the awkwardness of youth. He was scarcely thirteen years of age,
while Frank was four years older. The war made them Guerrillas.
Jesse was at home with his stepfather, Dr. Reuben Samuels, of Clay
County. He knew nothing of the strife save the echoes of it now and
then as it reached his mother’s isolated farm. One day a company
of militia visited this farm, hanged Dr. Samuels to a tree until
he was left for dead, and seized upon Jesse, a mere boy in the
fields plowing, put a rope about his neck and abused him harshly,
pricking him with sabers, and finally threatening him with death
should they ever again hear of his giving aid or information to the
Guerrillas. That same week his mother and sisters were arrested,
carried to St. Joseph and thrown into a filthy prison, where the
hardships they endured were dreadful. Often without adequate food,
insulted by sentinels who neither understood nor cared to learn
the first lesson of a soldier--courtesy to women--cut off from
all communication with the world, the sister was brought near to
death’s door from a fever which followed the punishment, while the
mother--a high spirited and courageous matron--was released only
after suffering and emaciation had aged her in her prime. Before
Mrs. Samuels returned to her home, Jesse had joined Frank in the
camp of Quantrell, who had preceded him a few years, and who had
already, notwithstanding the briefness of his service, made a name
for supreme and conspicuous daring. Jesse James had a face as
smooth and innocent as the face of a school girl. The blue eyes,
very clear and penetrating, were never at rest. His form, tall and
finely moulded--was capable of great effort and great endurance. On
his lips there was always a smile, and for every comrade a pleasant
word or a compliment. Looking at the small white hands with their
long, tapering fingers, it was not then written or recorded
that they were to become with a revolver among the quickest and
deadliest hands in the West. Frank was four years older, and
somewhat taller than Jesse. Jesse’s face was something of an oval;
Frank’s was long, wide about the forehead, square and massive about
the jaw and chin, and set always in a look of fixed repose. Jesse
laughed at many things; Frank laughed not at all. Jesse was light
hearted, reckless, devil-may-care; Frank sober, sedate, a splendid
man always for ambush or scouting parties.
Scott had to come back from the South and, eager for action,
crossed the Missouri River at Sibley May 20, 1863, taking with him
twelve men. Frank James and James Little led the advance. Beyond
the river thirteen miles, and at the house of Moses McCoy, the
Guerrillas camped, concocting a plan whereby the Federal garrison
at Richfield, numbering thirty, might be got at and worsted.
Captain Sessions was in command at Richfield, and his grave had
already been dug. Scott found a friendly citizen named Peter
Mahoney who volunteered to do the decoy work. He loaded up a wagon
with wood, clothed himself in the roughest and raggedest clothes
he had, and rumbled away behind as scrawny and fidgety a yoke of
oxen as ever felt a north wind in the winter bite their bones, or
deceptive buckeye in the spring swell their body.
“Mr. Mahoney, what is the news?” This was the greeting he got.
“No news, I have wood for sale. Yes, there is some news, too.
I like to have forgot. Eight or ten of those Quantrell men are
prowling about my way, the infernal scoundrels, and I hope they may
be hunted out of the country.”
Mahoney did well, but Scott did better. He secreted his men three
miles from Richfield, and near the crossing of a bridge. If an
enemy came the bridge was a sentinel--its resounding planks, the
explosion of a musket. Scott, with eight men, dismounted and lay
close along the road. Gregg, with Fletch Taylor, James Little and
Joe Hart, mounted and ready to charge, kept still and expectant
fifty yards in the rear in ambush. Presently at the crossing a dull
booming was heard, and the Guerrillas knew that Sessions had bit
at the bait Mahoney offered. A sudden clinking along the line--the
eight were in a hurry.
“Be still,” said Scott; “You cock too soon. I had rather have two
cool men than ten impatient ones.”
The Federals came right onward; they rode along gaily in front of
the ambuscade; they had no skirmishers out and they were doomed.
The leading files were abreast of Scott on the right when he
ordered a volley, and Sessions, Lieutenant Graffenstein and seven
privates fell dead. What was left of the Federal array turned
itself into a rout; Gregg, Taylor, Little, and Hart thundered down
to the charge. Scott mounted again, and altogether and away at a
rush, pursuers and pursued dashed into Richfield. The remnant of
the wreck surrendered, and Scott, more merciful than many among
whom he soldiered, spared the prisoners and paroled them.
