eighty-six people living in Christian, Douglas, and Taney Counties worked in "manufacturing," a term that often referred to such occupations as blacksmithing or operating a gristmill or a sawmill. Although some of the remainder worked as shopkeepers, doctors, lawyers, and the like, the majority would have made a living through tilling the soil or stock raising. In 1860, farmers in Christian, Douglas, and Taney Counties grew mainly food staples, including large quantities of corn, wheat, oats, Irish potatoes, and sweet potatoes. Likewise, the stock raisers in these three counties raised substantial herds of dairy cows, beef cattle, sheep, oxen, and especially hogs. As a matter of fact, in 1860 the number of hogs in these counties—approximately thirty thousand— outnumbered the human inhabitants by a ratio of nearly three to one.
A small farmer could make a decent life for himself through farming or raising stock in southwest Missouri, but he probably would not become rich. In a region where the vast majority of farmers owned between ten and ninety-nine acres of land, and none owned more than five hundred acres, traditional husbandry and pastoral pursuits would typically provide enough to live on and not very much else. To supplement their meager incomes, not to mention their meager diets, many Ozark Missourians turned to the traditional expedients of hunting and fishing. They discovered that the natural wealth of the Ozark hill country offered a wide variety of fish and game. In the early 1800s small herds of buffalo, sometimes numbering sixty or more, could still be found in the region, as could black bears in much greater numbers. Bears were prized for their pelts, which could be sold, and for their savory meat. A hunter could render bear fat into lard or "bear's grease," which was useful for cooking and as a lubricant, while the fatty meat about the stomach could be cut into strips and cooked as "bear bacon," which some considered a delicacy.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Faces Like Devils by Matthew J. Hernando. Copyright © 2015 The Curators of the University of Missouri. Excerpted by permission of University of Missouri Press.
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