The first white settlement in Scotland County was in 1833 by brothers Levi and George Rhodes and their families near a location known as Sand Hill.

Once the stands of timber were cleared and the tough prairie grass plowed aside, settlers found rich soil.

After a brief battle the MSG forces, mostly lightly armed cavalry, were driven from the town and surrounding areas of Scotland County and Moore's unit returned to its main base at Athens, Missouri.

On July 13, 1862, Confederate Colonel Joseph C. Porter approached Memphis in four converging columns totaling 125–169 men and captured it with little or no resistance.

Citizens expressed their sympathies variously; Porter gave safe passage to a physician, an admitted Union supporter, who was anxious to return to his seriously ill wife.

Porter's troops entered the courthouse and destroyed all indictments for horse theft, an act variously understood as simple lawlessness, intervention on behalf of criminal associates, or interference with politically motivated, fraudulent charges.

[5] At Memphis, a key incident occurred that darkened Porter's reputation, and which his detractors see as part of a behavioral pattern that put him and his men beyond the norms of warfare.

Stacy was generally regarded as a genuine bushwhacker; other members of Porter's command called his company "the chain gang" due to its behavior.

After rousing Aylward overnight and removing him from his home, ostensibly to see Porter, guards claimed that he escaped.

But witnesses reported hearing the sounds of a strangling, and his body was found the next day with marks consistent with hanging or strangulation.

Union Colonel (later General) John McNeil had been pursuing Porter and his forces across northeast Missouri for some time.

Hearing of the capture of Memphis, McNeil sent a detachment of three companies (C, H, and I), about 300 men, of Merrill's Horse under Major John Y. Clopper from Newark, Missouri, to rescue the town.

By whatever name, it happened about ten miles southwest of Memphis on the south fork of the Middle Fabius River.

Porter's men were concealed in brush and stayed low when the Federals stopped to fire before each charge.

A battalion of roughly 100 men[6] of the 11th Missouri State Militia Cavalry under Major Rogers arrived and dismounted.

Before the final charge, one company officer angrily asked, "Why don't you dismount those men and stop murdering them?