Part 11

They were a quarter of a mile off when Ben Morrow said, “Boys, we are all here except Harrison Trow, and do you hear that shooting? He is still alive and by G--d I am going back to get him.” So on came Ben Morrow, yelling and shooting with a pistol in each hand. When within forty yards of me and letting in on the enemy with a pistol in each hand, he saw me and came straight for me. I caught the crupper of his saddle, jumped up behind him, and pulling two pistols, one in each hand, firing as we went, we got safely away. From that day on, I would have died any where, and any place and any how for Ben Morrow, who saved my life at the risk of his own.

After the Fayette fight Lieutenant Jim Little, one of Quantrell’s best men, was badly wounded in Howard County, Missouri, and Quantrell went with him to the woods to take care of him until he recovered.

Then, after the Centralia fight, Ben Morrow, Bill Hulsh and I went to where Quantrell and Jim Little were in the woods. Jim was much better by this time, so that Quantrell could leave him and he came back to us in Jackson County, where we swam the river on our horses near Saline City. After we had crossed the river we went to a house to get breakfast and dry our clothes. Quantrell wanted to intercept General Price who was on a raid and have a consultation with him.

At this house we discovered some Federal clothing--caps, etc.--in the hall and asked whose they were. We were told they belonged to some Federal soldiers who had stayed there through the night and attended a dance. We captured them at once and swore them out of service. We then went on to intercept Price at Waverly, Saline County, Missouri, where arrangements were made for Quantrell’s men to take the advance clear on up through Fayette and Jackson Counties, and up through Kansas City. We were in advance all of the way from that time until Price started south, and we went with him, about one hundred miles, almost to the Arkansas line, and turned back to Jackson County.

Death of Todd and Anderson, October, 1864

Curtis’ heavy division, retreating before General Price all the way from Lexington to Independence, held the western bank of the Little Blue, and some heavy stone walls and fences beyond. Marmaduke and Shelby broke his hold from these, and pressed him rapidly back to and through Independence, the two Colorado regiments covering his rear stubbornly and well. Side by side McCoy and Todd had made several brilliant charges during the morning, and had driven before them with great dash and spirit every Colorado squadron halted to resist the continual marching forward of the Confederate cavalry.

Ere the pursuit ended for the day, half of the 2nd Colorado regiment drew up on the crest of a bold hill and made a gallant fight. Their major, Smith, a brave and dashing officer, was killed there, and there Todd fell. General Shelby, as was his wont, was well up with the advance, and leading recklessly the two companies of Todd and McCoy. Next to Shelby’s right rode Todd and upon his left was McCoy. Close to these and near to the front files were Colonels Nichols, Thrailkill, Ben Morrow, Ike Flannery and Jesse James.

The trot had deepened into a gallop, and all the crowd of skirmishers covering the head of the rushing column were at it, fierce and hot, when the 2nd Colorado swept the road with a furious volley, broke away from the strong position held by them and hurried on through the streets of Independence, followed by the untiring McCoy, as lank as a fox-hound and as eager.

That volley killed Todd. A Spencer rifle ball entered his neck in front, passed through and out near the spine, and paralyzed him. Dying as he fell, he was yet tenderly taken up and carried to the house of Mrs. Burns, in Independence. Articulating with great difficulty and leaving now and then almost incoherent messages to favorite comrade or friend, he lingered for two hours insensible to pain, and died at last as a Roman.

George Todd was a Scotchman born, his father holding an honorable position in the British navy. Destined also for the sea, it was the misfortune of the son to become engaged in a personal difficulty in his eighteenth year and kill the man with whom he quarreled. He fled to Canada, and from Canada to the United States. His father soon after resigned and followed him, and when the war began both were railroad contractors in North Missouri, standing well with everybody for business energy, capacity and integrity.