House Occupied by Women Light of Love
Four miles from Independence, and a little back from the road
leading to Kansas City, stood a house occupied by several women
light of love. Thither regularly went Federal soldiers from the
Independence garrison, and the drinking was deep and the orgies
shameful. Gregg set a trap to catch a few of the comers and goers.
Within the lines of the enemy much circumspection was required
to make an envelopment of the house successful. Jesse James was
chosen from among the number of volunteers and sent forward to
reconnoiter the premises. Jesse, arrayed in coquettish female
apparel, with his smooth face, blue eyes, and blooming cheeks,
looked the image of a bashful country girl, not yet acquainted
with vice, though half eager and half reluctant to walk a step
nearer to the edge of its perilous precipice. As he mounted, woman
fashion, upon a fiery horse, the wind blew all about his peach
colored face the pink ribbons of a garish bonnet and lifted the
tell-tale riding habit just enough to reveal instead of laced shoes
or gaiters, the muddy boots of a born cavalryman. Gregg, taking
twelve men, followed in the rear of James to within a half a mile
of the nearest picket post and hid in the woods until word could be
brought from the bagnio ahead. If by a certain hour the disguised
Guerilla did not return to his comrades, the pickets were to be
driven in, the house surrounded, and the inmates forced to give
such information as they possessed, of his whereabouts.
Jesse James, having pointed out to him with tolerable accuracy the
direction of the house, left the road, skirted the timber rapidly,
leaped several ravines, floundered over a few marshy places and
finally reached his destination without meeting a citizen or
encountering an enemy. He would not dismount, but sat upon his
horse at the fence and asked that the mistress of the establishment
might come out to him. Little by little, and with many gawky
protests and many a bashful simper, he told a plausible story of
parental _espionage_ and family discipline. He, ostensibly a she,
could not have a beau, could not go with the soldiers, could not
sit with them late, nor ride with them, nor romp with them. She was
tired of it all and wanted a little fun. Would the mistress let her
come to her house occasionally and bring some of the neighborhood
girls with her, who were in the same predicament? The mistress
laughed and was glad. New faces to her were like new coin, and
she put forth a hand and patted the merchantable thing upon the
knee, and ogled her smiling mouth and girlish features gleefully.
As the she-wolf and venturesome lamb separated, the assignation
was assured. That night the amorous country girl, accompanied by
three of her female companions, was to return, and the mistress,
confident of her ability to provide lovers was to make known among
the soldiers the attractive acquisition.
It lacked an hour of sunset when Jesse James got back to Gregg; an
hour after sunset the Guerrillas, following hard upon the tracks
made by the boy spy, rode rapidly on to keep the trysting place.
The house was aglow with lights and jubilant with laughter. Drink
abounded, and under cover of the clinking glasses, the men kissed
the women. Anticipating the orgy of unusual attraction, twelve
Federals had been lured out from the garrison and made to believe
that barefoot maidens ran wild in the woods and buxom lasses hid
for the hunting. No guards were out; no sentinels posted. Jesse
James crept close to a window and peered in. The night was chilly
and a large wood fire blazed upon a large hearth. All the company
were in one room, five women and a dozen men. Scattered about,
yet ready for the grasping, the cavalry carbines were in easy
reach, and the revolvers handy about the persons. Sampson trusting
everything to Delilah, might not have trusted so much if under the
old dispensation there had been anything of bushwhacking.
Gregg loved everybody who wore the gray, and what exercised him
most was the question just now of attack. Should he demand a
surrender? Jesse James, the boy, said no to the veteran. Twelve
men inside the house, and the house inside their own lines where
reinforcements might be hurried quickly to them, would surely hold
their own against eleven outside, if indeed they did not make it
worse. The best thing to do was to fire through the windows and
kill what could be killed by a carbine volley, then rush through
the door and finish, under the cover of the smoke, horror and
panic, those who should survive the broadside.
[Illustration: JESSE JAMES GOING TO HOUSE OF LIGHT OF LOVE]
Luckily the women sat in a corner to themselves and close to a
large bed fixed to the wall and to the right of the fireplace. On
the side of the house the bed was on, two broad windows opened low
upon the ground, and between the windows there was a door, not
ajar, but not fastened. Gregg, with five men, went to the upper
window, and Taylor, with four, took possession of the lower. The
women were out of immediate range. The house shook; the glass
shivered, the door was hurled backward, there was a hot stifling
crash of revolvers; and on the dresses of the women and the white
coverlet of the bed great red splotches. Eight out of the twelve
fell dead or wounded at the first fire; after the last fire all
were dead. It was a spectacle ghastly beyond any ever witnessed by
the Guerrillas, because so circumscribed. Piled two deep the dead
men lay, one with a glass grasped tightly in his stiffened fingers,
and one in his shut hand the picture of a woman scantily clad.
