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  • Wild West

    THE TERRIBLE McWATERS

    Sep 29, 2020 4 minutes
    BY LARRY E. WOOD

    Civil War bushwhacker and postwar outlaw William B. McWaters apparently came by his mean streak naturally, his father also having a penchant for violence. When the family lived in St. Charles County, Missouri, in the 1840s Hugh McWaters and two accomplices beat up a man and were convicted of riot, though the verdict was overturned on a technicality.

    The second of Hugh and Mary McWaters’ eight children, William was born on March 7, 1845, according to family genealogy. After 1850 the McWaters tribe moved to Cedar County in southwest Missouri, where William and brothers took up bushwhacking early in

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