Todd made a name by exceeding desperation. His features presented nothing that could attract attention. There was no sign in visible characters of the powers that was in him. They were calm always, and in repose a little stern; but if anything that indicated “a look of destiny” was sought for, it was not to be found in the face of George Todd. His was simple and confiding, and a circumspect regard for his word made him a very true but sometimes a very blunt man. In his eyes the fittest person to command a Guerrilla was he who inspired the enemy before people began to say: “That man, George Todd, is a tiger. He fights always; he is not happy unless he is fighting. He will either be killed soon or he will do a great amount of killing.” It has just been seen that he was not to be killed until October, 1864--a three years’ lease of life for that desperate Guerrilla work never had a counterpart. By and by the Guerrillas themselves felt confidence in such a name, reliance in such an arm, favor for such a face. It was sufficient for Todd to order a march to be implicitly followed; to plan an expedition to have it immediately carried out; to indicate a spot on which to assemble to cause an organization sometimes widely scattered or dispersed to come together as the jaws of a steel trap.

Nature gave him the restlessness of a born cavalryman and the exterior and the power of voice necessary to the leader of desperate men. Coolness, and great activity were his main attributes as a commander. Always more ready to strike than to speak, if he talked at all it was only after a combat had been had, and then modestly. His conviction was the part he played, and he sustained with unflinching courage and unflagging energy that which he had set down for his hands to do.

A splendid pistol shot, fearless as a horseman, knowing nature well enough to choose desperate men and ambitious men, reticent, heroic beyond the conception of most conservative people, and covered with blood as he was to his brow, his fall was yet majestic, because it was accompanied by patriotism.

Before the evacuation of Independence, Todd was buried by his men in the cemetery there, and Poole succeeded to the command of his company, leading it splendidly.

The night they buried Todd, Ike Flannery, Dick Burns, Andy McGuire, Ben Morrow, Press Webb, Harrison Trow, Lafe Privin, George Shepherd, George Maddox, Allen Parmer, Dan Vaughn, Jess and Frank James and John Ross took a solemn oath by the open grave of the dead man to avenge his death, and for the following three days of incessant battle it was remarkable how desperately they fought--and how long.

Until General Price started southward from Mine Creek in full retreat, the Guerrillas under Poole remained with him, scouting and picketing, and fighting with the advance. After Mine Creek they returned to Bone Hill, in Jackson County, some going afterwards to Kentucky with Quantrell, and some to Texas with George Shepherd.

Henceforward the history of the Guerrillas of Missouri must be the history of detachments and isolated squads, fighting always, but fighting without coherency or other desire than to kill.

Anderson had joined Price at Boonville and the meeting was a memorable one. The bridles of the horses the men rode were adorned with scalps. One huge red-bearded Guerrilla--six feet and over, and girdled about the waist with an armory of revolvers--had dangling from every conceivable angle a profuse array of these ghastly trophies. Ben Price was shocked at such evidence of a warfare so utterly repugnant to a commander of his known generosity and forbearance, and he ordered sternly that they be thrown away at once. He questioned Anderson Long of Missouri, of the forces in the state, of the temper of the people, of the nature of Guerrilla warfare, of its relative advantages and disadvantages and then when he had heard all he blessed the Guerrillas probably with about as much unction as Balaam blessed Israel.

General Price was a merciful man. Equable in every relation of life, conservative by nature and largely tolerant through his earlier political training, thousands are alive today solely because none of the harsher or crueler indulgences of the Civil War were permitted to the troops commanded by this conscientious officer.

Finally, however, he ordered Anderson back into North Missouri, and he crossed at Boonville upon his last career of leave taking, desperation and death.

Tired of tearing up railroad tracks, cutting down telegraph poles, destroying miles and miles of wire, burning depots, and picking up and killing isolated militiamen, terrified at the uprising in favor of Price, Anderson dashed into Danville, Montgomery County, where sixty Federals were stationed in houses and strong places.

He had but fifty-seven men, and the fight was close and hot.

Gooley Robinson, one of his best soldiers, was mortally wounded while exposing himself in a most reckless manner.

