Excerpt from History of Monroe and Shelby Counties, Missouri: Written and Compiled From the Most Authentic Official and Private Sources, Including a History of Their Townships, Towns and Villages May seem tame when compared with accounts of battles and sieges. Nevertheless, the faithful gathering, and the truthful narration of facts, bearing upon the early settlement of the country and the dan gers, hardships and privations, encountered by the early pioneers engaged in advancing the standard of civilization, is a work of no small magnitude, and the facts thus narrated are such as may chal lenge the admiration and arouse the sympathy of the reader, albeit, they have nothing to do with the feats of arms. The History of Monroe and Shelby counties has been written, in many respects, under trying circumstances. There has been no lack of material, but the work of collecting and compiling the same into one homogeneous record has been attended with many obstacles and perplexities, and in presenting this history to the citizens of these counties, we do so with the full knowledge that errors will be found within its pages. If this were not so it would be different from any work yet completed by human hands, absolute perfection never having been attained either in the historical or any other field of earthly labor. The facts and incidents herein treated have been gleaned from the memories of old settlers, from the files of old newspapers, from the records of early courts, and from a host of public and private citizens, and from all other sources whence there could be derived any thing that would. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.