BLOG PART III, Bushwhackers in the Missouri Ozarks

The Killing of the “King of Shannon County” Joshua Chilton, Guerrilla Warfare, and the Bloody Summer of 1862

When I began researching this third and final article on bushwhackers in the Missouri Ozarks, my original intention was to stay close to home. I hoped to find documented bushwhacker incidents near the home of my ancestor James F. Copeland and his family, in the area where Dent, Reynolds, and Shannon Counties meet on Little Sinking Creek on the Dent County side of the line. The stories simply weren't there, or perhaps more accurately, I could not find enough surviving documentation to tell them with confidence, except for the Ninian Bay story told in the previous blog.

That does not mean bushwhackers were absent from the area. Surviving military records make it clear that guerrilla bands moved throughout these counties. But I wanted this final article to be based on documented people and events rather than speculation about what the Copelands might have witnessed.

My search eventually led me to another part of Shannon County, in the Current River and Jacks Fork country near Eminence. There I found a remarkable and disturbing story from the summer of 1862 involving former Missouri state senator Joshua Chilton, a man whom Union authorities called the “King of Shannon County.”

What happened to Chilton and the other men captured with him provides perhaps a better illustration than anything else I found just how complicated the word bushwhacker can become when we look closely at the Civil War in the Missouri Ozarks.

A War with No Safe Side

There were no great Civil War battles fought along the Current and Jacks Fork rivers. Yet for the families living there, the war could arrive at the farm gate at any time.

Civil War researcher Suzanne Chilton later described the predicament faced by families in the Current River country: a Confederate force might arrive and take what it needed from a farm, only to be followed days later by federal troops doing much the same thing. Crops, livestock, horses, and other necessities of life could disappear regardless of which side a family supported.

Geography Made the Situation Worse.

The Current and Jacks Fork country was rugged, heavily wooded, and poorly served by roads. Large armies had difficulty operating there. Small groups of mounted men did not.

Confederate partisans, local guerrillas, Union militia, deserters, vigilantes, and outright criminals could move through the hills and hollows and disappear again. Some had legitimate military connections. Others operated largely on their own. Personal grudges and political rivalries became entangled with wartime loyalties. For civilians caught between them, determining exactly who qualified as a soldier and who was a bushwhacker may have mattered considerably less than surviving their visit.

Salem: The Union Outpost

The Union military presence in south-central Missouri was centered in Rolla, where the railroad from St. Louis ended. Salem in Dent County and Houston in Texas County served as forward military posts between Rolla and the increasingly dangerous country farther south.

The Ozarks Watch article, Outpost: The 1862 Summer of Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Weydemeyer, edited by Robert Flanders and John F. Bradbury Jr., says Weydemeyer was a German “Forty-Eighter,” had participated in the 1848 rebellion, belonged to the German Communist League, knew Marx and Engels, and entered Union service when the war began. In the summer of 1862, he was the Union officer responsible for trying to control much of this territory. Lt. Weydemeyer was an unusual character to find in the Missouri Ozarks. He became an abolitionist and supporter of Abraham Lincoln and entered Union service after the outbreak of the Civil War.

By 1862, this European-trained officer found himself confronting a kind of warfare very different from anything he had been trained to fight. Reliable information was difficult to obtain. Men who knew the woods and trails well enough to serve as guides or spies were often already known to Southern sympathizers. Weydemeyer complained that some potential informants had been forced to flee for their lives and the Union response was to send mounted scouting parties into the countryside. One of those expeditions would end with the death of one of Shannon County's most prominent citizens.

Who Was Joshua Chilton?

Joshua Chilton was not an obscure backwoods outlaw. Born in Tennessee in 1818, he was a son of pioneer Thomas Boggs Chilton and became a successful farmer and influential political figure. He served in the Missouri House of Representatives and later in the state senate. His family was closely associated with the area around Eminence and Jacks Fork, with one account placing the old Chilton homestead about a mile from Eminence.