How they wept, the poor, painted things, for the slain soldiers,
and how they blasphemed; but Gregg tarried not, neither did he
make atonement. As they lay there heaped where they fell and piled
together, so they lay still when he mounted and rode away.
* * * * *
In the three months preceding the Lawrence massacre, over two
hundred citizens were killed and their property burned or stolen.
In mid-winter houses were burned by the hundred and whole
neighborhoods devastated and laid waste. Aroused as he had never
been before, Quantrell meditated a terrible vengeance.
Lawrence Massacre
In the spring of 1863, Quantrell issued a proclamation to the
Federal forces of Kansas that if they did not stop burning and
robbing houses, killing old men and women, he would in return come
to Lawrence at some unexpected time and paint the city blacker than
hades and make its streets run with blood.
On Blackwater, in Johnson County, and at the house of Captain
Purdee, Quantrell called the Guerrillas together for the Lawrence
massacre. Todd, Jarrette, Blunt, Gregg, Trow, Anderson, Yager,
Younger, Estes and Holt, all were there, and when the roll was
called three hundred and ten answered promptly to their names.
Up to the mustering hour Quantrell had probably not let his left
hand know what his right hand had intended. Secrecy necessarily
was to be the salvation of the expedition, if indeed there was
any salvation for it. The rendezvous night was an August night--a
blessed, balmy, mid-summer night--just such a night as would be
chosen to give force to reflections and permit the secrets of the
soul to escape. The sultry summer day had lain swarthily in the
sun and panting; the sultry summer winds had whispered nothing of
the shadowy woods, nothing of the babble of unseen brooks. Birds
spoke goodbye to birds in the tree tops, and the foliage was filled
with twilight. Quantrell sat grave and calm in the midst of his
chieftains who were grouped about him. Further away where the
shadows were, the men massed themselves in silent companies or
spoke low to one another, and briefly. Something of a foreboding,
occult though it was, and undefinable, made itself manifest. The
shadow of a great tragedy was impending.
Without in the least degree minimizing or magnifying the
difficulties of the undertaking, Quantrell laid before his
officers his plans for attacking Lawrence. For a week a man of the
command--a cool, bold, plausible, desperate man--had been in the
city--thought it, over it, about it and around it--and he was here
in their midst to speak. Would they listen to him?
“Let him speak,” said Todd, sententiously.
Lieutenant Fletcher Taylor came out from the shadow, bowed gravely
to the group, and with the brevity of a soldier who knew better
how to fight than to talk, laid bare the situation. Disguised as a
stock trader, or rather, assuming the role of a speculating man,
he had boldly entered Lawrence. Liberal, for he was bountifully
supplied with money; keeping open rooms at the Eldridge House, and
agreeable in every way and upon every occasion, he had seen all
that it was necessary to see, and learned all that could be of
any possible advantage to the Guerrillas. The city proper was but
weakly garrisoned; the camp beyond the river was not strong; the
idea of a raid by Quantrell was honestly derided; the streets were
broad and good for charging horsemen, and the hour for the venture
was near at hand.
“You have heard the report,” Quantrell said with a deep voice,
“but before you decide it is proper that you should know it all.
The march to Lawrence is a long one; in every little town there
are soldiers; we leave soldiers behind us; we march through
soldiers; we attack the town garrisoned by soldiers; we retreat
through soldiers; and when we would rest and refit after the
exhaustive expedition, we have to do the best we can in the midst
of a multitude of soldiers. Come, speak out, somebody. What is it,
Anderson?”
“Lawrence or hell, but with one proviso, that we kill every male
thing.”
“Todd?”
“Lawrence, if I knew not a man would get back alive.”
“Gregg?”
“Lawrence, it is the home of Jim Lane; the foster mother of the Red
Legs; the nurse of the Jayhawkers.”
“Shepherd?”
“Lawrence. I know it of old; ‘niggers’ and white men are just the
same there; its a Boston colony and it should be wiped out.”
“Jarrette?”
“Lawrence, by all means. I’ve had my eye on it for a long time. The
head devil of all this killing and burning in Jackson County; I
vote to fight it with fire--to burn it before we leave it.”
“Dick Maddox?”
“Lawrence; and an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; God
understands better than we do the equilibrium of Civil War.”
