Part 10

Johnson’s overthrow, probably, was a decree of fate. He rushed upon it as if impelled by a power stronger than himself. He did not know how to command and his men did not know how to fight. He had, by the sheer force of circumstances, been brought face to face with two hundred and sixty-two of the most terrible revolver fighters the American war or any other war ever produced; and he deliberately tied his hands by the very act of dismounting, and stood in the shambles until he was shot down. Abject and pitiable cowardice matched itself against recklessness and desperation, and the end could be only just what the end was. The Guerrillas did unto the militia just what the militia would have done unto them if fate had reversed the decision and given to Johnson what it permitted to Todd.

Anderson

In June, 1864, Anderson crossed the Missouri River. Four miles out from the crossing place, he encountered twenty-five Federals, routed them at the first onset, killing eight, two of whom Arch Clements scalped, hanging the ghastly trophies at the head-stall of his bridle. One of the two scalped was a captain and the commander of the squad.

Killing as he marched, Anderson moved from Carroll into Howard, entered Huntsville the last of June with twenty-five men, took from the county treasury $30,000, and disbanded for a few days for purposes of recruiting.

The first act of the next foray was an ambuscade into which Anderson fell headlong. Forty militia waylaid him as he rode through a stretch of heavy bottom land, filled his left shoulder full of turkey shot, killed two of his men and wounded three others. Hurt as he was, he charged the brush, killing eighteen of his assailants, captured every horse and followed the flying remnant as far as a single fugitive could be tracked through the tangled undergrowth.

In July Anderson took Arch Clements, John Maupin, Tuck and Woot Hill, Hiram Guess, Jesse Hamlet, William Reynolds, Polk Helms, Cave Wyatt and Ben Broomfield and moved up into Clay County to form a junction with Fletch Taylor. By ones and twos he killed twenty-five militiamen on the march and was taking breakfast at a house in Carroll County when thirty-eight Federals fired upon him through doors and windows, the balls knocking dishes onto the floor and playing havoc with chinaware and eatables generally. The Guerrillas, used to every phase of desperate warfare, routed their assailants after a crashing volley or two, and held the field, or rather the house. In the melee Anderson accidentally shot a lady in the shoulder, inflicting a painful wound, and John Maupin killed the captain commanding the scouts, cut off his head and stuck it upon a gate-post to shrivel and blacken in the sun.

In Ray County, one hundred and fifty Federal cavalrymen found Andersons’ trail, followed it all day, and just at nightfall struck hard and viciously at the Guerrillas. Anderson would not be driven without a fight. He charged their advance guard, killed fourteen out of sixty, and drove the guard back upon the main body. Clements, Woot Hill, Hamlet and Hiram Guess had their horses killed and were left afoot in the night to shift for themselves. Walking to the Missouri River, ten miles distant, and fashioning a rude raft from the logs and withes, Hamlet crossed to Jackson County and made his way safe into the camp of Todd.

While with Anderson John Coger was wounded again in the right leg. Suffering from this wound and with another one in the left shoulder, he had been carried by his comrades to a house close to Big Creek, in Cass County, and when it was night, and by no road that was generally traveled. Coger, without a wound of some kind or in some portion of his body, would have appeared as unaccountable to the Guerrillas as a revolver without a mainspring.

At the end of every battle some one reckless fighter asked of another: “Of course, John can’t be killed, but where is he hit this time?” And Coger, himself, no matter how often or how badly hurt, scarcely ever waited for a old wound to get well before he was in the front again looking for a new one. He lived for fifty years after the battle, carrying thirteen bullet wounds.

The wonderful nerve of the man saved him many times during the war in open and desperate conflicts, but never when the outlook was so unpromising as it was now, with the chances as fifty to one against him.

Despite his two hurts, Coger would dress himself every day and hobble about the house, watching all the roads for the Federals. His pistols were kept under the bolster of his bed.