It was difficult to get the enemy out of the houses. Snatching up torches and braving the guns of the entrenched Federals, Dick and Ike Berry put fire to one house. Arch Clements and Dick West to another, Theo. Castle, John Maupin and Mose Huffaker to a third, and Ben Broomfield, Tuck, Tom and Woot Hill to the fourth.

It was a night of terror and agony. As the militiamen ran out they were shot down by the Guerrillas in the shadow. Some wounded, burnt to death, and others, stifled by the heat and smoke, rushed, gasping and blackened into the air, to be riddled with bullets. Eight, barely, of the garrison escaped the holocaust.

Anderson turned west towards Kansas City, expecting to overtake General Price there. En route he killed as he rode. Scarcely an hour of all the long march was barren of a victim. Union men, militiamen, Federal soldiers, home guards, Germans on general principles--no matter what the class or the organization--if they were pro-United States, they were killed.

Later on, in the month of October, while well advanced in Ray County, Anderson received the first news of the death of Todd and the retreat of Price. By this time, however, he had recruited his own command to several hundred, and had joined to it a detachment of regular Confederates, guiding and guarding to the South a motley aggregation of recruits, old and young. Halting one day to rest and to prepare for a passage across the Missouri River, close to Missouri City, Anderson found one thousand Federals--eight hundred infantry and two hundred cavalry. He made haste to attack them. His young lieutenant, Arch Clements, advised him urgently against the attack, as did Captain A. E. Asbury, a young and gallant Confederate officer, who was in company with him, commanding fifty recruits. Others of his associates did the same, notably Colonel John Holt, a Confederate officer, and Colonel James H. R. Condiff. Captain Asbury was a cool, brave, wary man who had had large experience in border fighting, and who knew that for a desperate charge raw recruits could not be depended upon.

Anderson would not be held back. Ordering a charge, his horse ran away with him and he was seventy-five yards ahead of his followers when he was killed. Next to him was William Smith, a veteran Guerrilla of four years’ service. Five balls struck him, and three struck Anderson. Next to Smith was John Maupin, who was wounded twice, and next to Maupin, Cundill, who was also hit, and next to Cundill, Asbury, who got four bullets through his clothes. John Holt, Jim Crow Chiles and Peyton Long had their horses killed. The three Hill brothers and Dick West and ten others of Anderson’s old company fought their way up to Anderson’s body and sought to bring it out. Tuck Hill was shot, so was his brother Woot and Dick West. Their wounds were severe, but not mortal. Once they succeeded in placing it upon a horse; the horse was killed and fell upon the corpse and held it to the ground. Still struggling heroically over the body of his idolized commander, Hank Patterson fell dead, not a foot from the dead Guerrilla. Next, Simmons was killed, and then Anson Tolliver, and then Paul Debonhorst, and then Smith Jobson, and then Luckett, then John McIlvaine, and finally Jasper Moody and William Tarkington. Nothing could live before the fire of the concealed infantry and the Spencer carbines of the cavalry.

A single blanket might have covered the terrible heap of dead and wounded who fought to recover all that remained of that tiger of the jungle. John Pringle, the red-headed giant of the Boonville scalps, far ahead of his company, was the last man killed, struggling even to the death to bear back the corpse. He was a captain of a company, and a veteran of the Mexican war, but he did what he would not order his men to do--he rushed up to the corpse heap and fastened about the leg of Anderson a lariat that he might drag the body away. The Federals killed his horse. Shot once, he tugged at the rope himself, bleeding pitifully. Shot again, he fell, struggled up to his feet, fired every barrel of three revolvers into the enemy, and received as a counter blow two more bullets.

This time he did not rise again or stir, or make a moan. All the wild boar blood in his veins had been poured out, and the bronzed face, from being rigid, had become august.

Joseph and Arch Nicholson, William James, Clell Miller and John Warren, all young recruits in their first battle, fought savagely in the melee, and all were wounded. Miller, among those who strove to rescue the corpse of Anderson, was shot, and Warren, wounded four times, crawled back from the slaughter pen with difficulty. A minie ball had found the heart of Anderson. Life, thank God, was gone when a rope was put around his neck and his body dragged as the body of a dog slain in the woods.

