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Small Towns of Southwest Missouri Hold Bald Knobber History

http://ozarkspub.vo.llnwd.net/o37/KSMU/audio/mp3/small-towns-southwest-missouri-hold-bald-knobber-history_26111.mp3

During the Civil War and in the years after, people in rural southwest Missouri were torn in alliances between the North and South. This tension, fueled through the use of media, religion and unresolved Civil War bias, made these hills the most violent area in the country until the turn of the century. These feelings led to the formation of the vigilante group, the Bald Knobbers. For our ongoing local history series, Sense of Place, KSMU’s Rebekah Clark looks at how the organization, known as the “law-and-order league,” shaped the history of the Ozarks.

After Missouri entered the Union in 1824, settlers came from all over to inhabit the new state. Many farmers came with slaves they had bought to work on their land. During the years that led up to the Civil War, the pro-slavery pioneers grew resentful of Missouri’s borderline status, which caused tension and hatred between settlers in the Ozarks.

The war came and went. Many soldiers, both for and against slavery, returned home to southwest Missouri. Their hatred, however, remained. This time period is known as one of the most violent periods in U.S. history.

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This is the time of the Bald Knobbers. These vigilante groups, which originally formed in Taney County in lieu of all the “lawlessness” in the area, felt that it was time for the rise in criminal activity to stop. The original founder of the first group, “Cap” Kinney, gathered a few men together in a little back room in Forsyth, Missouri in 1884. Thus, the organization began.

Wayne Glenn is a local historian and has an old-tyme radio show. He has researched the history of the Bald Knobber’s extensively.

“The Taney County group was the first; it was probably the best organized. They were men who had the specific goal of serving as vigilantes to do everything they could to bring, return, law-and-order to their area, so that most people in Taney County, at the original point of the founding of the group, were in support of them.”

Not long after that group formed, other vigilante groups around the Ozarks started popping up in Christian and Douglas counties. Small rural towns like Bruner, Elkhead, Lendon, and Shady Grove housed branch-off groups from 1886-1888. The most noted and violent group formed in the Chadwick-Sparta area. These groups also adopted the name “Bald Knobbers.” Glenn comments on the differences between the Taney and Christian County groups.

“The group in Christian County was a little bit more on the dark side to begin with. There was never as much support for the Bald Knobber movement in Christian County among the citizenry as there was in Taney County, again that’s my opinion.”

Some of the “dark side” Glenn refers to is the violent criminal activity they did. Members conducted beatings, arson, and murders to citizens around the area, eventually terrorizing many natives of the Ozarks. In a lot of ways, the logic was twisted. What once started as a group trying to prevent violence suddenly morphed into one that promoted it.

Taneesa Hall works as the assistant historian at the Christian County library.

“The original Bald Knobbers, they justified it because there was no law in the county, and they were doing the right thing as they saw it. Some of the later ones, I don’t know if they had a justification for what they did. I just think that some of them were just men who not necessarily thought they were doing the right thing, they just saw an opportunity.”

Wayne Glenn also said that if any one thing put the Ozarks on the national map through the headlines, it was the Bald Knobber crimes. He said that for decades, those stories prevented settlers from moving into the Ozarks. It was close to WWI before people started settling down in this area again.

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For KSMU News, I’m Rebekah Clark.