Part 1

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CHARLES W. QUANTRELL

A TRUE HISTORY OF HIS GUERRILLA WARFARE ON THE MISSOURI AND KANSAS BORDER DURING THE CIVIL WAR OF 1861 TO 1865

By JOHN P. BURCH

_ILLUSTRATED_

AS TOLD BY

CAPTAIN HARRISON TROW

ONE WHO FOLLOWED QUANTRELL THROUGH HIS WHOLE COURSE

COPYRIGHT, 1923 BY J. P. BURCH VEGA TEXAS

CONTENTS

PAGE

Introduction 11

The False Jonah 13

Early Life of Quantrell 15

Why the Quantrell Guerrillas Were Organized 23

Quantrell’s First Battle in the Civil War 29

Fight at Charles Younger’s Farm 35

Fight at Independence 37

Second Fight at Independence 39

Flanked Independence 41

Fight at Tate House 43

Fight at Clark’s Home 51

Jayhawkers and Militia Murdered Old Man Blythe’s Son 59

The Low House Fight 63

Quantrell and Todd Go After Ammunition 69

A Challenge 73

The Battle and Capture of Independence 77

Lone Jack Fight 85

The March South in 1862 97

Younger Remains in Missouri Winter of 1862 and 1863 105

The Trip North in 1863 121

Jesse James Joins the Command 131

Lawrence Massacre 141

Order Number 11, August, 1863 155

Fights and Skirmishes, Fall and Winter, 1863–1864 159

Blue Springs Fight, 1863 163

Wellington 165

The Grinter Fight 171

The Centralia Massacre 175

Anderson 187

Press Webb, a Born Scout 193

Little Blue 205

Arrock Fight, Spring of 1864 207

Fire Bottom Prairie Fight, Spring of 1864 209

Death of Todd and Anderson, October, 1864 213

Going South, Fall of 1864 223

The Surrender 229

Death of Quantrell 237

The Youngers and Jameses After the War 253

Do not loan this book out to neighbors and friends If You Do You Will Never Get It Back

Keep it in your Library When You Are Not Reading It

If You Want One Send to

J. P. BURCH, VEGA, TEXAS

And He Will Mail You One At Once

INTRODUCTION

Captain Harrison Trow, who will be eighty years old this coming October, was with Quantrell during the whole of the conflict from 1861 to 1865, and for the past twenty years I have been at him to give his consent for me to write a true history of the Quantrell Band, until at last he has given it.

This narrative was written just as he told it to me, giving accounts of fights that he participated in, narrow escapes experienced, dilemmas it seemed almost impossible to get out of, and also other battles; the life of the James boys and Youngers as they were with Quantrell during the war, and after the war, when they became outlaws by publicity of the daily newspapers, being accused of things which they never did and which were laid at their feet.

Captain Trow identified Jesse James when the latter was killed at St. Joseph. He also was the last man to surrender in the State of Missouri.

JOHN P. BURCH.

THE AUTHOR

Captain Harrison Trow was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 16, 1843, moved to Illinois in 1848, and thence to Missouri in 1850, and went to Hereford, Texas, in 1901, where he now resides. At the age of nine years, he, having one of the nicest, neatest and sweetest stepmothers (as they all are), and things not being as pleasant at home as they should be (which is often the case where there is a stepmother), and getting all the peach tree sprouts for the whole family used on him, he decided the world was too large for him to take such treatment, and one day he proceeded to give the stepmother a good flogging, such as he had been getting, and left for brighter fields.

In a few days he made his way to Independence, Missouri, got into a game of marbles, playing keeps, in front of a blacksmith shop, and won seventy-five cents. Then and there Uncle George Hudsbath rode up and wanted to hire a hand. Young Trow jumped at the job and talked to Mr. Hudsbath a few minutes and soon was up behind him and riding away to his new home. Young Trow proved to be the lad Uncle George was looking for and stayed with him until the war broke out.

The False Jonah

Early in the year of 1861, about in January, Jim Lane sent a false Jonah down to Missouri to investigate the location of the negroes and stock, preparing to make a raid within a short time. This Jonah located first at Judge Gray’s house at Bone Hill, was fed by Judge Gray’s “niggers” and was secreted in an empty ice house where they kept ice in the summer time. He would come out in the night time and plan with the “niggers” for their escape into Kansas with the horses, buggies and carriages and other valuables belonging to their master that they could get possession of. But an old negro woman, old Maria by name, gave the Jonah away.