Many a picture was taken of the dead lion, with his great flowing beard, and that indescribable pallor of death on his bronzed face. The Federals cut his head off and stuck it on a telegraph pole.

Going South, Fall of 1864

Todd’s death fell upon the spirits of his men as a sudden bereavement upon the hearts of a happy and devoted family. Those who mourned for him mourned all the more tenderly because they could not weep. Nature, having denied to them the consolation of tears, left them the infinite intercourse and remembrances of comradeship and soldierly affection.

The old bands, however, were breaking up. Lieutenant George Shepherd, taking with him Matt Wyman, John Maupin, Theo. Castle, Jack Rupe, Silas King, James and Alfred Corum, Bud Story, Perry Smith, Jack Williams, Jesse James and Arthur Devers, Press Webb, John Norfolk and others to the number of twenty-six, started south to Texas, on the 13th of November, 1864. With Shepherd also were William Gregg and wife, Richard Maddox and wife, and James Hendrix and wife. These ladies were just as brave and just as devoted and just as intrepid in peril or extremity as were the men who marched with them to guard them.

Jesse and Frank James separated at White River, Arkansas, Frank to go to Kentucky with Quantrell, and Jesse to follow the remnant of Todd’s still organized veterans into Texas.

Besides killing isolated squads of Federals and making way for every individual militiaman who supposed that the roads were absolutely safe for travelers because General Price and his army had long been gone, Shepherd’s fighting for several days was only fun. On the 22nd, however, Captain Emmett Goss, an old acquaintance of the Fifteenth Kansas Cavalry, Jennison’s, was encountered, commanding thirty-two Jayhawkers.

Of late Goss had been varying his orgies somewhat. He would drink to excess and lavish his plunder and money on ill-famed mistresses, who were sometimes Indians, sometimes negresses, and but rarely pure white. He was about thirty-five years old, square built, had broad shoulders, a swaggering gait, stood six feet when at himself, and erect, had red hair and a bad eye and a face that meant fight when cornered--and desperate fight at that.

November 22, 1864, was an autumn day full of sunshine and falling leaves. Riding southward from Missouri Lieutenant Shepherd met Captain Goss riding northward from Cane Hill. Shepherd had twenty-six men, rank and file. It was an accidental meeting--one of those sudden, forlorn, isolated, murderous meetings not rare during the war--a meeting of outlying detachments that asked no quarter and gave none. It took place on Cabin Creek, in the Cherokee Nation. Each rank arrayed itself speedily. There were twenty-six men against thirty-two. The odds were not great--indeed they never had been considered at all. There came a charge and a sudden and terrible storm of revolver bullets.

Nothing so weak as the Kansas detachment could possibly live before the deadly prowess and pistol practice of the Missourians. Of the thirty-two, twenty-nine were killed. One, riding a magnificent race horse, escaped on the wings of the wind--one, a negro barber, was taken along to wait upon the Guerrillas, and the third, a poor emaciated skeleton, as good as dead of consumption, was permitted to ride on northward, bearing the story of the thunderbolt.

Among the Missourians four were killed. In the melee Jesse James encountered Goss and singled him out from all the rest. As James bore down upon him, he found that his horse, an extremely high-spirited and powerful one, had taken the bit in its teeth and was perfectly unmanageable. Besides, his left arm being left weak from a scarcely healed wound, it was impossible for him to control his horse or even to guide him.

Pistol balls were as plentiful as the leaves that were pattering down. However, James had to put up his revolver as he rode, and rely upon his right hand to reinforce his left. Before he could turn his horse and break its hold upon his bit, Goss had fired upon him four times. Close upon him at last James shot him through and through. Goss swayed heavily in his saddle, but held on.

“Will you surrender?” Jesse asked, recocking his pistol and presenting it again.