Union authorities regarded Joshua as a dangerous Southern sympathizer. Weydemeyer accused him of having done more than almost anyone else in Missouri to persuade men to join the Southern army. Joshua was also known to be friendly with Missouri's pro-Southern governor, Claiborne Jackson, and General Sterling Price.

The Chilton Family's Version was Different.

According to later family accounts, Joshua attempted to remain neutral after the war began. Other historical research suggests that political rivalries may also have played a part in the Union campaign against him.

This distinction is important. Joshua Chilton may have sympathized with the South. He may even have encouraged Confederate enlistment, as Union authorities charged. But neither of those things, by itself, made him a bushwhacker. The surviving evidence does not justify turning accusations against him into established facts.

What we do know is that by the summer of 1862, Union authorities considered Joshua Chilton a dangerous man. In August, they captured him.

The Expedition into Shannon County

In late August 1862, a detachment of Union cavalry under Lieutenant Herbert Reed left Salem and traveled into the Current River and Jacks Fork country. The soldiers moved from house to house through the Chilton neighborhood. At one stop they searched a house at Chilton's Mill. At the home of Andrew Chilton, someone inside fired upon the soldiers. The cavalry returned fire, killing one man, apparently wounding another, and slightly wounding a woman.

The following day the soldiers surrounded the home of Frederick Chilton. There they found Alexander Chilton, Henry Smith, James Gallian, and William Chilton, along with a gun, a United States military saddle, two United States horses, and two additional horses the soldiers considered contraband.

The four men were placed under guard. The patrol continued for approximately another mile to the home of Joshua Chilton. As the soldiers approached, three men ran from the house. According to Reed's report, they were ordered to halt but continued running, and the soldiers opened fire. The surviving military records eventually show Joshua himself among the prisoners brought back to Salem.

By August 29, six prisoners were in Union hands: Joshua Chilton, Alexander Chilton, Henry Smith, James Gallian, William Chilton, and a man identified as Heron. Union authorities considered the expedition an extraordinary success. Yet another Union document written that same day reveals something particularly important about what happened next.

The prisoners had not been tried. The provost marshal at Salem wrote on August 29 that there had not been enough time to obtain all the evidence against them. Two witnesses had not yet arrived, and formal charges still needed to be prepared. Nevertheless, the six men were sent under guard toward Rolla. Most would be dead before the following day was over.

The Road Out of Salem

Soon after the prisoners left Salem, word came back that James Gallian had attempted to escape. He had been shot and killed. Weydemeyer sent men with picks and spades to bury Gallian and investigate the circumstances of his death. Then another report arrived. More prisoners had been shot farther along the road. This time Weydemeyer went to see for himself.

Gallian reportedly had been found twenty-five or thirty yards from the road, shot through the head. About a mile and a half farther on, Weydemeyer found two more dead prisoners near one another. Another body lay approximately sixty yards beyond them.

Farther still, about two hundred yards away in an opening in the woods, lay Joshua Chilton. Weydemeyer identified the other dead men as Alexander Chilton, William Chilton, and Henry Smith.

The sixth prisoner, Heron, was missing. A nearby farmer reportedly had seen a man running past his house at about the time the shooting occurred. Weydemeyer therefore believed that Heron had escaped.

He examined the scene himself. Small pools of blood beneath the bodies convinced him that the men had fallen where they were shot rather than being killed elsewhere and moved afterward. That answered one question, but it did not answer the much larger one.

Had nearly an entire group of prisoners really attempted to escape from their guards, or had they been executed?

“They Fully Deserved Their Fate.”

Weydemeyer's own words make the episode even more troubling. Only the day before, the Salem provost marshal had acknowledged that the evidence against the prisoners had not yet been assembled and that witnesses were still expected before formal charges could be drawn.

Now most of the prisoners were dead. After examining the bodies, Weydemeyer wrote that he had already reported upon the character of the prisoners and that “nobody doubts that they fully deserved their fate.”