Chat Rennick, one of the neighbors, and two other men secreted themselves in the negroes’ cabin so as to hear what he was telling the negroes. After he had made all his plans for their escape Chat Rennick came out on him with the other two men and took him prisoner and started north to the Missouri River. Securing a skiff, they floated out into the river and when in about the center there came up a heavy gale, and one of these gentlemen thought it best to unload part of the cargo, so he was thrown overboard. As for the negroes, they repented in sack cloth and ashes and all stayed at home and took care of their master and mistress, as Jonah did in the olden times. As for the Jonah, I do not know whether the fish swallowed him or not, but if one did he did not get sick and throw him up. This took place at my wife’s uncle’s home, Judge James Gray.

Early Life of Quantrell

The early life of Quantrell was obscure and uneventful. He was born near Hagerstown, Maryland, July 20, 1836, and was reared there until he was sixteen years of age. He remained always an obedient and affectionate son. His mother had been left a widow when he was only a few years old.

For some time preceding 1857, Quantrell’s only brother lived in Kansas. He wrote to his younger brother, Charles, to come there, and after his arrival they decided on a trip to California. About the middle of the summer of 1857 the two started for California with a freight outfit. Upon reaching Little Cottonwood River, Kansas, they decided to camp for the night. This they did. All was going well. After supper twenty-one outlaws, or Redlegs, belonging to Jim Lane at Lawrence, Kansas, rode up and killed the elder brother, wounded Charles, and took everything in sight, money, and even the “nigger” who went with them to do the cooking. They thought more of the d----d “nigger” than they did of all the rest of the loot. They left poor Charles there to die and be eaten later by wolves or some other wild animal that might come that way. Poor Charles lay there for three days before anyone happened by, guarding his dead brother, suffering near death from his wounds. After three days an old Shawnee Indian named Spye Buck came along, buried the elder brother and took Charles to his home and nursed him back to life and strength. After six months to a year Charles Quantrell was able to go at ease, and having a good education for those days, got a school and taught until he had earned enough money to pay the old Indian for keeping him while he was sick and to get him to Lawrence. He reached Lawrence and went to where Jim Lane was stationed with his company. He wanted to get into the company that murdered his brother and wounded himself. After a few days he was taken in and, from outward appearance, he became a full-fledged Redleg, but in his heart he was doing this only to seek revenge on those who had killed his brother and wounded him at Cottonwood, Kansas.

Quantrell, now known as Charles Hart, became intimate with Lane and ostensibly attached himself to the fortunes of the anti-slavery party. In order to attain his object and get a step nearer his goal, it became necessary for him to speak of John Brown. He always spoke of him to General Lane, who was at that time Colonel Lane, in command of a regiment at Lawrence, as one for whom he had great admiration. Quantrell became enrolled in a company that held all but two of the men who had done the deadly work at Cottonwood, Kansas. First as a private, then as an orderly and sergeant, Quantrell soon gained the esteem of his officers and the confidence of his men.

One day Quantrell and three men were sent down in the neighborhood of Wyandotte to meet a wagon load of “niggers” coming up to Missouri under the pilotage of Jack Winn, a somewhat noted horse thief and abolutionist. One of the three men failed to return with Quantrell, nor could any account be given of his absence until his body was found near a creek several days afterwards. In the center of his forehead was the round, smooth hole of a navy revolver bullet. Those who looked for Jack Winn’s safe arrival were also disappointed. People traveling the road passed the corpse almost daily and the buzzards found it first, and afterwards the curious. There was the same round hole in the forehead and the same sure mark of the navy revolver bullet. This thing went on for several months, scarcely a week passing but that some sentinel was found dead at his post, some advance picket surprised and shot at his outpost watch station.

The men began to whisper, one to another, and to cast about for the cavalry Jonah who was in their midst. One company alone, that of Captain Pickins, the company to which Quantrell belonged, had lost thirteen men between October, 1859 and 1860. Other companies had lost two to three each. A railroad conductor named Rogers had been shot through the forehead. Quantrell and Pickens became intimate, as a captain and lieutenant of the same company should, and confided many things to each other. One night the story of the Cottonwood River was told and Pickens dwelt with just a little relish upon it. Three days later Pickens and two of his most reliable men were found dead on Bull Creek, shot like the balance, in the middle of the forehead. For a time after Pickens’ death there was a lull in the constant conscription demanded by the Nemesis. The new lieutenant bought himself a splendid uniform, owned the best horse in the territory and instead of one navy revolver, now had two. Organizations of all sorts now sprang up, Free Soil clubs, Men of Equal Rights, Sons of Liberty, Destroying Angels, Lane’s Loyal Leaguers, and everyone made haste to get his name signed to both constitution and by-laws.

