Four months after his death in Texas on May 23, 1890, a Missouri weekly newspaper, the Greenfield Dade County Advocate, carried an obituary about John Trousdale Coffee. The obituary mentioned that "much of Col. Coffee's life was connected with this city...there are scarcely any here who do not know something of him personally or by reputation. (1) What the readers of the obituary remembered or knew concerned Coffee's years as a Mason, as an attorney, as a politician and as a leader of Confederate cavalry during the terrible years of the Civil War. Some Dade Countians also would have remembered Coffee as a hard-drinking and oft-married man noted for his "positive convictions" on many subjects. But the most vivid recollections of the people would pertain to Coffee's military exploits as a successful recruiter for the Confederate cause and for his troop of cavalry which rambled back and forth through Missouri and Arkansas. Coffee's men, during this perilous time, had caused Union sympa...
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