A remarkable, in-depth and readable story of post Civil War
vigilante bands in the Ozarks.
Matthew J. Hernando’s new book, Faces Like Devils, is an engrossing account of the Bald Knobbers, a
southwest Missouri vigilante movement that emerged as a result of post Civil
War lawlessness.
Hernando places the Ozarks’ own vigilante groups in the
broader context of American history: “Although often treated as a matter of
local interest, the bloody history of the Bald Knobber organization informs a
broader narrative of vigilante justice that has been a part of American history
and culture from the beginning. It is a tradition literally older than the
country itself.” The Bald Knobbers are
ideological cousins to the “Regulator” movements of colonial era North and
South Carolina, San Francisco’s Committees of Vigilance during the California
Gold Rush, ‘”fence cutting wars” in the West, and of course the KKK among many
others.
This is not news for people in southwest Missouri. These
were murderous nightriders whose “improvised dispensing of justice” has been
written about and portrayed in locally produced plays and movies both fictional
and documentary. The phenomenon has been subject of feature writers’ columns
since their beginnings in the nineteenth century. They were the heavies in Harold Bell Wright’s
1907 huge bestseller, Shepherd of the
Hills. The Mabes, a talented country music family, pulled the words into one
to name their Branson hillbilly music show. These popular appropriations,
Hernando notes, may explain the relative sparseness of Bald Knobber
scholarship: “The popular image of the Bald Knobbers may also have tainted the
group with the stigma of sensationalism and provincialism, causing some
historians who might otherwise have written about the group to defer from doing
so.”
Two full-length books - Lucille Morris’s Baldknobbers, Caxton Press, 1939 and Elmo Ingenthron’s Bald Knobbers, Pelican Publishing, 1988
– have been published. Numerous popular articles, pamphlets and investigative
journalist’s exposé have added detail and color to this compelling story. The bibliography of Faces like Devils provides an extraordinarily comprehensive
account of materials produced on the vigilantes in the last hundred years.
Hernando has absorbed all these. He has also delved deeply
into voluminous court records and newspaper articles from the time. He applied
microscopic examination of the condition of post Civil War turmoil that brought
about this war, which involved 700-900 people at one time. Night riding, hangings, floggings and gunfights
were standard operating procedures.
Certainly this tumult was not good for business. Missouri’s Governor
pushed the court system to crack down on these vigilantes in the mid 1880s.
Four were sentenced to hang. One got
away. The other three were executed in a
horrifically inept public hanging on grounds of the Christian County courthouse
in Ozark.
For those that know the story – and many in our part of the
country do – this is an unprecedented compendium of personalities. Though one
name is popularly applied, there were two distinct groups – the Bald Knobbers
of Taney County and the Bald Knobbers of Christian and Douglas counties. The distinctions, Hernando contends, are
important: “The two groups … used the same name, operated simultaneously, and
inhabited roughly the same compact geographical area. Yet they exhibited such
stark differences in their goals, tactics, and membership that it is sometimes
difficult to see how they were considered part of the same group.” This book expertly
clarifies these distinctions.
Faces Like Devils
tells a gripping story with blind tigers, prostitutes that followed the
railroad lines, and Yankees and Confederates fighting old battles. Hernando has
produced a fascinating book, an easy read with good balance between academic
research and readable prose.
