Sifoddling Along

By Marilyn Carnell

I planned to write about the holidays this month, but no story emerged from my busy brain. Below is background information concerning the Civil War novel I am writing about a capricious young woman named Bonnie Faye Doolittle:

Before dawn on April 12, 1861, Confederate forces fired on Ft. Sumter in the Charleston, South Carolina harbor. That action marked the beginning of the most devastating war in United States history and sent shock waves across a divided nation.

Trouble had been brewing about the issue of slavery for many years, but few areas of the massive conflict were to be as affected as a small patch of land colloquially known as Lapland. A place where the confluence of politically drawn borders fluidly “lapped” over each other.

The battles at Wilson’s Creek and Pea Ridge are less well known than battles east of the Mississippi – Antietam, Bull Run, and Gettysburg, but the early warfare to make Missouri part of the Confederacy were catastrophic to the residents of extreme southwest Missouri. It is one thing to read about war in a newspaper and quite another when the action occurs in your own backyard.

There were many problems. The South was poorly prepared for warfare. The horde of Southern men gathered on the Cowskin Prairie were ill-equipped. They lacked uniforms, guns, ammunition, and food. This forced them to range about the countryside looking for any needed supplies. Moreover, they were not very particular about how they obtained their acquisitions.

Random, ferocious attacks by bushwhackers were a part of life from the early days before and during the war until the bitter end. Although many schoolchildren are taught that the war ended with Lee’s surrender after the battle of the courthouse at Appomattox, it was not that tidy. President Lincoln learned of this momentous event before he was shot by John Wilkes Booth on April 14. Texas continued to have spotty resistance until the war was declared over on April 2, 1866. By that time, Lapland was an empty wasteland.

Bonnie Faye Doolittle was born in Lapland – a crossroads of geography, political divide, and cultures. Located at the end of the Mason-Dixon line that separated the North from the South, it abutted Indian Territory and was down the road from Bloody Kansas.

Precisely, Bonnie Faye was born in Pineville, Missouri, the County Seat of McDonald County nestled in the western Ozark Mountains. Its land and residents were trampled by armies and bandits of both the North and South during the four long years of the war.

Bonnie Faye’s parents migrated from Tennessee to the southwest corner of Missouri in 1840, and she came into the world in 1842. She was born under poor circumstances. Despite everything her father, Dr. Papa, could do, he could not save his beloved wife from bleeding to death when Bonnie Faye was three days old. As the town’s only physician, he knew that a neighbor, Little Feather McClain, had lost her baby only a few days before, so he hired her as a wet nurse to save his baby daughter. Little Feather, heartbroken at the loss of her own child, nursed her with care and affection.

Dr. Papa had no inclination to marry again, so with Little Feather’s help, he raised Bonnie Faye. She flourished under their hands and developed an opinion that the world centered on her belly button, although she would never have described it in such a crude way.