FACES LIKE DEVILS: The Bald Knobber Vigilantes in the Ozarks

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.

 (NOTE:  This review is also posted on amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2ZSDCV4P9UMSJ.  Check there for more information and purchase details.)

BLOODY BILL ANDERSON'S FINAL BATTLE REDUX - at Ray County Fairgrounds this weekend

Bloody Bill Anderson,whose guerrillas killed more than 100 federal troops at the Centralia Massacre of 1864, will meet his fate once again October 24-26. This time though, the Civil War battle - known as the Battle of Albany - will be at the Ray County Fairgrounds in Richmond, Missouri. Reenactors are gathering. Among the scheduled events:

The Battle of Albany re-enactment followed by a wagon carrying Anderson’s body to the Ray County Courthouse square. 

Events on the Ray County Courthouse square include dragging of the body, and photographs of Anderson.

The Ray County Fairgrounds is at 901 West Royle Street in Richmond, Mo. 64085   

More information on this weekend's event is available on their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/2014.ALBANY

150 Years Ago Today – THE CENTRALIA MASSACRE in Missouri’s Civil War

Father Hogan's Missionary Timetable kept him on the road despite the uncertainties of war.  After his harrowing handcar journey through federal lines only two nights before, Hogan took an afternoon train from Mexico to his home in Chillicothe. That train made a brief stop in Centralia. It was the last train through town before Bloody Bill Anderson's Confederate guerrillas attacked. Hogan wrote of his near-miss of the Centralia Massacre in his memoir, On the Mission in Missouri, 1857-1868.

OH, THE HORRID CRIME

      The train from St. Louis arrived in due time at Martinsburg Station, and having taken a seat in one of the coaches, I was soon reversing the journey I had made two nights previous on the handcars. Nothing unusual transpired on the way until we had reached Centralia, where, as the train was passing out from the Station, a troop of horsemen, moving rapidly across the prairie north of us, came in sight, halted, and quickly formed a line facing the train. Knowing well from their appearance, and as they wore no uniform, that they were guerillas, we feared a volley from their guns every moment. In anticipation of this, some federal soldiers who were aboard the train, brought their muskets to a ready to return the volley. But there was no firing, however; the train having passed quickly out of range. These armed horsemen were, no doubt, outposts from Bill Anderson’s guerillas, four hundred strong, then encamped in the woods and ravines in sight of Centralia, and waiting for an opportunity to attack some passing train.

     The ill-fated train that the attack fell on was the first following the one I was on. It came along the next day at noon. As it approached the Centralia Station, the guerillas with savage yells rushed out from their hiding places, and throwing obstructions on the track, commenced firing on the train which had to stop. Then the robbing began. Money, gold watches, jewelry, were dragged off the persons and pulled from the pockets of the passengers, men and women, indiscriminately. The express safe was broken open and rifled. Packages and boxes of express goods, and trunks were broken open and emptied of their valuables. A number of federal soldiers on the train were ordered out, put into line, and shot dead on the spot. A major of the federal army commanding one hundred and fifty mounted men, sallied out from a neighboring military post to give battle to the guerillas. These being vastly in majority and likewise better armed and equipped, fell upon the federals and slew them almost to a man. The railroad train, depot, and cars, were fired and burned.

     Never was there a more heart-rending scene of carnage and devastation; and for the like of it, for cold-blooded cruel atrocity, we look in vain in the annals of military history, even of savage nations. Had I waited or been delayed at Martinsburg or Mexico for that train, and had the federal military passes that I carried, been found on me, which certainly would have happened, as the pockets and pocket-books of all passengers were searched, there is no doubt whatever that I would have shared the fate of the poor fellows who fell on that occasion. Ever and always has the hand of God seemed raised over me, to protect me from otherwise unavoidable disaster and danger. To God’s infinite mercy I owe my life saved hundreds of times.

According to the Wikipedia article on Bill Anderson:

At Centralia, Anderson's men killed 125 soldiers in the battle and 22 from the train in one of the most decisive guerrilla victories of the Civil War. It was Anderson's greatest victory, surpassing Lawrence and Baxter Springs in brutality and the number of casualties

THIS OLD WORLD by Steve Wiegenstein - a Review

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Utopian communities – designed to live a philosophy, often using experimental models of governing, wealth sharing, and re-defining the relationship between the sexes – were not uncommon in the nineteenth century. History.com states that 80 such communities were founded in the 1840s alone.  Daybreak, Missouri, setting of This Old World, could have been one of them.

Steve Wiegenstein’s new historical novel propels the reader through the passions and tragedies of this fictional, but very convincingly real, experiment in the Ozarks wilderness. As the reader advances deeper into the lives and events of the citizens of the small Ozark town of Daybreak, each short chapter ends with an enticing lead-in to the next.  “Just a few more pages tonight…”

The “situation report” of this second novel in the Daybreak trilogy comes in Chapter Two when James Turner, who has returned a changed man from his service to the Union, mulls over their rocky descent from idealistic, hopeful community that would lead the way to a new, better social order. Their once bright optimism now "seemed like a relic from an antique time." The ravages of the Civil War has left them struggling to survive the failings of human character as well as the brutalities and privations of warfare – military and guerrilla.

Wiegenstein has put faces and strong characters to the tantalizing questions of history: who were the people beneath the tombstones of a country graveyard?  Who were the individuals who filled the ranks behind the generals, preachers, politicians who shaped history’s larger events?  Who tilled the soil, built the buildings, ground the wheat of the utopian communities? How did they live their lives? What kept them going?

