e bolder
eking out this by depredations upon their thriftier neighbors. Their
forebears had been paupers and criminals when sent from England, and the
descendants continued to be paupers and criminals in the new country,
forming a clearly marked social class, so distinct as to warrant the
surmise that they belonged to a different race. As the eastern part of
the South and the administration of the laws improved, this element
was to some extent forced out, and spread in a noisome trail over
Mississippi, Arkansas and Missouri. While other immigrants went into the
unbroken forest with a few rude tools and in the course of several years
built up comfortable homes, their's never rose above abject squalor. The
crudest of cabins sufficed them for shelter, beds of beech leaves were
all the couches they required; they had more guns in their huts than
agricultural or mechanical implements; they scarcely pretended to raise
anything more than a scanty patch of corn; and when they could not put
on their tables the flesh of the almost wild razor-back hog which roamed
the woods, they made meat of woodchucks, raccoons, opossums or any other
"varmint" their guns could bring down. They did not scorn hawks or owls
if hunger demanded and no better meat could be found.

11

It was this "White Trash" which added so much to the horrors of the war,
especially in Missouri, and so little to its real prosecution. Wolf-like
in ferocity, when the advantages were on their side, they were wolf-like
in cowardice when the terms were at all equal. They were the Croats,
Cossacks, Tolpatches, Pandours of the Confederacy--of little value in
battle, but terrible as guerrillas and bushwhackers. From this "White
Trash" came the gangs of murderers and robbers, like those led by the
Youngers, Jameses, Quantrils and scores of other names of criminal
memory.

As has been the case in all times and countries, these dregs of society
became the willing tools of the Slaveholding aristocrats. With dog-like
fidelity they followed and served the class which despised and overrode
them. Somehow, by inherited habits likely, they seemed to avoid the
more fertile parts of the State. They thus became "Bald Knobbers"
and "Ozarkers" in Missouri, as they had been "Clay Eaters" in South
Carolina, or "Sang Diggers" in Virginia.

With these immigrants from the South came also large numbers of a far
better element even than the arrogant Slaveowners or the abject "White
Trash."