endurance remained unimpaired to the end. His mind, always clear in
danger, seemed to recognize that his last battle had been fought
and his last encounter finished. He talked very little. Terrill
came to him and asked if there was any good service he might do
that would be acceptable.
“Yes,” said Quantrell quietly, “have Clark Hockingsmith buried like
a soldier.”
After he had been carried to the house of Wakefield and deposited
upon a pallet, he spoke once more to Terrell:
“While I live let me stay here. It is useless to haul a dying man
about in a wagon, jolting out what little life there is left in
him.”
Terrell pledged his word that he should not be removed, and rode
away in pursuit of those who had escaped.
Some of the fugitive Guerrillas soon reached the well known
rendezvous at the house of Alexander Sayers, twenty-three miles
from Wakefield’s, with tidings of the fight.
Frank James heard the story through with a set face, strangely
white and sorrowful, and then he arose and cried out: “Volunteers
to go back. Who will follow me to see our chief, living or dead?”
“I will go back,” said Allen Parmer, “and I,” said John Ross, and
“I,” said William Hulse.
“Let us ride, then,” rejoined James, and in twenty minutes
more--John Ross having exchanged his jaded horse for a fresh
one--these four devoted men were galloping away to Wakefield’s.
At two o’clock in the morning they were there. Frank James
dismounted and knocked low upon the door. There was the trailing
of a woman’s garments, the circumspect tread of a watching woman’s
feet, the noiseless work of a woman’s hand upon the latch and Mrs.
Wakefield, cool and courtly, bade the strange armed men upon the
threshold to enter.
Just across on the other side of the room from the door a man lay
on a trundle bed. James stood over the bed, but he could not speak.
If one had cared to look into his eyes they might have seen them
full of tears.
Quantrell, by the dim light of a single candle, recognized James,
smiled and held out his hand, and said to him very gently, though a
little reproachfully: “Why did you come back? The enemy are thick
about you here; they are passing every hour.”
“To see if you were alive or dead, Captain. If the first, to save
you; if the last, to put you in a grave.”
“I thank you very much, Frank, but why try to take me away? I am
cold below the hips. I can neither ride, walk nor crawl; I am dead
and yet I am alive.”
Frank James went to the door and called in Parmer, Ross and Hulse.
Quantrell recognized them all in his old, calm, quiet fashion, and
bade them wipe away their tears, for they were crying visibly.
Then Frank James, joined in his entreaties by the entreaties of his
comrades, pleaded with Quantrell for permission to carry him away
to the mountains of Nelson County by slow and easy stages, each
swearing to guard him hour by hour until he recovered or died over
his body, defending it to the last. He knew that every pledge made
by them would be kept to the death. He felt that every word spoken
was a golden word and meant absolute devotion. His faith in their
affection was as steadfast and abiding as of old. He listened until
they had done talking, with the old staid courtesy of victorious
Guerrilla days, and then he silenced them with an answer which,
from its resoluteness, they knew to be unalterable.
“I cannot live. I have run a long time; I have come out unhurt from
many desperate places; I have fought to kill and I have killed; I
regret nothing. The end is close at hand. I am resting easy here
and will die so. You do not know how your devotion has touched my
heart, nor can you understand how grateful I am for the love you
have shown me. Try and get back to your homes, and avoid if you can
the perils that beset you.”
Until 10 o’clock the next day these men remained with Quantrell.
He talked with them very freely of the past, but never of the
earlier life in Kansas. Many messages were sent to absent friends,
and much good advice was given touching the surrender of the
remnant of the band. Again and again he returned to the earlier
struggles in Missouri and dwelt long over the recollections and the
reminiscences of the first two years of Guerrilla warfare.
Finally the parting came, and those who looked last upon
Quantrell’s face that morning as they stooped to tell him goodbye,
looked their last upon it forever.
Terrill had promised Quantrell positively that he should not be
removed from Wakefield’s house, but in three days he had either
forgotten his promise or had deliberately broken his pledge. He
informed General Palmer, commanding the department of Kentucky,
of the facts of the fight, and of the desperate character of the
wounded officer left paralyzed behind him, suggesting at the same
time the advisability of having him removed to a place of safety.
