Midway on Missouri's western border, Cass County was organized in 1835 and named Van Buren, then renamed in 1849 for Democrat Lewis Cass after Martin Van Buren's Free-Soil Party affiliation. In territory ceded by the Osage tribes in 1825, it was first settled in 1828 by David Creek, and its early pioneers were mainly from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. Harrisonville, the county seat, was laid out in 1837 and named for Missouri Congressman Albert G. Harrison, and its 1897 courthouse is the county's third. Pleasant Hill, the second town founded, was laid out in 1844 near a store opened in 1833 by Blois, a French Canadian. Torn by strife in the 1854-59 Missouri-Kansas Border War, Cass was one of the counties named in Thomas Ewing's Order No. 11, issued August 25, 1863, to curb guerrilla warfare and forcing people from their homes except in or near Union-held Pleasant Hill and Harrisonville. Near Freeman is the site of the Battle of Morristown, where about 500 men under Union Colonel H.P. Johnson, who was killed, routed some 100 State Guards led by Colonel H.I. Irvin in September 1861. Resettlement brought the county a population of 19,296 by 1870. A county of handsome livestock and grain farms, Cass lies in Missouri's Western Prairie Region. During 1865-1904, the Missouri Pacific, Missouri-Kansas-Texas, Kansas City Southern, Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific, Frisco, and Kansas City, Clinton and Springfield railroads were built in the county, many towns were laid out, and Pleasant Hill and Harrisonville grew as shipping points. In 1872 the county was victimized by a county court railroad bond swindle; two guilty officials, out on bond, and a friend, attempting to leave, were killed by a mob that boarded their train at Gunn City, no one was ever punished, and it took some 50 years to pay off the bond debt. At Belton is buried temperance agitator Carry Moore Nation, and her grave marker reads, "She hath done what she could." In the Pleasant Hill post office is Tom Lea's mural "Back Home April, 1865." Buried in a cemetery there are Confederate General Hiram S. Bledsoe and Caroline Abbott Stanley, author of the novel "Order No. 11," and Missouri geologist Garland Carr Broadhead and political scientist James A. Smith lived there, while musician Robert Russell Bennett lived near Freeman as a youth.