Reflections On History Violence in Ozark Forklore by Jim Vandergriff published in The Bentley House Beacon, Spring, 1990, pp. 3-4. My great-grandmother was born in Camden County in 1876 and died, 96 years later, in neighboring Pulaski County, less than eight miles from her birthplace. Her father was the founder and Editor of the Lebanon Rustic; her mother's family was among the original settlers and founders of both Old Linn Creek and Camden County itself. Furthermore, her husband had been, for some time, a deputy U.S. marshal in Oklahoma Territory--"the Nations," as Grandma always called it--and, at some other time, a logger in California. Consequently, Grandma knew a lot of exciting stories. From the time I was about twelve or so, l spent two or three weeks each summer with her and she would entertain me with stones of her life in "the Nations" and the logging woods, or of the old days along Wet Glaize Creek--stories of the "hog's-headed snake," of gunfights at camp meetings, of the night she guarded "Black Pete" while her lawman husband slept, of getting up at night to knock snow off her tent in the logging woods, and the like. I saw the stories then only as entertainments to fill long July evenings in a time before television. Only many years later did I realize what a wealth of folklore and oral history had slipped by me. I know now that many of these stories were more fiction than fact, blends of the actual and the legend, but at the time I believed them all. In the last few years, I have been trying to track them down, to discover what is truth and what is legend in them. And I often wish Grandma were here so l could ask her to retell the stories; my research would be much easier. Last summer I spent virtually all of my spare time and money trying to track down the historical basis of one particular legend that has been handed down orally through the family, one mat began 40 years before Grandma's birth. In the process, I learned a great deal about the interrelatedness of folklore and history, and about how folklore can lead to insights into the character of a people. The story I was researching, one version of which was printed in the Springfield Press in March of 1931, goes like this. In the late 1830's, in what is now the northernmost part of Laclede County, Missouri, a former slave named Joe assaulted a ten year-old white girl named Amanda Fullbright while her family was out working in a nearby field. To stop her screams, he stabbed her, then fled. The girl lived to tell who had attacked her, but died shortly thereafter. The men in the area quickly formed a search party and hunted Joe for several days. Joe hid in the general area, forcing local slaves to feed him--and not disclose his whereabouts--by threatening their lives. The searchers eventually spotted him, though, and a man named Rafferty (or Raffety) shot him. Joe didn't die immediately, so a doctor was sent for. At the time, the nearest doctor was one Dr. Dodson, my great-great-great-uncle, who lived, the story says, 16 miles away. (The Dodsons lived at Glaize City in Camden County, a town founded by Dr. Dodson's father. The town, now a ghost town, was located along the Wet Glaize Creek about seven miles from the village of Wet Glaize and about two miles from Joe's Cave. Several of the original buildings, the cemetery, and a reproduction of the Dodson house still exist at the site, which is now a private farm. The Fullbright holdings were centered some ten or twelve miles Southwest, along Dry Glaize Creek and near the present-day intersection of Laclede County roads H and BB, on the old Tuscumbia Trail. Nothing remains of the original "mansion," as it is referred to in most versions of the story.) Dr. Dodson arrived too late to save Joe, but in time to settle the dilemma of what to do with his body. Of course, Joe could not be buried in the white cemetery, nor did the slaves want him buried in their cemetery since he was such a bad man. Dr. Dodson solved the problem by taking the corpse to the cave now called "Joe's Cave," or simply "Joe Cave," where he dismembered the body and boiled the flesh off the bones. It took several days to complete the grisly task and, because wolves were attracted by the odor of the cooking flesh, Dr. Dodson stayed at the cave until the job was done. His meals were brought to him by slaves, who left them a distance from the cave mouth because they feared approaching too closely. When the boiling was done, Dr. Dodson re-articulated the skeleton and used it in his medical practice for the rest of his life. Though the skeleton was destroyed in a house fire in 1944, it is still said that, at certain times, one can hear fiddle music emanating from deep in the cave and that, if one goes way back in the cave, one can find Joe's petrified heart or tongue. Joe's story ends there, but Rafferty's does not. A couple of years later, Rafferty was killed from ambush by a man identified in the legend only as "Grizzle," who was having an affair with Rafferty's wife. According to the story, Mrs. Rafferty arranged the ambush and gave Grizzle the gun with which to kill her husband, the same gun with which Rafferty had killed Joe. The lovers, according to the legend, were found out, arrested, and taken to jail, where they committed suicide before they could be brought to trial. After weeks of interviewing, of driving around back roads, exploring and photographing caves, wading through weedy old cemeteries, digging through libraries, poring over old maps, and buying and reading hundreds of dollars worth of books and pamphlets, I pretty much achieved my initial goal. I feel certain that I know most of the "who's'"' "when's," "where's," and "how's," though the "why's" remain, and probably will always remain, a mystery. In the course of this research, though, I kept stumbling onto and over other fascinating