Murder and Mayhem in Missouri by Larry Wood

Author:Larry Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

Sketch depicting a slicking. Courtesy of Andy Thomas, artist .

They then rode to the home of Thomas Meadows, tied him to a tree, and cruelly whipped him—or “slicked” him, as they called it—with switches fashioned from slender hickory limbs. Thus, the committee came to be known as the Slickers. After being whipped, Meadows was ordered to leave the country, and he was never heard from again, although accounts differ as to whether he died from his wounds or left the region.

The committee next marched to the home of William Brookshire, arriving about dark. Brookshire had attended the secret meeting the previous summer and, about the same time, had also joined Andy Jones in bailing out an accused horse thief. The men slicked Brookshire until he named Andy Jones as one of the killers of Hiram Turk. He also named Milton Hume and Henry Hodge, who, along with Jones and the Keaton brothers, had signed Turk’s death pact.

The vigilantes continued to ride through the night and the next day looking for Andy Jones. They found his brother Isaac and threatened him but turned him loose. They next took Jones’s friend Luther White from his home and slicked him.

On the night of January 29, the Slickers rode back to the Quincy area and, the next morning, went to the home of John Whittaker, another attendee at the secret meeting at Cock’s. They promised not to hurt him if he would let them search his house, but some of them came back a few days later and gave him a slicking. About the same time, they found Jabez Harrison, yet another attendee at the secret meeting, at a store near where Wheatland now is located and gave him a severe slicking, reportedly cutting him “to the hollow.” Harrison gave all the details of the secret meeting and Hiram Turk’s murder. He said he and Andy Jones were among those present when Turk was killed but that Henry Hodge was the one who pulled the trigger.

The Slicker War continued to rage during the early months of 1842. The Anti-Slickers, as the Jones faction became known, fought back, not only in the countryside but also in the courts. Both Berry Chapman and Luther White filed charges against the Slickers because of the whippings they had received. Andy Jones tried to kill Tom Turk sometime during February or early March, or so Turk later claimed. About March 21, the local militia was finally called out to restore order. When they cornered Andy Jones at a friend’s home, Jones tried to shoot Alex Cox, a Slicker, when he spotted him among the militiamen. Jones’s gun misfired, and he was arrested and taken to Warsaw. He was charged in separate cases with attempting to kill Turk and Cox but was released on bond.

The April 1842 docket of the Benton County Circuit Court was jammed with cases. In addition to the charges against Jones, a variety of other criminal cases, most pertaining to the Slicker War, were to be heard.

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