“Holt?”
“Lawrence, and be quick about it.”
“Yager?”
“Where my house once stood there is a heap of ruins. I haven’t a
neighbor that’s got a house--Lawrence and the torch.”
“Blunt?”
“Count me whenever there is killing. Lawrence first and then some
other Kansas town; the name is nothing.”
“Have you all voted?”
“All.”
“Then Lawrence it is; saddle up, men!”
Thus was the Lawrence Massacre inaugurated.
Was it justifiable? Is there much of anything that is justifiable
in Civil War? Originally, the Jayhawkers in Kansas had been very
poor. They coveted the goods of their Missouri neighbors, made
wealthy or well-to-do by prosperous years of peace and African
slavery. Before they became soldiers they had been brigands, and
before they destroyed houses in the name of retaliation they had
plundered them at the instance of personal greed. The first
Federal officers operating in Kansas; that is to say, those who
belonged to the state, were land pirates or pilferers. Lane was a
wholesale plunderer; Jennison, in the scaly gradation, stood next
to Lane; Anthony next to Jennison; Montgomery next to Anthony;
Ransom next to Montgomery, and so on down until it reached to the
turn of captains, lieutenants, sergeants, corporals and privates.
Stock in herds, droves and multitudes were driven from Missouri
into Kansas. Houses gave up their furniture; women, their jewels;
children, their wearing apparel; store-rooms, their contents; the
land, their crops, and the banks, their deposits. To robbery was
added murder; to murder, arson, and to arson depopulation. Is it
any wonder, then, that the Missourian whose father was killed
should kill in return, whose house was burnt should burn in return,
whose property was plundered, should pillage in return, whose
life was made miserable, should hunt as a wild beast and rend
accordingly? Many such were in Quantrell’s command--many whose
lives were blighted; who in a night were made orphans and paupers;
who saw the labor and accumulation of years swept away in an hour
of wanton destruction; who for no reason on earth save that they
were Missourians, were hunted from hiding place to hiding place;
who were preyed upon while not a single cow remained or a single
shock of grain; who were shot at, bedeviled and proscribed, and
who, no matter whether Union or disunion, were permitted to have
neither flag nor country.
It was the summer night of August 16, 1863, that the Guerilla
column, having at its head its ominous banner, marched west from
Purdee’s place on Blackwater. With its simple soldiers, or rather
volunteers for the expedition, were Colonels Joseph Holt and Boaz
Roberts. Officers of the regular Confederate army, who were in
Missouri on recruiting service when the march began, fell into line
as much from habit as from inclination.
The first camp was made upon a stream midway between Pleasant Hill
and Lone Jack, where the grazing was good and the hiding places
excellent. All day Quantrell concealed himself there, getting to
saddle just at dark and ordering Todd up from the rear to the
advance. Passing Pleasant Hill to the north and marching on rapidly
fifteen miles, the second camp was at Harrelson’s, twenty-five
miles from the place of starting. At three o’clock in the afternoon
of the second day, the route was resumed and followed due west to
Aubrey, a pleasant Kansas stream, abounding in grass and timber.
Here Quantrell halted until darkness set in, feeding the horses
well and permitting the men to cook and eat heartily. At eight
o’clock the march began again and continued on throughout the
night, in the direction of Lawrence. Three pilots were pressed into
service, carried with the command as far as they knew anything of
the road or the country, and then shot down remorselessly in the
nearest timber.
On the morning of the 21st, Lawrence was in sight. An old man a
short distance upon the right of the road was feeding his hogs
in the gray dawn, the first person seen to stir about the doomed
place. Quantrell sent Cole Younger over to the hog-pen to catechize
the industrious old farmer and learn from him what changes had
taken place in the situation since Taylor had so thoroughly
accomplished his mission. Younger, dressed as a Federal lieutenant,
exhausted speedily the old man’s limited stock. Really, but little
change had taken place. Across the Kansas river there were probably
four hundred soldiers in camp, and on the Lawrence side about
seventy-five. As for the rebels, he didn’t suppose there was one
nearer than Missouri; certainly none within striking distance of
Lawrence.
It was a lovely morning. The green of the fields and the blue of
the skies were glad together. Birds sang sweetly. The footsteps of
autumn had not yet been heard in the land.
“The camp first,” was the cry which ran through the ranks, and
Todd, leading Quantrell’s old company, dashed down, yelling and
shooting. Scarcely any resistance was made, as every time they
stuck their heads out of a tent it was met with a bullet. Ridden
over, shot in their blankets, paralyzed, some of them with terror,
they ran frantically about. What could they do against the
quickest and deadliest pistol shots along the border?
