Joseph Shelby was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1830, where he was raised and attended Transylvania College; in 1852 he moved to Missouri where he became one of the richest young men in the state as a hemp farmer, rope manufacturer, and steamboat owner.
In 1854, he returned to Kentucky where he recruited and outfitted a company of pro-slavery cavalry to fight in Kansas against the free-soil forces. When the Civil War broke out he was called to St. Louis by his cousin Frank Blair, who offered him a Federal commission as a captain. Shelby refused to join the Union forces, and instead recruited and outfitted a company of pro-Southern mounted rangers and accepted a commission as a captain in the Missouri State Guard.
Shelby and his men were involved in nearly every major battle in Missouri and Arkansas, including Carthage, Wilson’s Creek, Lexington, Pea Ridge, Prairie Grove and Springfield. He led an impressive, lengthy raid through Missouri in the fall of 1863, an act that won him promotion to brigadier general, and served with distinction in the repulse of Frederick Steele’s Camden Expedition in southern Arkansas in the spring of 1864. That fall, Shelby led his “Iron Brigade” in Price’s Missouri Raid, and saved Price’s army from likely disaster at the Battle of Westport.
When the war ended, Shelby and his men refused to admit defeat, and sinking their battle flag in the Rio Grande River, crossed into Mexico and established the Colony of Carlotta. He returned to Missouri in 1867, where he became a key figure in helping heal the wounds of the Civil War. In 1892, President Grover Cleveland appointed Shelby U.S. Marshal of the Western District of Missouri, a position he held until his death from pneumonia on February 13, 1897.
Image Courtesy Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield; WICR 31493
