Before he led cavalry across central Missouri in the Civil War, Odon Guitar was a Boone County courtroom fixture and one of the University of Missouri’s earliest graduates. His life bridges the town’s two great 19th-century themes: the young university and the war that nearly tore the state apart.
Scholar, gold-seeker, lawyer
According to biographical records, Guitar was born in 1825, graduated among the University of Missouri’s first classes in 1846, tried his luck in the California gold rush, and returned to build a formidable law practice in Columbia. He stayed rooted in Boone County — later serving the university as a curator and the town on its school board.
A general in a war of neighbors
When the Civil War came, Guitar rose to brigadier general in the Missouri State Militia, commanding Union forces against the guerrillas who made central Missouri so dangerous in those years — the same violent landscape that touched Rocheport. His war papers are preserved in the State Historical Society of Missouri’s collections. He died in 1908 and is buried in Columbia Cemetery. Like much of this era, his story sits against the hard backdrop of slavery and a divided state, and is best told with that context kept in view.