A portrait of Alexander Doniphan, painted by George Caleb Bingham around 1850

Born on July 9, 1808, in Mason County, Kentucky, Alexander William Doniphan was the son of…

James Eads. [Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Photographs and Prints Collection, P0004-1016]

Born in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, on May 23, 1820, James Buchanan Eads became an engineer of…

Daniel Marsh Frost

Daniel Marsh Frost, a Confederate army officer, was born on August 9, 1823, in Mariaville,…

Claiborne Fox Jackson. [Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Photographs and Prints Collection, N21069]

Claiborne Fox Jackson was born in rural Fleming County, in northeastern Kentucky, on April…

Stephen Watts Kearny. [Engraving by Y. B. Welch for Graham’s Magazine, from an original daguerreotype by Peter A. Juley & Son, photographers. Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, California Faces: Selections from the Bancroft Library Portrait Collection]

Stephen Watts Kearny was born on August 30, 1794, in Newark, New Jersey. He was the…

Nathaniel N. Kinney. [State Historical Society of Missouri, Rolla Research Center, William L. Vandeventer Papers (R1428)]

Nathaniel “Nat” N. Kinney has a popular image as a romantic, violent, swashbuckling…

An artist’s depiction of Fort San Carlos. Constructed under orders from Fernando de Leyba, it played a crucial role in stopping the British attack on St. Louis in 1780. [Walter B. Stevens, ed., History of St. Louis the Fourth City, 1764–1909, vol. 1 (1909)]

Controversy swirled around Upper Louisiana’s third lieutenant governor in life and in death…

Nathaniel Lyon. Engraving by John A. O’Neill. [State Historical Society of Missouri, Art Collection, 15613]

Nathaniel Lyon, a US Army officer from 1841 to 1861, was born in rural Ashford (later…

John Sappington Marmaduke in his Confederate brigadier general’s uniform. [Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-cwpb-06001]

Born on March 14, 1833, near Arrow Rock, Missouri, John Sappington Marmaduke is the only…

George Caleb Bingham’s depiction of the violence and tragedy of the Missouri-Kansas border war in his iconic painting Order No. 11. [State Historical Society of Missouri Art Collection, 1945.0003]

Civil war raged along the Kansas-Missouri border for nearly a…