tidbits of information about my ancestors. For instance, I read the letter in which my great-great-grandfather Armstrong then a Confederate soldier serving in Louisiana, asked my great-great-grandmother to marry him. And I read her response, written from Bonham, Texas, where her family lived out the duration of the war, in which she refused his offer on the grounds that the Confederacy's losing the war was God’s judgment and proof of her own worthlessness. The letter was one of the saddest things I have ever read, but it gave me an entirely new sense of the effects of the Civil War on individuals-and a new sense of my ancestors as real people. That increased awareness of my ancestors as flesh and blood people has also been one of the greatest values to me of all the stories I encountered. What perhaps fascinated me the most, though, was how many of the stories had to do with violence. There is, for example, the story of Judge Samuel L. Gibson, my great-great grandfather. Sam, who was my first Gibson ancestor in the Ozarks, came to the area in the early 1840's to live with his older brother after their parents died. (I acquired, during this research, a copy of the land claim documents issued to their father, Thomas Gibson, for 1156 acres of land near present day Washington, Missouri, which he homesteaded in 1803.) The brother, George William Gibson, is called, in the history of Pulaski County entitled Pulaski County, the first white squatter on the site of Robidoux Spring near Waynesville, Missouri, having arrived there in 1831 (Vol. I, p. 183). Sam, the younger brother, went on to become a successful merchant and banker in Richland in the 1860's and 70's, and a successful cattleman in Camden County. He was also County Judge of Camden County for many years. On February 8, 1893 (perhaps 1883; sources disagree), he was killed by a farm hand who thought Sam had a large sum of money on his person. Sam had recently returned from a cattle-selling trip to St. Louis and he and the farm hand were out in a field alone. The hand, a man ostensibly named Foster, killed Sam by burying an axe in the back of his head. Sam fell with his head against a stump and his beard caught in a crack in the stump. Foster left him that way, the axe still in his head and his head held at a grotesque angle by the beard, to be found by his family. (Significantly, a reliable article in Pulaski County, Vol. I, p. 205, says his head was crushed as if he had been hit with the pole end of an axe.) The killer fled, but was pursued for weeks by a vigilante posse into Kentucky and Tennessee. Though no one ever says directly what happened, the implication is that the group, which included Sam's sons and one of my Perkins ancestors, caught up with and killed Foster. A few years later, this same Perkins ancestor was involved in a similar incident. One day a man, slightly known to him, came to his house and asked for his help, saying that he had a horse (some say a cow) down in a ditch a short distance away. Though my great-great-great-grandfather didn't trust the man, he went with him anyway; however, a short way down the road he confronted the man with his suspicions. The man admitted that his motive was robbery, whereupon he pulled a knife and attacked my grandfather. Grandfather began to yell for help and his wife, Serepta, came to his aid. The man slashed out at Serepta and managed to cut her throat almost from ear to ear, during which time Grandfather was able to stab him in the shoulder, causing the assailant to flee. Despite being badly injured, grandmother lived, though she carried a terrible scar for life. Another story involves my ancestors only peripherally. There was, in the late 1920's, a beautiful woman in Richland, Missouri, who became pregnant out of wedlock. She was killed, presumably by her lover, with a bullet to the head, then laid on the railroad tracks in such a position that the train would crush her head, obscuring the evidence of the bullet wound. Things didn't work out according to the killer's plans and an investigation ensued. My grandfather Perkins was believed to know who the killer was and was questioned so many times that he eventually lost his job as a result. The killer was never identified and the story continues to live in the oral tradition, including veiled hints that my grandfather was perhaps himself the killer and continued speculations about the identity of the killer, who is generally presumed to have been a "successful businessman" in the town, someone who could not afford the scandal of a pregnant mistress. Still another incident that lives in the oral tradition involves a particularly brutal and pointless murder which occurred not too many years later. Two men, named McCracken and Coffin, lived on adjoining farms in Camden County. McCracken, who is characterized in the story as a crazy man, began to accuse Coffin of stealing his shocked corn, which Coffin denied. The accusations continued until one day McCracken confronted Coffn with a shotgun and shot him in the shoulder at point-blank range. After Coffin fell to the ground, McCracken fired the other barrel directly into Coffin's face. He was subsequently arrested, found guilty of murder, and imprisoned, where he remained until he died. Two of my uncles, then young boys, went to the murder scene and recall vividly, and willingly relate, the grisly details. In fact, the point of the story seems to be, as much as anything else, recounting those details. All of these stories continue to live in the oral tradition in the communities where the incidents occurred. And, as is often the case, they have taken on the patina of legend with age, focusing more, perhaps, on the shock value of the gore and the violent details than on the historicity, but, nonetheless, serving to characterize us as we see ourselves. I'm not certain why the