Uncle Buck Johnson's Escape

"Wars are things that bring their nasty selves right up to your front door for years and years after they are over. Of course, I get right down and think about it, seeing one of my own cousins with an arm shot off and hearing him laugh about how he got it done while he was trying to steal some horses from a Yankee sympathizer makes me know my own side was not made up of the gentlest men either." 

 

"(Of) Course, all my life, I was in sympathy with him because he was just trying to do something a little dirty to a Yankee. But when I learned that one of the best citizens of West Plains burned the home of my folks, it caused me to spend the early part of my life thinking up new cusswords that would be appropriate to apply to him. For years I made myself sick hating him. Then, finally, one day, I found out my own kids were his foster great-great-grandchildren. My wife was his foster great-grandchild, as he reared her orphan grandmother in his home. I knew him as a brute-she knew him as the kindest of men."

"When I learned that, I swallowed a couple of times, and I guess my face turned red. Whether it did or not, right there I decided the Civil War was over-for me anyway, and I thought we are all Americans and that we should not only live in physical peace but also in mental peace. Because, just like I said, wars are hard to forget." The words of "Uncle Buck," as he was known in West Plains, ring true to this day. 

William Spencer Johnson was born near the Gasconade River in Wright County, Missouri 1841. His parents moved to Howell County, settling three miles east of West Plains, just before the Civil War. Buck Johnson's twentieth birthday occurred the same time the war broke out, and he was one of the first to sign up to fight in Howell County in Judge/General James McBrides' Seventh Division of the Missouri State Guard. He was placed in Company A, Captain Armstrong's Company. 

 

After brutal fights at the Battle of Wilson's Creek in August 1861, Lexington, Missouri, in September 1861, and the Battle of Pea Ridge in March 1862, Buck was haggard and exhausted with a desire to return home. Remaining in Arkansas after his six-month term of enlistment expired, he was there long enough to come under the command of General John Marmaduke in the Confederate Army. He was furloughed because of his condition and allowed to return to Missouri. After their defeat at Pea Ridge, supplies were short, and because it was cold, Buck was wearing a Union jacket, likely picked up on the battlefield. 

 

Johnson later stated that on the way home, he came in contact with Confederate soldiers James Cox and Polk Young, who were from Howell County, also in Union uniform. They agreed to return to Buck's home three miles from West Plains down Howell Valley around the middle of December 1863. Unbeknownst to the three men, a fifteen hundred man army made up of the First Nebraska Cavalry, 11th Missouri Cavalry, and part of the Second Missouri Artillery Battery, under the command of Colonel Robert R. Livingston, had left Rolla, entered Arkansas, spent some time hunting rebels in Batesville on the 15th of December, then headed north through Salem, Arkansas on a collision course with Buck and his new friends in West Plains. Colonel Livingston, doing the job of a Brigadier General, was checking these two towns in Arkansas after reports of the Confederates congregating there after fleeing Pea Ridge.

 

According to William Monks, now a Lieutenant in the Union Army and receiving Captain's pay as the Chief of Scouts traveling with the expedition, Colonel Livingston "issued a general order and sent the same in all directions that all rebels or bushwhackers who were captured wearing Federal uniform would be court-martialed and shot; or all persons who were captured in robbing or plundering houses would be court-martialed and shot."

 

The three were caught at Buck's home, according to Monks. The Union Army was camped at the West Plains Town Spring and the weather was cold after a snowfall. Buck and his friends were inside when the Union Troopers surrounded their cabin. They were quickly tried by drum-head court martial and sentenced to be shot the following day at dawn. A German-American soldier in the First Nebraska wrote home that:

 

"We had a very interesting time on the march to here (From Rolla to West Plains). As a cavalryman one has a lot to do, but also a lot of fun. We were attacked several times when we went out in small detachments to forage, killed various guerrillas, took several prisoners, and made short work of them. Upon marching into West Plains we surprised three notorious bushwhackers." 

 

It seems any man who could shoulder a gun was regarded as a "notorious bushwhacker" when, in fact, many were just Confederate soldiers trying to go home. By this part of the war, both sides had stripped the countryside of human food and horse fodder, and Buck's unit was on starvation rations. All of South Central Missouri was in this condition. The soldier mentions that West Plains was a town by name only; it had been burned to the ground in the fall of 1863. He noted chimneys where houses once stood. The night of their trial the three captives were given spades and ordered to dig their own graves along what is today Grace Avenue, near what would become the East Ward school in downtown West Plains. 

 

Buck stated he and the other prisoners lay outside under guard at the town spring with six inches of snow on the ground. Waiting until everyone but the guards and sentries were asleep in the camp, he quickly wove his way through it, concealed among some tents to a string of horses, hopped on one, and rode off. Johnson waited on the outskirts o) and camps in West Plains, then circled back to where the horses were, took off with eight or nine more (accounts vary), and rode all night to the camp of a Confederate company just across the line in Arkansas. Buck attributed his success to his still being in a federal jacket, and the soldiers thought he was one of them taking water to the horses. 

 

The others weren't so lucky, shot at dawn and thrown into the graves they dug. One account says that after the executions Buck returned to West Plains with some Confederate soldiers and stole more horses, precisely 16. Johnson was a great judge of horse flesh and was impressed that the Nebraska Cavalry had one color of animals for each company of excellent quality, and he and his buddies followed the army for weeks, picking off additional horses.

 

Buck was back in Confederate service, where he remained until the end of the war. He returned to West Plains and married in 1867. His wife died five years later. In a few years, Buck remarried, raised an extended family, and developed a reputation as a dealer in fine horses and some livestock. He was also known as an exceptional deer hunter, killing only male deer, hence the name Buck. 

 

Cox and Young were dug up after the war and placed in local cemeteries. Buck took his own life in June 1918 following a struggle with skin cancer. He is buried in Oaklawn Cemetery. His wife "Polly" lived another twenty years and was buried beside Buck in Oaklawn.

 

Buck Johnson became well-known, respected, and a local folk hero. In 1913, when he was tried on a charge of selling liquor, a jury of his peers acquitted him. 

 

Colonel Livingston, also a medical doctor, went on to become a brevet General during the war, ending up in command of a portion of the northwestern frontier of the United States fighting hostile Indians.  He worked for the railways building through Nebraska and westward, while attending to his medical career.  He continued to rise in prominence and eventually became the Governor of Nebraska.  For all his accomplishments, it appears he met his match in the person of Buck Johnson of Howell County.