Lawrence especially effected the Liberator Club, whose undivided mission was to found freedom for all the slaves now in Missouri.

Quantrell persevered in his efforts to kill all of the men who had had a hand in the killing of his brother and the wounding of himself. With this in view, he induced seven Liberators to co-operate with him in an attack on Morgan Walker. These seven men whom Quantrell picked were the last except two of the men he had sworn vengeance upon when left to die at Cottonwood River, Kansas. He told them that Morgan Walker had a lot of “niggers,” horses and cattle and money and that the sole purpose was to rob and kill him. Quantrell’s only aim was to get these seven men. Morgan Walker was an old citizen of Jackson County, a venerable pioneer who had settled there when buffalo grazed on the prairie beyond Westport and where, in the soft sands beyond the inland streams, there were wolf and moccasin tracks. This man, Morgan Walker, was the man Quantrell had proposed to rob. He lived some five or six miles from Independence and owned about twenty negroes of various ages and sizes. The probabilities were that a skillfully conducted raid might leave him without a “nigger.”

Well mounted and armed, the little detachment left Lawrence quietly, rode two by two, far apart, until the first rendezvous was reached, a clump of timber at a ford on Indian Creek. It was the evening of the second day, and they tarried long enough to rest their horses and eat a hearty supper.

Before daylight the next morning the entire party were hidden in some heavy timber about two miles west of Walker’s house. There these seven men stayed, none of them stirring, except Quantrell. Several times during the day, however, he went backwards and forwards, apparently to the fields where the negroes were at work, and whenever he returned he brought something either for the horses or the men to eat.

Mr. Walker had two sons, and before it was yet night, these boys and their father were seen putting into excellent order their double-barrel shotguns, and a little later three neighbors who likewise carried double-barrel shotguns rode up to the house. Quantrell, who brought news of many other things to his comrades, brought no note of this. If he saw it he made no sign. When Quantrell arranged his men for the dangerous venture they were to proceed, first to the house, gain access to it, capture all the male members of the family and put them under guard, assemble all the negroes and make them hitch up the horses to the wagons and then gallop them for Kansas. Fifty yards from the gate the eight men dismounted and fastened their horses, and the march to the house began. Quantrell led. He was very cool and seemed to see everything. The balance of his men had their revolvers in their hands while he had his in his belt. Quantrell knocked loudly at the oaken panel of the door. No answer. He knocked again and stood perceptibly at one side. Suddenly the door flared open and Quantrell leaped into the hall with a bound like a red deer. A livid sheet of flame burst out through the darkness where he had disappeared, followed by another as the second barrels of the guns were discharged and the tragedy was over. Six fell where they stood, riddled with buckshot. One staggered to the garden and died there. The seventh, hard hit and unable to mount his horse, dragged himself to a patch of timber and waited for the dawn. They tracked him by the blood upon the leaves and found him early in the morning. Another volley, and the last Liberator was liberated.

Walker and his two sons, assisted by three of the stalwart and obliging neighbors, had done a clean night’s work, and a righteous one. This being the last of the Redlegs, except two, who murdered Quantrell’s brother and wounded him in Cottonwood, Kansas, in 1857, he closed his eyes and ears from ever being a scout for old Jim Lane any more.

In a few days after the ambuscade at Walker’s, Charles W. Quantrell, instead of Charles Hart, as he was known, then was not afraid to tell his name on Missouri soil. He wrote to Jim Lane, telling him what had happened to the scouts sent out by him, and as the war was on then, Quantrell told Lane in his letter that he was going to Richmond, Virginia, to get a commission from under Jeff Davis’ own hand, which he did (as you will read further on in this narrative), to operate on the border at will. So Quantrell, being fully equipped with all credentials, notified Jim Lane of Missouri, telling him he would treat him with the same or better courtesy than he (Lane) had treated him and his brother at Cottonwood River, Kansas, in 1857. This made Jim Lane mad, and he began to send his roving, robbing, and thieving bands into Missouri, and Charles W. Quantrell, having a band of well organized guerrillas of about fifty men, began to play on their golden harps. Every time they came in sight, which was almost every day, they would have a fight to the finish.

