The Bee Creek Massacre occurred in December, 1861, when troops of the 18th Missouri Infantry USA executed two Confederate prisoners.
Southern bushwhacker Silas M. Gordon had been operating out of Platte County, Missouri for a number of months before regional Federal military authorities attempted to capture him and his followers. In November, 1861, two Federal soldiers were killed near the Bee Creek Bridge, a few miles south of Weston, Missouri.
By mid-December, elements of the 18th Missouri Infantry were occupying neighboring Platte City and captured Black Triplett, Gabriel Case, and William Kuykendall, three Confederate soldiers that had come home either on furlough or at the expiration of their enlistment terms. Platte Countian W.M. Paxton wrote in a history of the county that he spoke to the 18th Missouri's colonel, W. James Morgan, asking on behalf of Triplett's father for the privilege to speak with his son. Morgan's reply was, "Yes, God damn him! Let him say now what he pleases, for he will never see him alive again."
Instead of leniency, Morgan took Triplett and prisoner Case near to Bee Creek Bridge. Triplett stood and was shot. Case, with arms bound, fled to the nearby creek bed where he quickly became mired in the mud. A Federal soldier descended upon him and bayoneted him to death. The letters "U.S." were scrawled in Triplett's blood on the bridge. The third prisoner, William Kuykendall, was spared.
Famous quotes containing the words bee, creek and/or massacre:
“She saw a dust bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister calxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage!”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“The only law was that enforced by the Creek Lighthorsemen and the U.S. deputy marshals who paid rare and brief visits; or the “two volumes of common law” that every man carried strapped to his thighs.”
—State of Oklahoma, U.S. relief program (1935-1943)
“The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)