One day a scout of sixty militiamen approached the house so suddenly that Coger had barely time to undress and hurry to bed, dragging in with him his clothes, his boots, his tell-tale shirt and his four revolvers. Without the help of the lady of the house he surely would have been lost. To save him she surely--well, she did not tell the truth.

The sick man lying there was her husband, weak from a fever. Bottles were ostentatiously displayed for the occasion. At intervals Coger groaned and ground his teeth, the brave, true woman standing close to his bedside, wiping his brow every now and then and putting some kind of smelling stuff to his lips.

A Federal soldier, perhaps a bit of a doctor, felt Coger’s left wrist, held it awhile, shook his head, and murmured seriously: “A bad case, madam, a bad case, indeed. Most likely pneumonia.”

Coger groaned again.

“Are you in pain, dear?” the ostensible wife tenderly inquired.

“Dreadful!” and a spasm of agony shot over the bushwhacker’s sun-burnt face.

For nearly an hour the Federal soldiers came and went and looked upon the sick man moaning in his bed, as deadly a Guerrilla as ever mounted a horse or fired a pistol.

Once the would-be doctor skirted the edge of the precipice so closely that if he had stepped a step further he would have pitched headlong into the abyss. He insisted upon making a minute examination of Coger’s lungs and laid a hand upon the coverlet to uncover the patient. Coger held his breath hard and felt upward for a revolver. The first inspection would have ruined him. Nothing could have explained the ugly, ragged wound in the left shoulder, nor the older and not entirely healed one in the right leg. The iron man, however, did not wince. He neither made protest nor yielded acquiescence. He meant to kill the doctor, kill as many more as he could while life lasted and his pistol balls held out, and be carried from the room, when he was carried at all, feet foremost and limp as a lock of hair. Happily a woman’s wit saved him. She pushed away the doctor’s hand from the coverlet and gave as the emphatic order of her family physician that the sick man should not be disturbed until his return.

Etiquette saved John Coger, for it was so unprofessional for one physician to interfere with another physician’s patient, and the Federal soldier left the room and afterwards the house.

Press Webb, a Born Scout

Press Webb was a born scout crossed upon a highlander. He had the eyes of an eagle and the endurance of the red deer. He first taught himself coolness, and then he taught it to others. In traveling he did not travel twice the same road. Many more were like him in this--so practicing the same kind of woodcraft and cunning--until the enemy began to say: “That man Quantrell has a thousand eyes.”

Press Webb was ordered to take with him one day Sim Whitsett, George Maddox, Harrison Trow and Noah Webster and hide himself anywhere in the vicinity of Kansas City that would give him a good view of the main roads leading east, and a reasonably accurate insight into the comings and going of the Federal troops.

The weather was very cold. Some snow had fallen the week before and melted, and the ground was frozen again until all over the country the ground was glazed with ice and traveling was made well nigh impossible. The Guerrillas, however, prepared themselves and their horses well for the expedition. Other cavalrymen were forced to remain comparatively inactive, but Quantrell’s men were coming and going daily and killing here and there.

On the march to his field of operation, Webb overtook two Kansas infantrymen five miles west of Independence on the old Independence road. The load under which each soldier staggered proved that their foraging expedition had been successful. One had a goose, two turkeys, a sack of dried apples, some yarn socks, a basket full of eggs and the half of a cheese; while the other, more powerful or more greedy than the first--toiled slowly homeward, carrying carefully over the slippery highway a huge bag miscellaneously filled with butter, sausages, roasted and unroasted coffee, the head of a recently killed hog, some wheaten biscuits not remarkably well cooked, more cheese and probably a peck of green Jenniton apples. As Webb and his four men rode up the foragers halted and set their loads on the ground as if to rest. Piled about them, each load was about as large as a forager.

Webb remarked that they were not armed and inquired of the nearest forager--him with the dried apples--why he ventured so far from headquarters without his gun.

“There is no need of a gun,” was the reply, “because the fighting rebels are all out of the country and the stay-at-homes are all subjugated. What we want we take, and we generally want a good deal.”