Why the Quantrell Guerrillas Were Organized

It all came about from the Redlegs or Kansas Jayhawkers. For two years Kansas hated Missouri and at all times during these two years there were Redlegs from old Jim Lane’s army crossing to Missouri, stealing everything they could get their hands on, driving stock, insulting innocent women and children, and hanging and killing old men; so it is the province of history to deal with results, not to condemn the phenomena which produce them. Nor has it the right to decry the instruments Providence always raises up in the midst of great catastrophes to restore the equilibrium of eternal justice. Civil War might well have made the Guerrilla, but only the excesses of civil war could have made him the untamable and unmerciful creature that history finds him. When he first went into the war he was somewhat imbued with the old-fashioned belief that soldiering meant fighting and that fighting meant killing. He had his own ideas of soldiering, however, and desired nothing so much as to remain at home and meet its despoilers upon his own premises. Not naturally cruel, and averse to invading the territory of any other people, he could not understand the patriotism of those who invaded his own territory. Patriotism, such as he was required to profess, could not spring up in the market place at the bidding of Redleg or Jayhawker. He believed, indeed, that the patriotism of Jim Lane and Jennison was merely a highway robbery transferred from the darkness to the dawn, and he believed the truth. Neither did the Guerrilla become merciless all of a sudden. Pastoral in many cases by profession, and reared among the bashful and timid surroundings of agricultural life, he knew nothing of the tiger that was in him until death had been dashed against his eyes in numberless and brutal ways, and until the blood of his own kith and kin had been sprinkled plentifully upon things that his hands touched, and things that entered into his daily existence. And that fury of ideas also came to him slowly, which is more implacable than the fury of men, for men have heart, and opinion has none. It took him likewise some time to learn that the Jayhawkers’ system of saving the Union was a system of brutal force, which bewailed not even that which it crushed; and it belied its doctrine by its tyranny, stained its arrogated right by its violence, and dishonored its vaunted struggles by its executions. But blood is as contagious as air. The fever of civil war has its delirium.

When the Guerrilla awoke he was a giant! He took in, as it were, and at a single glance, all the immensity of the struggle. He saw that he was hunted and proscribed; that he had neither a flag nor a government; that the rights and the amenities of civilized warfare were not to be his; that a dog’s death was certain to be his if he surrendered even in the extremest agony of battle; that the house which sheltered him had to be burned; the father who succored him had to be butchered; the mother who prayed for him had to be insulted; the sister who carried him food had to be imprisoned; the neighborhood which witnessed his combats had to be laid waste; the comrade shot down by his side had to be put to death as a wild beast--and he lifted up the black flag in self-defense and fought as became a free man and a hero.

Much obloquy has been cast upon the Guerrilla organization because in its name bad men plundered the helpless, pillaged the friend and foe alike, assaulted non-combatants and murdered the unresisting and the innocent. Such devils’ work was not Guerrilla work. It fitted all too well the hands of those cowards crouching in the rear of either army and courageous only where women defended what remained to themselves and their children. Desperate and remorseless as he undoubtedly was, the Guerrilla saw shining upon his pathway a luminous patriotism, and he followed it eagerly that he might kill in the name of God and his country. The nature of his warfare made him responsible, of course, for many monstrous things he had no personal share in bringing about. Denied a hearing at the bar of public opinion, of all the loyal journalists, painted blacker than ten devils, and given a countenance that was made to retain some shadow of all the death agonies he had seen, is it strange in the least that his fiendishness became omnipresent as well as omnipotent? To justify one crime on the part of a Federal soldier, five crimes more cruel were laid at the door of the Guerrilla. His long gallop not only tired, but infuriated his hunters. That savage standing at bay and dying always as a wolf dies when barked at by hounds and dudgeoned by countrymen, made his enemies fear and hate him. Hence, from all their bomb-proofs his slanderers fired silly lies at long range, and put afloat unnatural stories that hurt him only as it deepened the savage intensity of an already savage strife. Save in rare and memorable instances, the Guerrilla murdered only when fortune in open and honorable battle gave into his hands some victims who were denied that death in combat which they afterward found by ditch or lonesome roadside. Man for man, he put his life fairly on the cast of the war dice, and died when the need came as the red Indian dies, stoical and grim as a stone.