George Caleb Bingham

George Caleb Bingham was an artist whose paintings connected the Missouri River’s role as a route for westward settlement with the wartime devastation of western Missouri. His work on the river and his later response to General Order No. 11 give him a distinct place in the book’s account of the region’s history.

River and Settlement

Bingham’s Missouri River paintings belonged to an era when the river was a principal path for settlers. In Boatmen on the Missouri, a steamer appears through the haze of a sunlit morning. The vessel might have been the Radnor, the Henry Bry, the Winona, or one of more than twenty river packets carrying people from Kentucky. The scene links the river’s landscape to the movement of families into Missouri.

Witness to General Order No. 11

In 1863, Union commander Thomas Ewing ordered civilians from much of Jackson, Cass, and Bates counties to leave their homes, while grain and hay left in the district after the deadline were to be destroyed. Union cavalry took what they found and burned buildings and crops; about twenty thousand people were driven from their homes. Bingham was among those who witnessed the resulting suffering firsthand.

The Order in Art

After the war, Bingham settled in Independence, where his outrage over the measure took artistic form in Order No. 11. The painting shows Ewing driving a family from its home. Bingham’s response thus returned to the displacement not as an abstract military policy but as an act imposed on civilians and families. His work joins his earlier depictions of the river’s role in settlement to a later record of how war transformed the same region.