Cooperation between the Vernon County Historical Society and the Sons of Confederate Veterans should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the local past (or even merely with the local present: Bushwhacker Days and all that). According to the record, 19 out of 20 Vernon Countians were Confederate sympathizers. Proportionate to population, Bushwhackers apart, the county sent more men to the Confederate army than any other in Missouri.

The VCHS, as a group devoted to truth (however "politically incorrect") in local history, logically finds itself sharing a tent, so to speak, with the SCV. The latter's devotion is historical truth overall (however "politically incorrect," again). Specifically: remembering and cherishing the Confederate heritage, honoring the valor and sacrifices of people who fought for "what they thought was right," just as did their opponents, in a war some are now doing their damnedest to "dumb down" to a crusade of right against wrong, good against evil. The SCV tries to stay out of politics, but sometimes finds itself forced, in sheer self-defense, to take up the old fight, for the same old right. With words, not swords. But words, too, can cut.

The Col. John T. Coffee Camp No. 1934 of the Sons of Confederate Veterans rose from the ashes, so to speak, just three years ago. With Stockton as home base, it has members, meetings, and activities throughout west central Missouri. Several Camp officers are VCHS members, the Bushwhacker Museum has hosted Camp meetings, and Vernon County has seen by far the largest number of Camp events, two of which came rousingly off just this fall.

The occasions are perfect, resounding rebuttals of the many recent mouthings of on-the make political ignoramuses and journalistic hatchet-work against the SCV. Two happier, more heartening public doingses couldn't have been asked for, or even imagined.

On Oct. 11, VCHS members were part of a public turnout of some 50, from Oklahoma, Jefferson City, Kansas City, and Florida, as well as closer by. Many were kinfolk of Hiram Ready, the Confederate soldier being commemorated, gathered about his monument in Walnut Grove Cemetery on the Vernon-Cedar county line, east of Montevallo.

Before returning to Montevallo for the Camp's annual picnic, the party moved on a few miles south, and enjoyed a hayride through tall prairie grasses and glorious October air and color to the lonely burial vault of five Confederate recruits killed in battle in 1862 and buried where they fell. A kinswoman of one of the five learned of the event by sheer chance and drove over from St. Louis with her husband to behold the vault, hear the tale, as told by the gray-uniformed Eldon Steward, who'd personally reconstructed the tumbledown but still imposing, marblelidded vault, and leave a floral tribute. Her turning up enabled the Camp to keep its perfect record of drawing at least one relative to each of its commemorative ceremonies.

Again, 16 VCHS members joined some 200 others on Nov. 1 for the dedication of the Coffee Camp's newest project, the monument to the Missouri Confederate Brigades, in the roadside park overlooking the scenic Sac-Osage river junction, just west of Osceola, Mo., on Missouri Highway 82. VCHS board member and Bushwhacker Museum coordinator Terry Ramsey was one of the speakers, wearing two of her many other hats as a board member of the Missouri Travel Council and a member of the Missouri Division of Tourism's Civil War Committee. Frank Carlton, also a VCHS board member, as camp chaplain, gave the invocation and benediction. His wife Linda sang her own composition, "Missouri Brigade." The Missouri Brigades were the some 12,000 men of the Missouri State Guard (the state's army), who mustered in "Sauk River Camp," as it was then called, in the fall of 1861, following their victory in the Battle of Lexington. There, led by Gen. Sterling Price, they drilled and learned the art of war. Some 8,000 then joined the regular Confederate army, leaving 2,000 as a "rump" State Guard brigade led by Gen. M. M. Parsons. The remaining 2,000 went home, turned Bushwhacker to try to protect their families from rampaging Kansans.

Some 15 officers present at Sauk River Camp went on to become Confederate generals.

Only 300 men of the Missouri Brigades survived to return to Missouri at the war's end. They spent 37 of their 40 months' service outside Missouri. Confederate Pres. Jefferson Davis called them "the finest body of soldiers ever gazed upon."

Memorials to them have long stood on their faraway battle sites, but none, till now, in their home state.

Osceola was a major town of 3000 before the Jayhawkers burned it, and carried off an estimated million dollars worth of private property, only a month before the Missouri troops began moving into their camp. Dstinguished Osceolan U. S. Senator Waldo P. Johnson had his stately home burned by his Senate colleague, the jayhawking Jim Lane.

Among the speakers at the dedication was Johnson's great-grandson, Bill Farmer. Other speakers included William G. Piston, professor of history at Southwest Missouri State University, Springfield, and Jay Jackson, school principal at Missouri City, who co-authored the inscription on the large Missouri Red granite monument, shaped like the state. The featured speaker was author and lecturer David C. Reif, who "addressed the group with Southern passion." Wreaths were laid from the Springfield chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The monument was then unveiled by Geraldine Ayres, granddaughter of a Confederate soldier, and Pauline Fast, of the Roscoe Historical Society.

The ceremony ended with an earthshaking salute by three cannons, manned by separate costumed reenactor crews. Some 40 other reenactors, participating in the nearby weekend encampment, were on hand to add a rousing Rebel yell. Many spectators as well showed up in period costume. State and national Confederate flags fluttered gaily, while the big Battle Flag defiantly draped the podium, shrinking the speakers to "talking heads." Still, one couldn't help being struck by the traditional, "mainstream" ambiance of these two occasions. Never was heard a discouraging word. Where was all that "hate" incessantly decried to the high heavens by sanctimonious, on-the-make bigmouths, and tut-tutted by every wild-eyed liberal journalistic hack? All to be seen, heard, or felt was a blessed, brief breath of peace and good will in a jangling world of debunkings and cynicism, of lockstep "diversity" and bigoted "tolerance" and whipped-up "multicultural" hate of a culture, a heritage.

"Politically incorrect" hosts and guests alike were as unapologetic in their religious as in their Confederate piety. The chaplain matter-of-factly asked God's blessing "in Jesus's name."

Even this poor heathen went away musing that perhaps God indeed was in his heaven, and all, if not quite right with the world, at least wasn't hopelessly wrong with it after all, as the "politically correct" would have us believe, and which of course only they can set right.