McDonald County, encompassing 540 square miles in Missouri’s extreme southwest, was formed in 1847 as Seneca, fully organized in 1849, and named for Revolutionary War soldier Alexander McDonald. Its county seat, Pineville, was laid out by Nathan Richardson in 1847 and first called Maryville; the judicial seat was first at Rutledge, or Elk Springs, before being moved to Pineville in 1857 after a bitter dispute. At the headwaters of Elk River, Pineville was a lively trading post for reservation Indians from what is now Oklahoma and for settlers in 1860, and a Jesse James movie was made there in 1938. The county’s first settlers were Valentine Miller and family in 1827, and many pioneers came from Kentucky and Tennessee. In the 1840s, the Pine War pitted settlers against U.S. marshals over cutting trees on public land, and in the 1850s bands of Slickers briefly tried to stop land sales. During the War Between the States, this pro-Southern county on the Arkansas and Oklahoma borders saw heavy troop movement, sharp skirmishes, and guerrilla raids; just over the border in Arkansas lies Pea Ridge Battlefield, site of a decisive Union victory on March 7-8, 1862. Later known as a resort county in the Ozark Playgrounds Region, McDonald County lay in a dairy, livestock, poultry, fruit, and timber area, with processing plants at Noel and at Anderson, the county’s largest town, founded in 1887. Near Anderson stood Splitlog, once a boom town where Mathias Splitlog, a wealthy Wyandotte Indian, and others went broke mining fool’s gold, and where Splitlog began the county’s first railroad; the Kansas City and Southern was built through the county in the 1890s. At Southwest City, settled in the 1840s, stands the Missouri-Arkansas-Oklahoma tri-state boundary marker bearing the admission dates of the three states: Missouri, 1821; Arkansas, 1836; and Oklahoma, 1907. Noel, named for Bridge Noel and founded in 1891, gives cancellation on Christmas mail. Other towns in the county include Rocky Comfort, Tiff City, Goodman, Powell, Jane, and Lanagan. The county also contains Jacob’s, Bluff Dwellers, Shira, and Ozark Wonder caves, as well as ancient Bluff Dweller sites, Indian mounds, and trails in an area that was part of the 1825 Osage Indian land cession, and nearby in Oklahoma near Southwest City, Missouri, lies the burial place of Stan Watie, a Cherokee and the only Confederate Indian general.