Jackson County (Mo.) Historical Society

Historical Perspective

by David W. Jackson

Abuse and murder on the frontier

The next time you’re out at the Eastland Shopping Center (on the grounds of the former Crackerneck Country Club) at I-70 and M-291, notice how the beautiful Little Blue River meanders through that area. In the 1830s, Williamson Hawkins, his wife Rebecca, and their family lived in a log cabin in this vicinity.

Rebecca, an illiterate mother of five and pregnant with her sixth child, had no choice but to follow her husband when he picked up and moved his family west from their Tennessee home in 1830. They traveled by wagon and settled in newly created Jackson County where Hawkins began accumulating land. Within eight years, he retained 1,680 acres of land, including two gristmills along the Little Blue River, and ten slaves.

During this time, Rebecca bore three more children, and the family appeared to be living solid, hardy, pioneer lives. But, under the surface lurked a painful truth. For nearly 20 years—all her married life—Rebecca Hawkins suffered Williamson’s physical abuse. It was common knowledge in the small, rural Jackson County community that her husband, under the influence of whiskey, routinely beat and whipped Rebecca, as proved through historical documents presented by biographer William B. Bundschu, in his book, Abuse and Murder on the Frontier: The Trials and Travels of Rebecca Hawkins: 1800-1860.

In 1838, Rebecca sought a home remedy to her desperate situation. She stirred white arsenic ratsbane poison into her husband’s coffee. Her initial attempt to end the attacks by removing the attacker failed (and there’s evidence she may have tried it twice). Still, Williamson, ill from the effects of an unknown plague, made out a lengthy Last Will and Testament.

Meanwhile, Rebecca resorted to Plan B. She paid $150 to her next-door neighbor, Henry Garster, to administer another form of poison—a lethal dose of lead poisoning by way of a gun. Garster removed a portion of the mud chinking between the logs of the cabin, aimed a squirrel rifle, and shot Williamson in the heart while he was sitting asleep before the fireplace.

Unfortunately for Garster, he was tracked to his house by footprints he left in a light layer of snow. He ultimately paid for his part with his life in the first legal hanging in Jackson County in 1839 (it would be another 40 years before the next hanging). Rebecca was arrested, tried and acquitted on charges of aiding the murder. But, she was convicted on charges of poisoning based on testimony quoting a conversation with her own slave, Mary.

Bundschu writes, “Rebecca…could well have been a model for the statues of “Pioneer Mothers” placed along the [trails…as she] certainly endured the variety of hardships and loneliness that the sculptors and sponsors of the statues had in mind. They might not have endorsed her final remedy for one of the all-too-frequent hardships—spousal abuse—but they would have understood the pain that drove her to use it.”

What was the fate of Rebecca Hawkins?

Her life’s story is presented in Abuse and Murder on the Frontier in short, easy-to-read chapters, and packed with detail that all add up to answering the complex question as to whether her experience was typical or unique among women on the Missouri frontier. Abuse and Murder also yields interesting information about various aspects of every-day life in Jackson County in the 1830s.

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