I was sorry to encounter one character who was an embittered survivor of a real Missouri pre-Civil War utopian experiment. Still, his bad behavior begs the question – was he always that way or did the brutal Civil War, the loss of wife, family and settlement make him so?  His pre-Civil War home, Father John Joseph Hogan’s Irish Settlement in Oregon and Ripley counties (now included in the National Wilderness system as the Irish Wilderness) was not fiction. It was a real community for a few years before the Civil War, but failed because of exterior forces – the Civil War.

I read This Old World without having read the first volume of the trilogy, Slant of Light. However, Wiegenstein’s subtle references to the earlier time and past relationships are woven skillfully into this new volume so new readers are not left in the dark, but are enticed to go back to flesh out the original inspiration for Daybreak and make acquaintance with its young and hopeful leaders in the first volume.

This Old World is available on amazon.com

John Jospeh Hogan and the cost to build a log church in the Irish Wilderness

One of the revealing documents we found in our search for information on the Irish Wilderness was a small, pocket-size account book belonging to John Hogan. He kept records in this little notebook of expenses incurred and work accomplished in 1858 and 1859, the years of the building of the settlement in the Ozarks. The telling details of daily transactions - hiring a settler to cut timber, buying supplies at the store (coffee, tea and ague medicine), the cost of a yoke of oxen ($40) - these bring life and breath to the image of life on that pre-Civil War Ozarks frontier. (pages 48 and 49 in Mystery of the Irish Wilderness)

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Paid for Church

100 feet plank                        $17.00

2000 boards at 62 per hun       12.40

1000 D_lost by five                   6.20

hauling lumber 4 day at 2          8.00

hauling Shingles 1 day              2.00

D logs for floor 1                       2.00

D logs for buildings 3                6.00

4 days notching 126 1/2             5.06

1/2 day hewing                             .65

Man roofing 4 days                    4.00

400 feet plank                             4.00

hauling same                               2.00

Building fireplace                       3.50

Nails & hardware                        5.00

Calicos Candlestick & _______ 5.50

Altar linens                                 2.00

                                                $85.31

We think the little log church was built in area near these two trees in Oregon County.

So - the cost of a log church in the pre-Civil War Ozarks was $85.31.  But how to pay for it? Another page details accounts "Rec'd for the Church" which add up to $75.45, leaving a deficit of just $9.86 - a sum many clergy might envy when it comes to church building.

Hogan built more churches during his career:  the little church at Chillicothe, whose stained glass windows were shattered by anti-Catholic night riders - "gentlemen of grips and signs" - who "belabored with sticks and guns the artistic little gems..."; a cathedral for St. Joseph, Missouri, more lavish than he wanted by urging of his most influential parishioner; and the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Kansas City (first services in 1883) with its now-gold-plated dome. 

In On the Mission in Missouri, Hogan mentions other churches he helped build across north Missouri, but often he doesn't mention their names. One small church built in 1865, however, he does describe:  St. Bridget's church at Peabody (later called Lingo), Missouri, "a small neat, convenient frame church was built, at a cost of about eight hundred dollars, which was subscribed and paid without delay. ... I loved the little building for its name, its devotional seclusion, and the piety of the people who attended it.

New review

We're excited by this new review of our second 'Hogan book" - On the Mission & Fifty Years Ago ...

Irish Wilderness - companion volume now available

Just in time for the holidays … the companion volume to Mystery of the Irish Wilderness has arrived from the printer.  ON THE MISSION IN MISSOURI & FIFTY YEARS AGO: Two Irish-American Classics includes both John Joseph Hogan’s personal memoirs. The young priest-become-bishop cherished his days on the Missouri frontier, recounting Civil War adventures, near-death experiences, a rousing childhood in County Limerick, Ireland in the 1830s and '40s, Daniel O'Connell rallies, and his clipper ship voyage to America.

Yellowing newspaper articles, handwritten accounts of historical events, and personal letters found in files cabinets revealed a very appealing personality – so we’ve added chapters on his life, family history and his later career in Kansas City in the booming years of the late 19^th century. 

As Jo Schaper said in her review in River Hills Traveler:

... why would a non-Catholic want to read this book? For the same reason a non-geologist reads Henry Rowe Schoolcraft's journal: as a primary source for nineteenth century life, told by a reliable witness. And besides - who can resist an engaging Irish storyteller?

On the Mission in Missouri and Fifty Years Ago

Mystery of the Irish Wilderness - THE VIDEO!

Leland's script combined with Ross's editing expertise created this video .... enjoy!

Book Signing in Kansas City, Missouri November 22

Leland and I will be signing books at Barnes & Noble on the Country Club Plaza next Saturday - November 22 - from 1 - 3 p.m. The store is at 420 W. 47th St. Kansas City, Missouri


This is our first book signing event and we're curious to see who might come and what aspects of our books generate the most interest. The new book, Mystery of the Irish Wilderness (which by the way is non-fiction), begins in the pre-Civil War era, with Irish Famine immigrants, and follows 150 years of land use policies and personalities as they affect the area the Irish settled. It also follows the life of the intrepid young priest who led the colony: John Joseph Hogan. He became the first bishop of Kansas City and much of our research was done here in the archives of the Diocese.


Of course, See the Ozarks and Beautiful and Enduring Ozarks will be available as well!