“A blind man might see that,” Webb rather grimly replied, “but suppose some of Quantrell’s cut-throats were to ride up to you as we have done, stop to talk with you as we have done, draw out a pistol as I am doing this minute, cover you thus, and bid you surrender now as I do, you infernal thief and son of a thief, what would you say then?”

“Say!”--and the look of simple surprise yet cool indifference which came to the Jayhawker’s face was the strongest feature of the tragedy--“what could I say but that you are the cut-throat and I am the victim? Caught fairly, I can understand the balance. Be quick.”

Then the Jayhawker rose up from the midst of his spoils with a sort of quiet dignity, lifted his hat as if to let his brow feel the north wind, and faced without a tremor the pistol which covered him.

“I cannot kill you so,” Webb faltered, “nor do I know whether I can kill you at all. We must take a vote first.”

Then to himself: “To shoot an unarmed man, and a brave man at that, is awful.”

There amid the sausages and cheese, the turkeys and the coffee grains, the dried apples and the green, five men sat down in judgment upon two. Whitsett held the hat; Webster fashioned the ballots. No arguments were had. The five self-appointed jurors were five among Quantrell’s best and bravest. In extremity they had always stood forth ready to fight to the death; in the way of killing they had done their share. The two Kansas Jayhawkers came close together as if in the final summing up they might find in the mere act of dying together some solace. One by one the Guerrillas put into the hat of Whitsett a piece of paper upon which was written his vote. All had voted. Harrison Trow drew forth the ballots silently. As he unfolded the first and read from it deliberately; “Death,” the younger Jayhawker blanched to his chin and put a hand on the shoulder of his comrade. The two listened to the count, with every human faculty roused and abnormally impressionable. Should any one not understanding the scene pass, they would not be able to comprehend the situation--one man standing bareheaded, solemnly, and all the eyes bent keenly forward as another man drew from a hat a dirty slip of folded paper and read therefrom something that was short like a monosyllable and sepulchral like a shroud.

“Life,” said the second ballot, and “Life” said the third. The fourth was for death and made a tie. Something like the beating of a strong man’s heart might have been heard, and something as though a brave man were breathing painfully through his teeth lest a sigh escape him. Whitsett cried out: “One more ballot yet to be opened. Let it tell the tale, Trow, and make an end to this thing speedily.” Trow, with scarcely any more emotion than a surgeon has when he probes a bullet wound, unfolded the remaining slip of paper, and read, “Life”!

The younger Jayhawker fell upon his knees and the elder ejaculated solemnly: “Thank God, how glad my wife will be.”

Webb breathed as one from whose breast a great load had been lifted and put back into its scabbard his revolver. The verdict surprised him all the more because it was so totally unexpected, and yet the two men there--Jayhawkers though they were and loaded with spoils of plundered farm houses--were as free to go as the north wind that blew or the stream that was running by.

As they rode away the Guerrillas did not even suggest to one another the virtue of the parole. At the two extremities of their peculiar warfare there was either life or death. Having chosen deliberately as between the two, no middle ground was known to them.

Press Webb approached to within sight of Kansas City from the old Independence road, made a complete circle about the place, as difficult as the traveling was, entered Westport notwithstanding the presence of a garrison there; heard many things told of the plans and number of the Federal forces upon the border; passed down between the Kansas river and what is now known as West Kansas City, killed three foragers and captured two six-mule wagons near the site of the present gas works; gathered up five head of excellent horses, and concealed himself for two days in the Blue Bottom, watching a somewhat notorious bawdy house much frequented by Federal soldiers. This kind of houses during the war, and when located upon dangerous or debatable grounds, were man traps of more or less sinister histories.

Eleven women belonged to this bagnio proper, but on the night Webb stalked it and struck it, there had come five additional inmates from other quarters equally as disreputable. Altogether the male attendants numbered twenty, two lieutenants, one sergeant major, a corporal, four citizens and twelve privates from an Iowa regiment. Webb’s attacking column, not much larger than a yard stick, was composed of the original detail, four besides himself.