“Never,” was the stern reply. Goss, still reeling in the saddle and bleeding dreadfully.

When the blue white smoke curled up again there was a riderless steed among the trees and a guilty spirit somewhere out in the darkness of the unknown. It took two dragoon revolver bullets to finish this one, and yet James was not satisfied with his work.

There was a preacher along who also had sat himself steadfast in the saddle, and had fought as the best of them did. James rode straight at him after he had finished Goss. The parson’s heart failed him at last, however, and he started to run. James gained upon him at every step. When close enough for a shot, he called out to him:

“Turn about like a man, that I may not shoot you in the back.” The Jayhawker turned, and his face was white and his tongue voluble.

“Don’t shoot me,” he pleaded, “I am the chaplain of the Thirteenth Kansas; my name is U. P. Gardner, I have killed no man, but have prayed for many; spare me.” James did not answer. Perhaps he turned away his head a little as he drew out his revolver. When the smoke lifted, Gardner was dead upon the crisp sere grass with a bullet through his brain.

Maddox, in this fight, killed three of Goss’ men, Gregg five, Press Webb three, Wayman four, Hendrix three, and others one or two each.

The march through the Indian country was one long stretch of ambushments and skirmishes.

Wayman stirred up a hornet’s nest one afternoon, and though stung twice himself quite severely, he killed four Indians in single combat and wounded the fifth who escaped.

Press Webb, hunting the same day for a horse, was ambushed by three Pins and wounded slightly in the arm. He charged singlehanded into the brush and was shot again before he got out of it, but he killed the three Indians and captured three excellent ponies, veritably a god-send to all.

The next day about noon the rear guard, composed of Jesse James, Bud Story, Harrison Trow and Jack Rupe, was savagely attacked by seventy-five Federal Cherokees and driven back upon the main body rapidly. Shepherd, one of the quickest and keenest soldiers the war produced, had formed every man of the command in the rear of an open field through which the enemy must advance and over which in return a telling charge could be made. The three heroic women, mounted on excellent horses and given shelter in some timber still further to the rear of the Guerrilla line, bade their husbands, as they kissed them, fight to the death or conquer. The Indians bore down as if they meant to ride down a regiment. Firing their pistols into their very faces with deadly effect, the rear guard had not succeeded in stopping them a single second, but when in the counter-charge Shepherd dashed at the oncoming line, it melted away as snow in a thaw. Shepherd, Maddox, Gregg, the two Corums, Rupe, Story, James, Hendrick, Webb, Smith Commons, Castle, Wayman and King fought like men who wanted to make a clean and a merciless sweep.

John Maupin, not yet well from the two ugly wounds received the day Anderson was killed, insisted on riding in the charge, and was shot the third time by the Indian into whom he had put two bullets and whose horse he rushed up to secure.

Jesse James had his horse killed and a pistol shot from his hand. Several other Guerrillas were wounded but none killed, and Williams, James Corum and Maddox lost horses.

Of the sixty-five Indians, fifty-two were counted killed, while some, known to be wounded, dragged themselves off into the mountain and escaped.

During the battle Dick Maddox’s wife could not keep still under cover, and commenced to shoot at the enemy, and had a lock of her hair shot off just above the ear.

The Surrender

Early in the month of March, 1865, Captain Clements, having been reinforced by ten men under the command of Captain David Poole, marched from Sherman, Texas, to Mount Pleasant, Titus County, Arkansas. From Mount Pleasant, on the 14th of April, the march began once more and for the last time into Missouri. Forming an advance of David Poole, John Poole, John Maupin, Jack Bishop, Theo. Castle, Jesse James and Press Webb, Clements pushed on rapidly, killing five militiamen in one squad, ten in another, here and there a single one, and now and then as many together as twenty. In Benton County, Missouri, a Federal militiaman named Harkness, was captured, who had halted a brother of Clements and burnt the house of his mother. James, Maupin and Castle held Harkness tightly while Clements cut his throat and afterwards scalped him.