One of my 2nd great-grandfathers was Micajah Dark: 1801-1874. He was a survivor of Lane's raid and destruction of Osceola and had been badly wounded. He took as his second wife the widow (as a result of the same disaster) Nancy Ellen Dunlap Guinn whose husband Champion Guinn had been murdered--with the direct involvement of Lane--in that raid. Champion Guinn and Micajah Dark were part of a group of about a dozen men trying to protect one of the town banks. Lane called trying to protect said bank and not turning over its funds to him, personally, treason, ran a quick kangaroo court with himself as prosecutor and judge (no defense permitted, of course) and then had the men of Osceola lined up to be shot. Lane had his men assemble a makeshift "firing squad," and he himself gave the command to "fire" and fired himself. So, I descend from a man whom a U.S. Senator tried to kill. Micajah was badly wounded but survived. He was considered "too old" for the regular army so he joined Quantrill--just once--for the raid on Lawrence Kansas.

That was enough to brand him as one of "Quantrill's Men"--and it didn't help that Micajah Dark's nearest neighbors were the Younger family. Micajah was the JP for Chalk Level, just north of Monegaw Springs and Osceola and after the war gave no help to the Pinkertons, etc., further adding to his list of "crimes." In 1874, the last year of the Union occupation of Missouri, Micajah Dark was also hunted down. In the late autumn word came to the family that a group of armed strangers with a couple of army regulars were looking for him. Fearing another devastating raid, the family gathered everything it could quickly from the house and hid in the adjacent woods. The baby, Sterling Dark, wouldn't stop crying so Nancy and her daughter, my great-grandmother Martha Jane Dark, went back to the house and hid the baby in the oven and hoped the raiders wouldn't burn the house again. As Martha went to hide, her father asked for her help in getting the last two horses out of the barn and into the woods. He was having trouble with a reluctant stallion and a mare was attempting to stay with the stallion. Martha got her horse into the woods, just barely and hid in a bush as she heard horsemen approaching. Her father wasn't so lucky. He'd gotten the horse out of the barn but was still in the open when the men arrived. They surrounded him and beat him to unconsciousness on the ground. They may have heard Martha start to cry or something, though she was trying to be quiet. She was only 7 years old. They looked around and then slung the unconscious Micajah Dark over his own horse and rode off. The family was notified a very short time later that Micajah had been shot to death and dumped in the Osage River. He was literally just about the last of Quantrill's men to have been hunted down and killed.

The town of Osceola up until its destruction in September, 1861 had been the 2nd largest "city" in Missouri--2nd only to St. Louis. It was, at the time, the foremost "jumping off point" for wagon trains headed to California and Missouri, particularly along the Santa Fe trail. It had begun as a trading town for the civilized tribes across the line in what was originally Indian territory--which by treaty and Act of Congress included Kansas. Some of the first settlers of Osceola were the "more white parts" of mixed families with branches who were "more Cherokee" and thus had been forced out of Tennessee on "The Trail of Tears." Trade with the Indian Territory and then supplying the wagon trains had made the town wealthy--and that's what Lane was jealous of and wanted. It was 2/3 pro-Union and anti-slavery (as per a poll taken by the "Osceola Democrat" 3 weeks or so before the raid)up until the day of the raid and then immediately afterward, went the other way, understandably. Micajah's two oldest sons, once they were assured their father would recover from his wounds at Osceola, enlisted in the CSA Army.

My family knew the James and Younger gang members quite well and helped hide them at times from pursuers. My grandmother was shown one of the local caves, one about a mile north and west of the site of the old hotel at Monegaw Springs by her own mother and uncles, who had helped hide the James' and Youngers, and ran food and water to them.

Members of the Dark family, descendants of Micajah's sons by his first marriage, still live in Henry and St. Clair Counties, mostly in and around Deepwater, these days.

I hope this helps add to your stories--and maybe a book. I still have the letter my grandmother wrote to me describing bits of these incidents, as she was told them by her mother and grandmother--the eyewitnesses, and the follow up telephone notes I took, as well as the notes from a visit to the Osceola library with John Lapsley Mills in the 1980's who was then the town historian. There were some notes there from the diary of William Berry, who described the incident in which Champion Guinn was killed and Micajah Dark was wounded in the Osceola assault by Lane. Berry died a few days after the event of his own wounds and the journal was given to his brother and is still in possession of some member of that brother's family's descendants. It was at the centennial commemorative but it's not known now which descendant has the journal.

Cecilia L. Fabos-Becker
(My late mother was a Wallace--Martha's daughter Jessie Lavinia Collins married William Thomas Wallace and ironically, my mother's Wallace grandfather was about a 2nd cousin or so of the Wallace who prosecuted Frank James.)