Lisa,

I am glad you discovered this forum, and by now you discovered among the replies a hearty list of references that document what happened to the Burgesses and their friends in Post Oak Township during the spring of 1862.

As to your questions, here goes:

1. You mentioned oral family history that says the Union militiamen captured some of the Burgess men only to gun them down in their yard. You also wondered if that included a 13-year-old boy. I believe it was in a Union military report that indicated the troopers gunned down perhaps two Burgess men who were attempting to escape out the back of the house. I have no trouble accepting your family's version of this incident as the truthful one. It was dark, the militiamen may have thought the boy was older than he really was.

Consider the following as a factor in these incidents. I think fear played a part in the Union soldiers' actions that night. Johnson County, MO was strongly divided into the southern and northern sympathy, and they didn't exactly keep separate settlements based on their loyalty. This was neighbor against neighbor. Consider perhaps that some of these Yankee troopers had great fear that some of these southerners would some night ride to their home and kill the Yanks in their beds, and--especially after this campaign of murder and mayhem--some southerners probably had the same fear. People do strange things when fear is their strongest motivator. I actually read in an old "Missouri Historical Review" article published some decades ago about a Union lieutenant colonel who wrote his wife at home in NE Missouri in the last spring of the war that he was all set to return home to her in a few days at the end of his term of service in Missouri, but he changed his mind. The LTC heard about a Union colonel killed in the street by bushwhackers raiding a railroad town in NE MO a few days before. He told her he changed his mind and would remain on duty in order to kill a few more Confederates just to prevent them from some night coming to kill him in his bed. Mind you, this was no greenhorn private, but an experienced, veteran field grade officer.

2. What brought the Burgess family from Kanawah County, WVA all the way to Missouri? To precisely answer that question you would have to read some of the Burgess letters to family or friends back in WVA, or diary entries, or some similar expression of Burgess thought at the time. However, speaking generally, lots of Americans living in WVA, Tennessee, or Kentucky moved on west every few years or so as part of the belief of the middle 1800's in what an historian called "Manifest Destiny." This theory amounted to a generalization that Americans fully believed their country was destined to occupy what later became all of the 48 states, almost as a matter of fact. This theory some use to explain why some farmers from back east moved on to settle farm after farm gradually shifting further west. A very real reason some families seemed to have a case of "itching feet," was the stark real world problem that as a fine brood of several children grew to adulthood, the younger ones had to move on because the older ones inherited the family farm at the time. I seem to recall from history class in junior high school that this inheritance pattern was called "Primogeniture," and it was common. West Virginia folks tended to move west first into Kentucky and Tennessee, and then later moves west brought them all the way west to Arkansas and Missouri. This is only a generalization, but it fits lots of real American families moving on west.

3. What happened to the Burgess' property in Johnson County as the war ran on? I don't know, although I may have even walked across it in my hiding across Post Oak Township in my younger days in Johnson County.

4. Regarding Indian blood in early American families, this seemed to be more common with Cherokees (who lived in the region of western Carolinas, east Tennessee, and east Kentucky) before President Andrew Jackson had the army escort many of that tribe out west in the "Trail of Tears" long march to what is now Oklahoma in about 1834. According to my reading, the Cherokee people had the females handle business such as trading, leaving the menfolk free to pursue hunting, fishing, and etc. A number of Cherokee ladies felt marrying a white man would improve their chances for future business success among the huge number of European immigrants moving across the landscape and also with some of the other Indian tribes. To borrow a phrase, "it was just good business," not to mention that maybe some of those Cherokee lady business leaders took a shine to some of those strapping Scot-Irish trappers and traders with their red hair and long flowing red beards. Of course, this last part is just conjecture. Usually, providing proof that great, great, great grandmother was a Cherokee is very, very hard to provide. My mother's family even claims that way back in those early years of our country's history one of our men married a Cherokee princess named "Morning Dawn," or some similar name. Not much was documented in those early years to even try to prove such a claim. Not to doubt your own family's claim, of course.

I hope this helps. Bruce Nichols