Well not exactly. The event you describe took place about 8 October 1864 during General Price's great Missouri raid. Price sent staff officers into Missouri in advance of his raid to direct west-central Missouri guerrillas to attack transportation infrastructure--mostly railroads--to impede the Union military ability to move troops about and send reinforcements.

Former Quantrill guerrilla lieutenant George Todd with about 108 men on or about that day raided transportation infrastructure at Syracuse and Otterville. They were brutal at Syracuse. After they torched the railroad depot, the bushwhackers forced all the men to line up and made a local man named Grove identify northern sympathizers in the line. Poor Grove reluctantly identified a Yates, George W. Shackelford, and a Smith whom the Rebels quickly shot. After they shot Shackelford once he pleaded for his life as did his wife, but the guerrillas shot him again to death. Shortly afterward, Todd heard from somebody present that Grove made a mistake about Shackelford being a northern sympathizer and so he shot Grove to death, too. Yates and Smith were from Sedalia, according to one resource, so I wonder if Grove fingered them instead of his neighbors since they were strangers. This is guesswork on my part, though. As much as I can tell, the guerrillas targeted the railroad and telegraph facilities, and not the stagecoach setup.

The following are my sources for the Syracuse raid:
--Goodspeed 1889 history of Morgan County, p. 418 (almost no details except mention of Shackelford's death);
--John N. Edwards, "Noted Guerrillas," 1877, p. 313 (few correct details about what happened at Syracuse);
--U.S. Gov't, "Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies," series 1, vol. 41, part 3, p. 714, 735, 741 (few details);
--newspaper on microfilm, "Killed,""Missouri Statesman," Columbia, Boone County, 4 November 1864, from the earlier "Paris Kentucky Citizen."

There may be other sources for the depredations at Syracuse, but I haven't worked on this in quite a while, and can't recall more than these. There were a lot of other actions around this part of Missouri at this time, and this affects how much or little of this was recorded.

Bruce Nichols