General Palmer sent an ambulance under a heavy escort to
Wakefield’s house and Quantrell, suffering greatly and scarcely
more alive than dead, was hauled to the military hospital in
Louisville and deposited there.
Until the question of recovery had been absolutely decided against
him, but few friends were permitted into his presence. If any
one conversed with him at all, the conversation of necessity was
required to be carried on in the presence of an official. Mrs. Ross
visited him thus--Christian woman, devoted to the South, and of
active and practical patriotism--and took some dying messages to
loved and true ones in Missouri.
Mrs. Ross left him at one o’clock in the afternoon and at four the
next afternoon the great Guerrilla died.
His passing away, after a life so singularly fitful and
tempestuous, was as the passing of a summer cloud. He had been
asleep, and as he awoke he called for water. A Sister of Charity at
the bedside put a glass of water to his lips, but he did not drink.
She heard him murmur once audibly--“Boys, get ready.” Then a long
pause, then one word more--“Steady!” and then when she drew back
from bending over the murmuring man, she fell upon her knees and
prayed. Quantrell was dead.
Before his death he had become a Catholic and had been visited
daily by two old priests. To one of these he made confession, and
such a confession! He told everything. He was too serious and
earnest a man to do less. He kept nothing back, not even the least
justifiable of his many homicides.
As the priest listened and listened, and as year after year of the
wild war work was made to give up its secrets, what manner of a man
must the priest have imagined lay dying there.
Let history be just. On that hospital bed, watched by the calm,
colorless face of a Sister of Charity, a dead man lay who, when
living, had filled with his deeds four years of terrible war
history. A singularly placid look had come with the great change.
Alike was praise or censure, reward or punishment. Fate had
done its worst and the future stood revealed to the spirit made
omniscient by its journey through the Valley of the Shadow of
Death. He had done with summer’s heat and winter’s cold, with
spectral ambuscades and midnight vigils. There would never be any
war in the land of the hereafter. The swoop of cavalry, the roar of
combat, the agony of defeat, white faces trampled by the iron hoofs
of horses, the march--the bivouac, the battle; what remains of
these when the transfiguration was done and when the river called
Jordan rolled between the shores of the finite and the infinite?
Nothing! And yet by those, standing or falling, must the great
Guerrilla be judged.
Quantrell differed in some degree from every Guerrilla who was
either a comrade or his contemporary. Not superior to Todd in
courage and enterprise, nor to Haller, Poole, Jarrette, Younger,
Taylor, Anderson, Frank James, Gregg, Lea, Maddox, Dan Vaughn, or
Yager, he yet had one peculiar quality which none of these save
Gregg, Frank James, Thrailkill, Lea and Younger possessed to the
same pre-eminent degree--extraordinary resource and cunning.
All the Guerrillas fought. Indeed, at certain times and under
certain conditions fighting might justly have been considered the
least of their accomplishments. A successful leader requires
coolness, intrepidity, robust health, fine horsemanship, expert
pistol practice, quick perception in peril, great rapidity of
movement, immense activity, and inexorable fixedness of purpose.
Those mentioned excelled in these qualities, but at times they were
too eager to fight, took too many desperate chances, or rushed too
recklessly into combats where they could not win. Quantrell counted
the cost of everything; watched every way lest an advantage should
be taken of him; sought to shield and save his men; strove by much
strategy to have the odds with rather than against him; traveled
a multitude of long roads rather than one short one once too
often; took upon himself many disguises to prevent an embarrassing
familiarity; retreat often rather than fight and be worsted; kept
scouts everywhere; had the faculty of divination to an almost
occult degree; believed in young men; paid attention to small
things; listened to every man’s advice and then took his own; stood
by his soldiers; obeyed strictly the law of retaliation; preferred
the old dispensation to the new--that is to say, the code of Moses
to the code of Jesus Christ; inculcated by precept and example
the self abnegation and devotion to comrade; fought desperately;
carried a black flag; killed everything; made the idea of surrender
ridiculous; snapped his fingers at death; was something of a
fatalist; rarely drank; trusted few women, but these with his
life; played high at cards; believed in religion; respected its
ordinances; went at intervals to church; understood human nature
thoroughly; never quarreled; was generally taciturn and one of the
coolest and deadliest men in a personal combat known to the border.