He then described the accusations against them. Alexander Chilton, he said, had participated in robbing military trains and killing stragglers. A government saddle and two government horses had reportedly been found in his possession. William Chilton had served in General Sterling Price's army and, according to Weydemeyer, remained a rebel afterward. Henry Smith was accused of murder and described as a member of Coleman's guerrilla band.

Smith's story unexpectedly reached Reynolds County. According to Weydemeyer, Henry Smith had twice robbed the store of William Copeland at Barnesville, the Reynolds County settlement later renamed Ellington.

The State Historical Society of Missouri still holds surviving Copeland Store Records, including an account ledger from William Copeland's general store at Logan Creek, also known as Barnesville, dating from 1857 to 1860.

This William Copeland belonged to another Copeland family in the region rather than my own ancestral line. But his presence in the story is another reminder of how closely connected these small southeastern Missouri communities were.

The Chilton Family Remembers It Differently.

The violence did not stop at county lines, nor did the stories surrounding it remain confined to a single version. The Chilton family remembered the events differently and there is another version of what happened on the road outside Salem. According to Weydemeyer's contemporary military report, Alexander Chilton was among the dead, while Heron was apparently the only prisoner to escape.

Chilton family history tells a very different story. Suzanne Rayfield Chilton and her husband, John Chilton, researched the family's Civil War experiences for their historical novel “Blue & Gray Cross Current”. Their account was based on the Memoirs of John J. Chilton as well as official records. In their reconstruction of the events of 1862, Alexander Chilton was the lone survivor of the Federal shootings. He subsequently joined Coleman's Regiment as a first lieutenant and later operated independently as a bushwhacker, pursuing what the authors portray as an increasingly personal war of revenge.

The Chilton account also preserves an extraordinary story about what happened after the war. According to family tradition, Alexander eventually traveled to San Francisco seeking two of the Union guards involved in the deaths. He killed the men and recovered a gold Masonic ring that had belonged to Joshua Chilton and had allegedly been taken from his body. The family story goes further, maintaining that Alexander returned to Eminence with not only Joshua's ring but the finger upon which one of the guards had worn it.

There are obvious problems in reconciling the two accounts. Weydemeyer's report explicitly names Alexander Chilton among the dead. Other historical material identifies an Alexander as Joshua's brother, while later accounts describe the survivor as Joshua's son.

Rather than choose one version and risk turning an uncertain story into historical fact, I believe it is more appropriate to preserve both. The contemporary Union military record says Alexander Chilton died. The Chilton family account, drawing upon John J. Chilton's memoirs as well as official records, identifies Alexander as the lone survivor.

Perhaps additional records will someday resolve the discrepancy. For now, the disagreement itself tells us something important about researching the Civil War in the Missouri Ozarks. Military officers left one version of events. Families who lived with the consequences preserved another. More than 160 years later, both deserve to be heard.

There is also a personal connection to Suzanne Rayfield Chilton’s great grandmother. Lucy Todd Copeland Swinney was a daughter of James F. Copeland and a sister of my grandfather, Jacob Whitaker “Whit” Copeland. Suzanne therefore descended from the same Copeland family whose Civil War experiences first led me to this research. Through marriage, her family's story also became intertwined with the Chilton family of Shannon County.

I had hoped to find one documented bushwhacker story that I could place near James Copeland's home. Instead, I found the roads, farms, rivers, mills, and isolated settlements of Dent, Reynolds, Shannon, and the neighboring counties forming the landscape of a brutal little war. Confederate guerrillas traveled through it. Union patrols searched it. Civilians tried to survive between them.

James F. Copeland, My Great-Grandfather, and the Bushwhacker War

The generations in my family happen to span an unusually long period of time. My great-grandfather, James F. Copeland, was born in 1837, and my grandfather Whit, his fourteenth child, was not born until 1883. I was born seventy years later, in 1953. Thus, although James was my great-grandfather and a Civil War soldier, only two generations separated us. My grandfather had known James as his father, and as a child I was able to hear some of James's stories from him. He told me that when James heard horses approaching, he would always run to the barn and hide in the hayloft. He believed that if the riders found him, he would be killed. I remember I would have him repeat this story over many times, otherwise I’m not sure I would remember it from my childhood, but I’m so very glad I did.

