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MARCH 3, 1863
GUERRILLA RAID AT NEOSHO & GRANBY

Report of Maj. Edward B. Eno, Eighth Missouri State Militia Cavalry (Union), to Maj. James H. Steger, Assistant Adjutant-General, Springfield.

HEADQUARTERS,
Newtonia, Mo., March 4, 1863.

MAJOR:  I have to report that, on the night of the 3d instant, the guerrilla chief Livingston, with 100 men, dashed into Granby, where 25 men of my battalion were stationed.  The patrol guard, 2 men, were captured, disarmed, and probably killed, as nothing has since been heard of them.  Two other soldiers, who were attending upon a sick family a short distance outside the stockade, were captured, and, unarmed as they were, begging for their lives, were shot down in their tracks.  Livingston passed rapidly out, without venturing to attack the squad in the stockade.

Yery respectfully, your obedient servant,

E. B. ENO
Major, Commanding Sub-district

SOURCE:  OR, Series I, Volume 22, Part I, Pages 235-236.


Excerpt from a book by Wiley Britton

Information was received from Neosho this morning [March] (9th) that a force of rebels under Livingston made a raid on that place a few nights ago and captured about twenty negroes and a number of horses and mules.  There was not much of a skirmish, for the rebel leader did not venture near where our troops were quartered, and they did not attack him because he had left before they had fairly got into position.  It seems that guards were not posted upon all the roads leading into town; or if they were, that they got captured, or reached the post but a few moments ahead of the enemy.  A couple of soldiers posted on a road several miles out, by the time they had halted and ascertained whether the approaching force was friend or foe, would, if the latter, have few chances of escape, if it were at night.  If Livingston's men are mounted upon as good horses as they are reported to be, they could move more rapidly than an Indian guard mounted on a pony.  In a few weeks the Indian soldiers and all the refugee Indian families will leave Neosho and join us in the Nation, and then it is the intention to have stationed there several companies of the Missouri State Militia, who generally have good horses, and will probably be able at least to hold their own with the, guerrillas of southwest Missouri.

SOURCE:  Wiley Britton, Memoirs of the Rebellion on the Border 1863 (1882), pages 172-173.


Goodspeed's Account of the Neosho Raid

William P. Maguinness, now of Texas, had his farm extending from Color to Ratliff Streets prior to the war.  It appears that a Kansas Federal force placed forty slaves in Maguinness' barn.  While there Livingstone's guerrillas came in, recaptured them, and shot one, who would not leave with them.

SOURCE:  Goodspeed's History of Newton County, Missouri (1888), page 271.

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