He rode like he was carved from the horse beneath him. In an
organization where skill with a pistol was a passport to leadership
he shot with a revolver as Leatherstocking shot with a rifle. He
drilled his men to fight equally with either hand. Fairly matched,
God help the column that came in contact with him.
As to the kind of warfare Quantrell waged, that is another matter.
Like the war of La Vendee, the Guerrilla war was one rather of
hatred than of opinion. The regular Confederates were fighting for
a cause and a nationality--the Guerrilla for vengeance. Mementoes
of murdered kinsmen mingled with their weapons; vows consecrated
the act of enlistment and the cry for blood was heard from
homestead to homestead. Quantrell became a Guerrilla because he had
been most savagely dealt with, and he became a chief because he had
prudence, firmness, courage, audacity and common sense. In personal
intrepidity he was inferior to no man. His features were pleasing
without being handsome, his eyes were blue and penetrating. He
had a Roman nose. In height he was five feet, eleven inches, and
his form was well knit, graceful and sinewy. His constitution was
vigorous, and his physical endurance equal to an Indian. His
glance was rapid and unerring. His judgment was clearest and surest
when the responsibility was heaviest, and when the difficulties
gathered thickest about him. Based upon skill, energy, perspicacity
and unusual presence of mind, his fame as a Guerrilla will endure
for generations.
Quantrell died a Catholic and was buried in a Catholic cemetery at
Louisville, Kentucky.
The Youngers and Jameses After the War
The end of the war also brought an end to armed resistance by the
Guerrillas. As an organization, they never fought again. The most
of them kept their weapons; and a few of them had great need to
keep them. Some were killed because of the terrible renown won in
the four years’ war; some were forced to hide themselves in the
unknown of the outlying territories, and some were persecuted and
driven into desperate defiance and resistance because they were
human and intrepid. To this latter class the Jameses and Youngers
belonged.
No men ever strove harder to put the past behind them. No men ever
submitted more sincerely to the results of a war that had as many
excesses on one side as on the other. No men ever went to work
with a heartier good will to keep good faith with society and make
themselves amenable to the law. No men ever sacrificed more for
peace, and for the bare privilege of doing just as hundreds like
them had done--the privilege of going back again into the obscurity
of civil life and becoming again a part of the enterprising economy
of the commonwealth. They were not permitted so to do, try how they
would, and as hard, and as patiently.
After the death of Quantrell and the surrender of the remnant of
his Guerrillas, Frank James was not permitted, at first, to return
to Missouri at all, much less to his home in Clay County.
He lingered in Clay County as long as possible, very circumspect
in his actions and very conservative in his behavior. Tempted one
day by his beardless face and innocent walk and to bear upon him
roughly, four Federal soldiers set upon Frank James in Brandenburg
and made haste to force an issue. For a moment the old fire of his
earlier and stormier days flared up all of a sudden from the ashes
of the past and consumed as with a single hot blast of passion
prudence, accountability, caution and discretion. He fought as he
had fought at Centralia. Two of the Federals were killed instantly,
the third was desperately wounded, while the fourth shot Frank
badly in the joint of the left hip, inflicting a grievous hurt and
one which caused him afterwards a great deal of pain and trouble.
Staunch friends hid him while the hue and cry were heaviest, and
careful surgical attention brought him back to life when he lay so
close to death’s door that by the lifting of a hand he also might
have lifted its latch.
This fight, however, was not one of his own seeking, nor one
which he could have avoided without the exhibition of a quality
he never had known anything about and never could know anything
about--physical cowardice.
Jesse James, emaciated, tottering as he walked, fighting what
seemed to everyone a hopeless battle--of “the skeleton boy against
skeleton death”--joined his mother in Nebraska and returned with
her to their home near Kearney, in Clay County. His wound would
not heal, and more ominous still, every now and then there was a
hemorrhage.