tag story about Grizzle and Rafferty is so frequently included with Joe's story, but my recent thinking about violence in the Ozarks has led me to one possibility. Many Ozark tales involve crimes committed with a knife, so perhaps the gun was not as common a tool in this region as novels and television have led us to believe; perhaps it gets the focus because it was rare. In any event, the Grizzle story is often included with Joe's tale, and it too has a factual basis. According to Pulaski County, Vol. I, p. 17, the first murder trial held in Pulaski County, in 1839, was that of William Grizzell for the murder of a man named "Raferty, whom he shot on account of some family affair." Because of the time and the similarity in names and circumstances, I feel sure Grizzle and Grizzell are the same person, as I hope continued research will show. If he is, he didn't commit suicide in jail; he was apparently convicted and a clemency petition in his behalf was circulated in 1840 (Pulaski County, Vol. II, p. 16). Of course, too, the lovers' suicide motif is a standard folktale motif. Why such a detail would be attached to this sordid little story is perhaps further evidence of Ozarkers' fascination with violence, reflecting a tendency, even, to romanticize it. Whatever the cause, the story is instructive of what Ozarkers' find entertaining. The versions of Joe's legend which include the ghostly fiddle music usually mention early on that Joe was an excellent fiddler much in demand at local dances. These versions often imply, too, that Miss Fullbright was a young woman, rather than a girl, and that Joe's motive for the assault was sexual, that he had felt led on by the girl. There is documentary evidence of Amanda's age and death date (she died July 10, 1837, at the age of ten), so such versions as these are obviously much later creations. While they don't provide us with reliable historical details about the incident itself, these later versions do offer useful information about the tellers' attitudes. These variant details, for instance, focus on the issue of interracial sex and illustrate vividly its presumed consequences and reflect how the tellers think about it. This attitude is, of course, available to historians from other sources, but here it is expressed by the people themselves- a valuable corroboration. Similarly, the versions which refer to the petrified heart and tongue provide some useful psychological information about the tellers. One of the most interesting points is the pure physical impossibility these details present. I visited the cave several times in the course of my investigation and found that, about thirty feet in, the cave narrows down to a passage so small that a human could not even worm through. Thus it is impossible to go deep into the cave to find the petrified parts. Both of my informants for these versions grew up very near the cave and undoubtedly visited it many times. Why had they never checked this detail? The answer is that typically, people learn legends from people they trust and are, therefore, not inclined to skepticism. Details such as these, though, also indicate a belief system that has room in it for things that go beyond the scientific; we can learn at least that about the tellers. So, here again the details uncovered by folklorists offer historians support from the voices of the people. Legends such as this may continue to live in the oral tradition for a variety of reasons, and the reasons may change over time, but one thing that does not change is that they continue to exist and transmute because they serve some purpose or purposes for the tellers. Joe’s tale began as a historical incident,but through the years it has undergone great changes in detail and purpose. At some point in its evolution it became primarily an etiological tale, a story which explained how the cave got its name. At another point, it seems to have existed mainly to provide a lesson about miscegenation. At other times, its purpose seems to have been to frighten small children away from caves, or at least to associate caves with the supernatural. In my own family, its primary function, I believe, is to create or nurture pride in our ancestors, several lines of whom were among the original settlers in the area, and to remind us that they were shaping forces in the development of the region. By comparing variations in the details of a legend over time, and by looking at its central focus at a given time, one can learn much about the psychology of the tellers and, therefore, the psychology of the region. That is one of the main values of folklore to historians. Alongside the stories discussed here are the hundreds of other violent stories that comprise much of Ozark history--the bushwhacker depredations, Hickock's infamous gunfight, the 1906 Iynchings in Springfield, the Fleagle gang, even the recent John D. Brown saga. They all share a fascination with violence on the part of the hearers, but more importantly they show that we Ozarkers are and always have been a violent people. The stories are, of course, a blend of fact and fiction which is often difficult to separate but the reward for trying is great. These legends, and others like them, not only offer historians a kind of corroborative evidence available nowhere else, but also provide a glimpse into the violent character, past and present, of the Ozarker. Jim Vandergriff is President of the Missouri Folklore Society and an English Instructor at SMSU. A native Ozarker, he was born in rural Laclede County, near Stoutland, and grew up there and in Pulaski and Phelps counties. He has served on the directing boards of both the Missouri and Kansas Folklore societies and is former editor of Heritage of Kansas, a folklore / regional history journal. He is currently Book Review Editor for the Missouri Folklore Society Journal.