Episode Details

During the Civil War, guerrilla fighters known as bushwhackers turned rural Missouri into a war of neighbor against neighbor, rooted in the Bleeding Kansas clashes with Kansas Jayhawkers. Unlike John Singleton Mosby's partisan rangers under the 1862 Partisan Ranger Act, most Missouri bands operated outside the Confederate chain of command, carrying several Colt revolvers each and relying on networks of civilian sympathizers. Union commanders answered with mass arrests, banishments, house burnings and summary executions, including that of Lieutenant Colonel Frisby McCullough after Kirksville.

In August 1863 William Quantrill's raiders burned Lawrence, Kansas and killed about 150 men, citing the sacking of Osceola and the deaths of five female relatives in a collapsed Kansas City jail. General Thomas Ewing Jr.'s General Order No. 11 then emptied Jackson, Cass, Bates and northern Vernon counties of nearly 25,000 people, creating the Burnt District. In 1864 Bloody Bill Anderson's men executed 24 unarmed soldiers at Centralia before Samuel P. Cox's militia killed Anderson, and survivors including Jesse James turned to bank robbery.

• The families of both Jesse James and future president Harry Truman were banished from Missouri.
• About 2,200 square miles were burned, leaving lone chimneys standing in the ash.
• Jesse James' only confirmed fight with federal troops from another state came a month after the war ended.
• In 1869 at Gallatin he killed cashier John W. Sheets, mistaking him for Samuel P. Cox.
• In California the Mason Henry gang murdered three men because they were known Republicans.