John Woodside

Before the Civil War, he served in the Missouri House of Representatives, where he argued long and hard and rather loudly against secession from the Union. But when word came to Jefferson City of the invasion of the state by Union troops, he took off at full speed to warn the people at home, leaving everything but his horse.

According to one report, "no horse and rider ever made a faster trip from Jefferson City to Thomasville, not even Frank James." The horse was part of John R’s dream of breading thoroughbreds at Thomasville. That dream was partially realized even before the war: later, a rider brought a message from a life-long friend named Thomas Jackson (General Stonewall). John R not only rode again, he supplied horses to the Confederacy by running the blockade on the Mississippi.

As a frontiersman, he knew how too defend his family and his land. He became a recruiting officer for the McBride’s Division of the Missouri State Guards, and fought at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek near Springfield in the summer of 1861. After several more skirmishes, he and his son Posey were held prisoner in a Union camp at Ironton on this side of the Mississippi.

Each night they were required to attend a lecture on the dangers of dividing the nation. One night the officer was well into his lecture when Posey asked his father if they hadn’t heard the same lecture 100 times. It sounded familiar. "It should sound familiar," John R told his son, "I wrote it for the Missouri House of Representatives."

The two decided just to walk away from the prison camp, carefully. Expecting to be shot in the back at any moment, they eased out of the lecture circle and kept walking. They walked until they crossed the Arkansas border (near present-day Myrtle) into what they referred to as the Choctaw Nation. Searchers and bounty hunters came after them, but the Choctaws who

befriended them gave the hunters no clues. After sheltering the two men, the Indians led them to the Mississippi River, then rowed them across to the Mississippi shore.

There were some strenuous efforts to get John R. to say which way the prisoners had gone, but there was nothing he would tell the Union Officers. Things were pretty rough for several days, and he was worn, exhausted and worried about the escaped pair.

Sometime during the fifth night after the jail dismantling, they heard the high, clear cry of a loon from the woods. John R. grinned, gave a whistle of his own and collapsed in exhaustion at the foot of a tree. The Choctaws had walked a great distance, in very real danger to deliver their message: The prisoners were safe.

John R. not only liked and respected the Indians, but learned some of their ways, He could for instance, walk through the Irish Wilderness, along a stream or down a city street with all the graceof a careless cat. No leaf moved, no twig snapped, no pebble rattled.

That was the first of three times during the Civil War that John R. Woodside would be detained or held prisoner by the Union men. Another time, the Woodsides were under house arrest in Oregon County. Officers of a Union encampment jailed a couple of men in the Alton Jail, so they would have someone to hang the next morning, as a warning to the others. During the night, John R., his son and friends, keeping to the shadows, reached the Alton jail. It was a log structure which they had built, they un-built it. When the encampment stirred the next morning eager for a hanging, they found an open air jail. The whole south wall was removed.