The Bald Knobbers: Vigilantes of Taney County
Near Branson, Missouri
The word Baldknobbers is all over Branson today, on theaters and shows, but the original Bald Knobbers were something far darker. In the years after the Civil War, Taney County was nearly lawless. By one accounting, roughly forty murders were committed here between eighteen sixty-five and eighteen eighty-five, and not one killer was ever convicted.
In eighteen eighty-three, a Union Army veteran named Nathaniel Kinney gathered about a dozen men on a treeless hilltop, a bald knob, near Kirbyville. They called themselves the Committee for Law and Order, and they set out to punish wrongdoers the courts would not touch. But vigilante justice curdled fast.
The Bald Knobbers whipped and beat their opponents and hanged two men. In February of eighteen eighty-six, Kinney himself shot and killed a nineteen-year-old orphan and outspoken critic named Andrew Coggburn at a church gathering in Forsyth. Kinney claimed self-defense; witnesses said the young man was unarmed.
The cycle of killing eventually claimed Kinney too, and the movement collapsed in the courts. That real history of masked violence is the uneasy shadow behind a name Branson now uses to sell family entertainment.