In the spring of 1866 he was just barely able to mount a horse and
ride a bit. And he did ride, but he rode armed, watchful, vigilant,
haunted. He might be killed, waylaid, ambuscaded, assassinated; but
he would be killed with his eyes open and his pistols about him.
The hunt for this maimed and emaciated Guerrilla culminated on the
night of February 18th, 1867. On this night an effort was made to
kill him. Five militiamen, well armed and mounted, came to his
mother’s house and demanded admittance. The weather was bitterly
cold, and Jesse James, parched with fever, was tossing wearily in
bed. His pistols were under his head. His step-father. Dr. Samuels,
heard the militiamen as they walked upon the front porch, and
demanded to know what they wanted. They told him to open the door.
He came up to Jesse’s room and asked him what he should do. “Help
me to the window,” was the low, calm reply, “that I may look out.”
He did so.
There was snow on the ground and the moon was shining. He saw that
all the horses hitched to the fence had on cavalry saddles, and
then he knew that the men were soldiers. He had but one of two
things to do--drive them away or die.
Incensed at the step-father’s silence, they were hammering at the
door with the butts of their muskets and calling out to Jesse to
come down stairs, swearing that they knew he was in the house, and
that they would have him out, dead or alive.
He went down stairs softly, having first dressed himself, crept
close up to the front door and listened until from the talk of the
men he thought he was able to get a fairly accurate pistol range.
Then he put a heavy dragoon pistol to within three inches of the
upper panel of the door and fired. A man cried out and fell. Before
the surprise was off he threw the door wide open, and with a pistol
in each hand began a rapid fusillade. A second man was killed as
he ran, two men were wounded severely, and surrendered, while the
fifth marauder, terrified, yet unhurt, rushed swiftly to his horse
and escaped in the darkness.
What else could Jesse James have done? In those evil days bad men
in bands were doing bad things continually in the name of the law,
order and vigilance committees.
He had been a desperate Guerrilla; he had fought under a black
flag, he had made a name for terrible prowess along the border;
he had survived dreadful wounds; it was known that he would fight
at any hour or in any way; he could not be frightened out from
his native county; he could be neither intimidated nor robbed,
and hence the wanton war waged upon Jesse and Frank James, and
this is the reason they became outlaws, and hence the reason also
that--outlaws as they were and proscribed in county, or state or
territory--they had more friends than the officers who hunted them,
and more defenders than the armed men who sought to secure their
bodies, dead or alive.
The future of the Youngers after the war was similar to the
Jameses. Cole was in California when the surrender came, and he
immediately accepted the situation. He returned to Missouri,
determined to forget the past, and fixed in his purpose to reunite
the scattered members of his once prosperous and happy family, and
prepare and make comfortable a home for his stricken and suffering
mother.
Despite everything that has been said and written of this man,
he was, during all the border warfare, a generous and merciful
man. Others killed and that in any form or guise or fashion; he
alone in open and honorable battle. His heart was always kind, and
his sympathies always easily aroused. He not only took prisoners
himself, but he treated them afterwards as prisoners, and released
them to rejoin commands that spared nothing alive of Guerrilla
associations that fell into their hands.
He was the oldest son, and all the family looked up to him. His
mother had been driven out of Cass County into Jackson, out of
Jackson into Lafayette, and out of Lafayette into Jackson again.
Not content with butchering the father in cold blood, the ravenous
cut-throats and thieves followed the mother with a malignity
unparalleled. Every house she owned or inhabited was burnt, every
outbuilding, every rail, every straw stack, every corn pen, every
pound of food and every store of forage. Her stock was stolen. Her
household goods were even appropriated. She had no place to lay
her head that could be called her own, and but for the kindness
and Christianity of her devoted neighbors, she must have suffered
greatly.
At this time Coleman and James returned to Missouri and went
hopefully and bravely to work. Their father’s land remained to
them. That at least had neither been set fire to nor hauled away in
wagons, nor driven into Kansas.