Bill Anderson, Todd, Jarrette, Little, McGuire, Long, Bill McGuire,
Richard Kenney, Allen Parmer, Frank James, Clemmons, Shepherd,
Hinton, Blunt, Harrison Trow, and the balance of the older men did
the most of the killing. They went for revenge, and they took it.
These men killed. They burned. The Federals on the opposite side of
the river made scarcely any attempt to come to the rescue of their
butchered comrades. A few skirmishes held them in check. It was a
day of darkness and woe. Killing ran riot. The torch was applied
to every residence; the air was filled with cries for mercy;
dead men lay in cellars, upon streets, in parlors where costly
furniture was, on velvet carpets. The sun came up and flooded the
sky with its radiance and yet the devil’s work was not done. Smoke
ascended into the air, and the crackling of blazing rafters and
crashing of falling walls filled the air. A true story of the day’s
terrible work will never be told. Nobody knows it. It is a story of
episodes, tragic--a story full of collossal horrors and unexpected
deliverances.
Frank James, just as he was in the act of shooting a soldier in
uniform who had been caught in a cellar--his pistol was at the
Federal’s head--heard an exceedingly soft and penetrating voice
calling out to him, “Do not kill him for my sake. He has eight
children who have no mother.” James looked and saw a beautiful
girl just turned sixteen, blushing at her boldness and trembling
before him. In the presence of so much grace and loveliness her
father was disarmed. He remembered his own happy youth, his sister,
not older than the girl beside him, his mother who had always
instilled into his mind lessons of mercy and charity. He put up his
pistol.
“Take him, he is yours. I would not harm a hair of his head for the
whole state of Kansas,” said James.
Judge Carpenter was killed in the yard of H. C. Clark, and Colonel
Holt, one of the Confederate officers with the expedition, saved
Clark. He saved others besides Clark. He had been a Union man doing
business in Vernon County, Missouri, as a merchant. Jennison,
belonging to old Jim Lane of Lawrence, noted “nigger” thief,
robber and house burner, who always ran from the enemy, raided the
neighborhood in which he lived, plundered him of his goods, burnt
his property, insulted his family, and Holt joined the Confederate
army for revenge. The notorious general, James H. Lane, to get whom
Quantrell would gladly have left and sacrificed the balance of the
victims, made his escape through a corn field, hotly pursued but
too speedily mounted to be captured. He swam the river.
There were two camps in Lawrence at the time of the attack, one
camp of the “nigger” troops being located at the southern end of
Massachusetts street and the other camp of white soldiers were
camped in the heart of the city. In this latter camp there were
twenty-one infantry, eighteen of whom were killed in the first wild
charge.
Cole Younger had dragged from his hiding place in a closet a very
large man who had the asthma. In his fright and what with his hurry
the poor man could not articulate. Younger’s pistol was against his
heart when his old wife cried out, “For God’s sake, do not shoot
him. He has not slept in a bed for nine years.” This appeal and the
asthma together, caused Younger to roar out, “I never intended to
harm a hair of his head.”
Todd and Jarrette, while roaming through Eldridge’s house in search
of adventure, came upon a door that was locked. Todd knocked and
cried out that the building was in flames and it was time to get
away. “Let it burn and be d----d,” a deep voice answered, and then
the voices of three men were heard in conversation. Jarrette threw
his whole weight against the door, bursting it open, and as he did
so Todd fired and killed one of the three, Jarrette another and
Todd the third, who were hiding there. They were soldiers who had
escaped in the morning’s massacre, and who did not even make an
effort to defend themselves. Perhaps the number killed will never
be accurately known, but I should say there were at least one
thousand killed, and none wounded. The loss of property amounted
to the enormous sum of $1,500,000. The total buildings consumed
were one hundred and eighty-nine. In the city proper Quantrell had
one man killed and two wounded. The man who lost his life was drunk
when the firing began. His name was Larkin Skaggs, and the fighting
at Lawrence was the first he had ever done as a Guerilla.
Fate favored Quantrell from the time he left Missouri until he
returned to Missouri. A man from Johnson County, Kansas, started by
an Indian trail to inform the people of Lawrence of his coming. He
rode too carelessly and his horse fell and so injured him that he
died. A full company of soldiers were situated at Oxford, but they
seemed more anxious to keep out of the way than to fight.