The night was dark; the nearest timber to the house was two hundred and fifty yards. There was ice on everything. The tramping of iron shod feet over the frozen earth reverberated as artillery wheels. At the timber line Maddox suggested that one man should be left in charge of the horses, but Webb overruled the point.

“No man shall stir tonight,” he argued, “except he be hunted for either war or women. The horses are safe here. Let us dismount and make them fast.”

As they crept to the house in single file, a huge dog went at Harrison Trow as if he would not be denied, and barked so furiously and made so many other extravagant manifestations of rage, that a man and a woman came to the door of the house and bade the dog devour the disturber. Thus encouraged he leaped full at Trow’s throat and Trow shot him dead.

In a moment the house emptied itself of its male occupants, who explored the darkness, found the dog with the bullet through its head, searched everywhere for the author of the act, and saw no man, nor heard any retreating steps, and so returned unsatisfied to the house, yet returned, which was a great deal.

As for the Guerrillas, as soon as Trow found himself obliged to shoot or be throttled, they rushed back safely and noiselessly to their horses, mounted them and waited. A pistol shot, unless explained, is always sinister to soldiers. It is not to be denied. Fighting men never fire at nothing. This is a maxim not indigenous to the brush, nor an outcome of the philosophy of those who were there. A pistol shot says in so many words: “Something is coming, is creeping, is crawling, is about--look out!”

The Federals heard this one--just as pertinent and as intelligible as any that was ever fired--but they failed to interpret aright this significant language of the ambuscade, and they suffered accordingly.

Webb waited an hour in the cold, listening. No voices were heard, no skirmishers approached his position, no scouts from the house hunted further away than the lights from the windows shone, no alarm had been raised, and he dismounted with his men and again approached the house.

By this time it was well on to twelve o’clock. Chickens were crowing in every direction. The north wind had risen high and was blowing as a winter wind always blows when there are shelterless men abroad in a winter night.

The house, a rickety frame house, was two stories high, with two windows on the north and two on the south.

George Maddox looked in at one of these windows and counted fourteen men, some well advanced in liquor and some sober and silent and confidential with the women. None were vigilant. The six upstairs were neither seen nor counted.

At first it was difficult to proceed upon a plan of action. All the Federals were armed, and twenty armed men holding a house against five are generally apt, whatever else may happen, to get the best of the fighting.

“We cannot fire through the windows,” said Webb, “for women are in the way.”

“Certainly” replied Whitsett, “we do not war upon women.”

“We cannot get the drop on them,” added Trow, “because we cannot get to them.”

“True again,” replied Maddox, “but I have an idea which will simplify matters amazingly. On the south there is a stable half full of plank and plunder. It will burn like pitch pine. The wind is from the north is strong, and it will blow away all danger from the house. Were it otherwise I would fight against the torch, for not even a badger should be turned out of its hole tonight on word of mine, much less a lot of women. See for yourself and say if the plan suits you.”

They saw, endorsed the proposition, and put a match at once to the hay and to the bundles of fodder. Before the fire had increased perceptibly the five men warmed their hands and laughed. They were getting the frost out of their fingers to shoot well, they said. A delicate trigger touch is necessary to a dead shot.

“Fire!”

All of a sudden there was a great flare of flames, a shriek from the women and a shout from the men. The north wind drove full head upon the stable, roared as like some great wild beast in pain.

The Federals rushed to the rescue. Not all caught up their arms as they hurried out--not all even were dressed.

The women looked from the doors and windows of the dwelling, and thus made certain the killing that followed. Beyond the glare of the burning outhouse, and massed behind a fence fifty paces to the right of the consuming stable, the Guerrillas fired five deadly volleys into the surprised and terrified mass before them, and they scattered, panic-striken and cut to pieces,--the remnant frantically regained the sheltering mansion.

