Lancaster, laid out as the county seat of newly organized Schuyler County in 1845, stood in one of Missouri's foremost livestock farming counties and was named by pioneer legislator John Lusk for Lancaster, Pennsylvania, while the county took its name from Revolutionary War Gen. Phillip J. Schuyler and occupied territory ceded by the Iowa, Sac, and Fox tribes in 1824. Schuyler County, first permanently settled by Moses Stice in 1834, had long been known to explorers, bee hunters, and surveyors; its first town, Tippecanoe, was settled in the late 1830s about two miles southeast, and the Bee Trace, a noted pioneer trail following the Great Divide between tributaries of the Missouri and Mississippi, ran through the county. During the Civil War, troops of both sides and guerrilla bands overran the county, Union forces occupied Lancaster at times, and sharp skirmishes occurred there on Nov. 24, 1861, and Sept. 7, 1862. After the war, prosperity returned as the North Missouri R.R. reached the county in 1868 and the Missouri, Iowa and Nebraska came to Lancaster in 1872. Lancaster became known for William P. "Diamond Billy" Hall's horse and mule market, through which he supplied thousands of horses and mules to the British in the Boer War and to the Allies in World War I, and after a brief career as a circus operator he also maintained a circus equipment and wild animal brokerage business there. In the Glacial Plains of north Missouri, Lancaster served as the seat of justice for a leading sheep-raising county; the county's northern limits were not settled until the U.S. Supreme Court fixed the Missouri-Iowa boundary in 1851 on the 1824 Iowa, Sac, and Fox Indian purchase line, and Historic Salt River and several forks and divisions of the Fabius rise in Schuyler County. Lancaster was also the birthplace of novelist Rupert Hughes, inventor Howard R. Hughes, and agriculturist John R. Rippey, while financier Tom K. Smith was born in nearby Glenwood and educator and editor Glenn Frank in Queen City to the south.