By the summer of 1864, bushwhacking was hardly a distant problem for the people of southeastern Missouri. A Union cavalry officer stationed at Salem reported that in June, Dent County was “swarming with bushwhackers.” Small bands stole horses, plundered the countryside, and disappeared into the dense timber before soldiers could catch them.

The timing is significant.

Eventually, James F. Copeland put on a Union uniform and entered that conflict himself. On 23 August 1864, he enlisted in Company F of the newly organized 47th Missouri Infantry. The regiment was raised during the final year of the war for service in southeastern Missouri, where one of the pressing military problems was the continuing presence of bushwhackers and Confederate guerrillas. James's service therefore brought him directly into the Union effort to find and suppress the irregular bands operating through these southern Missouri counties. For the people of the Missouri Ozarks, and for the Copeland family, the Civil War was not something happening somewhere else.

The 47th Missouri was organized at Pilot Knob beginning in late August 1864, with its companies assigned to posts throughout southeastern Missouri. The regiment would soon be drawn into Sterling Price's invasion of Missouri, including the fighting around Pilot Knob and Fort Davidson. But the men of the 47th were also serving in a region where guerrilla warfare remained an everyday military problem. Members of the regiment took part in anti-guerrilla operations. One surviving November 1864 military report, later published in the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, records Captain Pinkney L. Powers of Company H reporting that his men had killed eleven bushwhackers.

James therefore enlisted in a Union regiment that was actively involved in the struggle against the guerrilla bands still operating in southeastern Missouri. We cannot know what was in James's mind when he enlisted. He left no letter or diary telling us why he chose to put on a Union uniform in August 1864. But there is another part of his family story that makes me wonder.

In Part II of this series, I told the story of the Bay family of Little Sinking Creek, who lived near the point where Dent, Reynolds, and Shannon Counties meet. In August 1862, Ninian Lewis Bay was seized and killed by armed irregulars. Within months, two of his sons, George Washington Bay and Daniel Bay, were also killed. The Bay family had experienced the bushwhacker war in the most personal way possible.

At the time of those killings, the Bays and Copelands were not yet related. James and Sarah Copeland were living several miles away in the same broader southeastern Missouri world, and I cannot document what James knew about the Bay killings or when he learned of them.

But after the war the two families became neighbors, and eventually family. James and Sarah later moved into the Little Sinking Creek community. In 1879 their eldest daughter, Elvira Copeland, married Greenberry Wade Bay, a surviving son of Ninian Lewis Bay. The daughter of a Union veteran had married the son of a man killed during the bushwhacker violence of 1862.

That connection makes me look again at James's decision to enlist. I cannot prove that James Francis Copeland joined the 47th Missouri Infantry because he wanted to hunt bushwhackers. To state that as fact would go beyond the surviving evidence. But I find the possibility entirely believable.

James lived in a region where families knew what bushwhackers could do. Violence traveled along the same roads people used to visit neighbors, attend church, trade at stores, and take grain to the mill. Stories of killings did not remain confined to the household in which they occurred. By 1864, bushwhackers were still operating through the very counties in which James and his neighbors lived.

Then, in August of that year, James enlisted in a newly organized Union regiment serving throughout southeastern Missouri—a regiment whose men would take part in the effort to suppress those guerrillas.

Perhaps James enlisted for reasons having nothing specifically to do with bushwhackers. Perhaps Price's threatened return to Missouri, loyalty to the Union, economic considerations, a sense of duty, or some combination of motives influenced his decision. Or perhaps, after years of hearing what bushwhackers had done to families throughout the Missouri Ozarks, James had simply had enough. We will never know. But knowing the world in which he lived, I find that possibility very easy to believe.