Eight were killed where they stood about the fire; two were mortally wounded and died afterwards; one, wounded and disabled, quit the service; five, severely or slightly wounded, recovered; and four, unhurt, reported that night in Kansas City that Quantrell had attacked them with two hundred men, and had been driven off, hurt and badly worsted, after three-quarters of an hour’s fight. Press Webb and his four men did what work was done in less than five minutes.

Little Blue

Captain Dick Yager, commanding ten men, the usual number the Guerrillas then operated with, engaged twenty Federals under Lieutenant Blackstone of the Missouri Militia regiments, and slew fourteen.

Yager had ambushed a little above a ford over the Little Blue and hid behind some rocks about fifteen feet above the crossing place, and Blackstone, unconscious of danger, rode with his troops leisurely into the water and halted midway in the stream that his horses might drink. He had a tin cup tied to his saddle and a bottle of whiskey in one of his pockets. After having drunk and while bending over from his stirrups to dip the cup into the water, a volley hit him and knocked him off his horse dead, thirteen others falling close to and about him at the same time.

Jarrette and Poole, each commanding ten men, made a dash into Lafayette County and struck some blows to the right and left, which resounded throughout the West.

Poole pushed into the German settlement and comparatively surprised them.

Where Concordia now is, there was then a store and a fort, strong and well built. This day, however, Poole came upon them unawares and found many who properly belonged to the militia feeding stock and in an exposed position. Fifteen of these he killed and ten he wounded severely but not so severely as to prevent them from making their way back to the fort.

Arrock Fight, Spring of 1864

Todd and Dave Poole went east through Fayette County to Saline County and thence to Arrock, with one hundred and twenty men to avenge the death of Jim Janes, Charles Bochman and Perkins, who were captured by the Federals under Captain Sims.

The men who captured the boys made them dig their own graves and shot them and rolled them into them. We made the raid for the benefit of this captain and were successful. We caught him and his men playing marbles in the street, unaware of any danger. We rode slowly into town with our Federal uniforms on, Sim Whitsett in advance.

“Boys,” said he, “I will knock the middle man out for you.”

He fired the first shot. Then it was a continuous fire and the Federals surrendered in a very few minutes.

We killed twenty-five men, wounded thirty-five and had only one man, Dick Yager, wounded.

Ben Morrow and I had the pleasure of capturing the captain in an upstairs bed room of a hotel. He died with quick consumption with a bullet through his head.

We captured one hundred and fifty men and swore them out of service.

Fire Bottom Prairie Fight, Spring of 1864

One of the most daring things I ever witnessed was when Ben Morrow saved my life at the time they got me off my horse at the battle of Fire Prairie Creek near Napoleon, Missouri, in the spring of 1864.

George Todd, in command, was sent out to meet a bunch of Federals going from Lexington to Independence. We expected to meet them in the road and charge them in the usual way, but they got word we were coming and dismounted, hid their horses in the woods and came up, on foot, and fired on us from the brush as we charged. They caught my horse by the bridle and before they could shoot me I jumped off over the horse’s head. As I went over, I fired at the man holding him and he fell. I was on foot amidst the worst of them. This gave me an advantage as I could fire in any direction I wanted to and they could not, as their men were all around me and in danger of being hit by their own bullets. I saw a hole where a large tree had been uprooted, a hole large enough to conceal me almost, and I made direct for it, firing at everything in sight as I went.

Captain Todd ordered his men back, with three of them, Babe Hudspath, Bill McGuire and Tid Sanders, so badly wounded they were unable to go further.

I was left there in the hole, bullets blowing up the dirt all around me, the hole being deep enough for me to get out of sight. I lay on my back, loading my pistols and watched close as a hawk. They said I was dead and wanted to come up and get my pistols. Whenever one would show his head I took a shot at him and they saw that I was very much alive and their scheme would not work.

One of the blue billies climbed a tree close by, thinking he would be able to get a better shot at me. I waited until he got fairly up in the tree and then shot him in the thigh and down he came. I kept up firing, thinking the boys would hear it and come back and help me.