Bursheba Fristoe Younger knew better than perhaps anyone the thorough devastation wrought by nearly a decade of guerrilla warfare along the Missouri-Kansas border. The Youngers, like many households, traced their hardships back to the partisan violence of the 1850s. A slaveholding family of southern descent, they owned a dry goods store in Cass County, Missouri, which was repeatedly robbed by antislavery bands of Kansas “jayhawkers.” At the outbreak of the national Civil War, Bursheba’s husband, Henry, remained an avowed Union man, but in July 1862, Unionist militia ambushed, robbed, and murdered the family patriarch as he traveled home from Westport.
Her son, Cole—the seventh of 14 children—took to the brush as a pro-Confederate guerrilla and eventually joined up with William C. Quantrill, the country’s most notorious “bushwhacker.” That association soon brought upon the Youngers even greater scrutiny from Union troops, who in February 1863 ordered the family home set ablaze. Bursheba’s resulting exile took her north to Clay County, where she lingered, her family broken and wealth gone, until the war finally burned itself out.
The Civil War touched the lives of virtually everyone who lived near the Missouri-Kansas border. The war in this part of the West blurred and often shattered the distinctions between home front and battlefield. Fierce differences over slavery and its expansion triggered the irregular violence that erupted in Kansas Territory in 1856, but this bloodshed often devolved into a vengeful cycle of retaliation. Such fighting was often deeply personal in nature; long before the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, the border was consumed by a bitter civil war that pitted neighbor versus neighbor.
