Brutal murder.
--W. S. Granville, late Clerk of the Supreme Court of Missouri, and a gentleman of the strictest veracity, in a letter to the Southern Crisis, gives the following account of the murder of Joshua Chilton, State Senator from Shannon county, Mo:Senator Chilton, with two nephews and another young man of his neighborhood, was taken prisoner by a company of Federal sometime last September, while at his home in county, Missouri, attending to his own domestic affairs. The four prisoners were taken to Roila, the county seat of Phelps county, Missouri, and one of the military posts of the enemy; but, from some cause, were neither released nor retained at Roila, but were taken by their captors to a certain place in the vicinity of Salem, Don't county, where they were all deliberately shot, except one of the nephews, who, at the moment when immediate death stared him in the face, managed to make his escape, and hastened with the melancholy tidings of the fale of his comrades to their friends and families at home.--The blood-thirsty monsters, after perpetrating this diabolical act as it to make their crime more hideous, if possible, cut off the bead of Senator Chilton, hoisted it upon a pole planted by the roadside, and there left it--"a warning," as they were afterwards heard to say, "to all rebels and traitors" The bodies of these unfortunate men were subsequently recovered by friends and interred.
The sheriff of Oregon county, and many other citizens, were murdered in a similar manner, about the same time and subsequently.