Western Missouri was then full of disbanded Federal soldiers,
organized squads of predatory Redlegs and Jayhawkers, horse thieves
disguised as vigilance committees, and highway robbers known as law
and order men.
In addition, Drake’s constitution disfranchised every property
owner along the border. An honest man could not officially stand
between the helpless of his community and the imported lazzaroni
who preyed upon them; a decent man’s voice could not be heard
above the clamor of the beggars quarreling over stolen plunder; and
a just man’s expostulations penetrated never into the councils of
the chief scoundrels who planned the murders and the robberies.
Coleman Younger’s work was like the work of a pioneer in the
wilderness, but he did it as became the hardy descendants of a
stalwart race of pioneers. He cut logs and built a comfortable log
house for his mother. He made rails and fenced in his land. In lieu
of horses or mules, he plowed with oxen. He stayed steadfastly
at home. He heard rumors of threats being made against his life,
but he paid no attention to them. He took part in no political
meetings. He tried to hide himself and be forgotten.
The bloodhounds were on his track, however, and swore either to
kill him or drive him from the country. A vigilance committee
composed of skulking murderers and red-handed robbers went one
night to surprise the two brothers and end the hunt with a
massacre. Forewarned, James and Coleman fled. The family were
wantonly insulted, and a younger brother, John, a mere boy, was
brutally beaten and then hung until life was almost extinct. This
was done to force him to tell the whereabouts of James and Coleman.
Mrs. Younger never entirely recovered from the shock of that
night’s work, lingering along hopelessly yet patiently for several
months and finally dying in the full assurance of the Christian’s
blessed hereafter.
The death of this persecuted woman, however, did not end the
persecution. Cole Younger was repeatedly waylaid and fired at. His
stock was killed through mere deviltry, or driven off to swell
the gains of insatiable wolves. His life was in hourly jeopardy,
as was the life of his brother James. They plowed in the fields
as men who saw suspended above them a naked sword blade. They
permitted no light to be lit in the house at night. They traveled
the public highway warily. They were hunted men and proscribed men
in the midst of their own people. They were chased away from their
premises by armed men. Once Cole was badly wounded by the bullet of
an assassin. Once, half dressed, he had to flee for his life. If he
made a crop, he was not permitted to gather it and when something
of a success might have come to him after the expenditure of so
much toil, energy, long-suffering and forbearance, he was not let
alone in peace long enough to utilize his returns and make out of
his resources their legitimate gains.
Of course there could be but one ending to all this long and
unbroken series of malignant persecutions, lying-in-wait, midnight
surprises, perpetual robbings, and most villainous assaults and
attempted murders--Coleman and James Younger left home and left
Jackson County. They buckled on their pistols and rode away to
Texas, resolved from that time on to protect themselves, to fight
when they were attacked, and to make it so hot for the assassins
and the detectives who were eternally on their track that by and
by the contract taken to murder them would be a contract not
particularly conducive to steady investments. They were hounded to
it.
They endured every species of insult and attack, and would have
still continued to endure it in silence and almost non-resistance
if such forbearance had mitigated in any manner the virulence
of their enemies, or brought any nearer to an appeasement the
merciless fate which seemed to be eternally at their heels. The
peaceful pursuits of life were denied them. The law which should
have protected them was overridden. Indeed, there was no law.
The courts were instruments of plunder. The civil officers were
cutthroats. Instead of a legal process, there was a vigilance
committee. Men were hung because of a very natural desire to keep
hold of their own property. To the cruel vigor of actual war, there
had succeeded the irresponsible despotism of greedy highwaymen
buttressed upon assassination. The border counties were overrun
with bands of predatory plunderers. Some Confederate soldiers dared
not return home and many Guerrillas fled the country. It was dark
everywhere, and the bravest held their breath, not knowing how much
longer they would be permitted to remain peacefully at home, or
suffered to enjoy the fruits of the labors they had endured.
Fortunately for all, however, the well nigh extinct embers of
a merciless border war were not blown upon long enough and
persistently enough to kindle another conflagration.