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Leighton Shay Morkan’s negress Judith wanted to gossip about a local hanging, but she could not keep his attention. It was a scandal in a nearby town much bandied in the papers, and he was leery of talk about it. Sitting in the mudroom of his farmhouse in Galloway, Missouri, he dug two fingers through lime paste mixed in a spittoon. On a cedar bench knee-to-knee across from him sat his negro hand Isaac, tense as a hound.

Even after the night of gunfire and cannon, of surging, drunken crowds on Market and Water Streets, all down the river front; after flares and rockets; even after the box-shaped gunboat finished thumping bursts of fire and black mounds of smoke, men still staggered under the Weitzers’ window and paused at the visage of the brown Mississippi River.

On the morning of August 10, 1861, miners at the Morkan Quarry heard thunder. They stepped from the shade of a tool shed and gazed west. Lime powdered them white and matted their hair gray with sweat.