Walley afterwards caused the arrest of my cousins fearing that they had
recognized him and his men. These young women were thrown into an old
rickety, two-story house, located between 14th and 15th streets on Grand
avenue, Kansas City, Mo. Twenty-five other women were also prisoners
there at that time, including three of my own sisters. The down-stairs
was used as a grocery store. After six months of living death in this
trap, the house was secretly undermined and fell with the prisoners, only
five of whom escaped injury or death. It was noted that the groceryman
had moved his stock of groceries from the building in time to save it from
ruin, showing that the wrecking of the house was planned in cold blood,
with the murder of my sisters and cousins and the other unfortunate women
in mind. All of my relatives, however, were saved from death except
Charity Kerr, who was helpless in bed with the fever and she went down
with the wreck and her body, frightfully mangled, was afterwards taken
from the ruins. Mrs. McCorkle jumped from the window of the house and
escaped. This cousin was the daughter of Reuben N. Harris, who was
revenue collector for many years. A Virginian by birth, and a school
teacher for many years in various parts of Missouri, he was well known
throughout the state as an active sympathizer with the South. His home
was friendly to every Confederate soldier and scout in the West.
Information, newspapers, and the like, left there, were certain to be kept
for the right hands.
In September 1863, soldiers ransacked the Harris home, stole everything
they considered valuable, and burned the house. A daughter, Kate, who was
asleep upstairs, was rescued from the flames by her sister. As the raiders
left, one of them shouted:
“Now, old lady, call on your protectors. Why don’t you call on Cole
Younger now?”
Among the women who lost their lives was Miss Josephine Anderson, whose
cruel death simply blighted her brother’s life and so filled him with
determination to revenge that he afterward became the most desperate of
desperate men. “Quantrell sometimes spares, but Anderson never,” became a
tradition of the Kansas line. Before he died in a skirmish with Northern
troops in 1864, he had tied fifty-three knots in a silken cord which he
carried in his buckskin pouch.
Every knot represented a human life.
Anderson was then ripe for the raid on Lawrence.
All this was cruelty, indeed, and enough to harden and embitter the
softest of hearts, but it was mild compared with the continuous suffering
and torture imposed upon my mother during the years from 1862 to 1870.
After the murder of my father she was so annoyed at her home in
Harrisonville that she sought peace at her country residence eight and a
half miles north of town. But she failed to find the comfort she sought,
for annoyances continued in a more aggravated form. She had with her only
the youngest children and was obliged to rely wholly for protection upon
“Suse,” the only remaining servant left to the family, who proved her
worth many times over and in every emergency was loyalty and devotion
itself. Nothing could have proved her faithfulness more effectually than
an incident connected with one of my stolen visits home. I went home one
night to get medicine for the boys wounded in the battle of Lone Jack whom
I was nursing in the woods some miles away. As I sat talking with my
mother two of my brothers watched at the windows. There was soon the
dreaded cry, “the militia are surrounding the house,” and in the
excitement which followed, “Suse” dashed open the door to find a score of
bayonets in her face. She threw up her hands and pushed aside the guns.
Her frantic screams, when they demanded that she deliver me up to them,
caused a momentary confusion which enabled me to gain her side and
together we made for the gate, where I took for the woods amid a shower of
lead, none of the bullets even so much as skinning me, although from the
house to the gate I was in the full glare of the light.
Two months after this incident the same persecutors again entered our home
in the dead of the night, and, at the point of a pistol, tried to force my
mother to set fire to her own home. She begged to be allowed to wait
until morning, so that she and her children and “Suse” would not be turned
out in the snow, then some two or three feet deep, in the darkness, with
the nearest neighbor many miles away. This they agreed to do on condition
that she put the torch to her house at daybreak. They were there bright
and early to see that she carried out her agreement, so, leaving her
burning walls behind her, she and the four youngest children and “Suse”
began their eight mile trudge through the snow to Harrisonville.
I have always felt that the exposure to which she was subjected on this
cruel journey, too hard even for a man to take, was the direct cause of
her death. From Harrisonville she went to Waverly, where she was hounded
continually. One of the conditions upon which her life was spared was
that she would report at Lexington weekly. It was during one of her
absences there that our enemies went to the house where she had left her
family and demanded that they turn over the $2,200 which had been
overlooked when my father was murdered. She had taken the precaution to
conceal it upon the person of “Suse,” and although they actually hung this
faithful servant to a tree in the yard in their determination to force her
to divulge the hiding place of the money, she never even hinted that the
money at that very moment was secreted in her garments. She was left for
dead, and except for the timely arrival of a friend, who cut her down and
restored her to her senses, she would in a few moments have been as dead
as her would-be-murderers hoped.
One of the numerous books purporting to be a history of my life states
with the utmost soberness that, as a boy, I was cruel to dumb animals and
to my schoolmates, and, as for my teachers, to them I was a continual
trouble and annoyance. A hundred of my friends and schoolmates will bear
me out in the statement that, far from being cruel to either dumb animals
or human beings, I was always regarded as kind and considerate to both.
One of my old school-teachers, whom I have never seen since the spring or
summer of 1862, is Stephen B. Elkins, senator from West Virginia.
July 4, 1898, Senator Elkins wrote: “I knew Cole Younger when we were boys
and also his parents. They were good people and among the pioneers on the
western border of Missouri. The Younger brothers maintained a good
reputation in the community where they lived and were well esteemed, as
were their parents, for their good conduct and character. In the spring
or summer of 1862 I was taken prisoner by Quantrell’s men and brought into
his camp by the pickets who had me in charge. On reaching the camp the
first person I saw whom I knew was Cole Younger. When I was taken
prisoner, I expected to be shot without ceremony. As soon as I saw Cole
Younger I felt a sense of relief because I had known him and his parents
long and favorably, and as soon as I got a chance I told him frankly what
I feared and that I hoped he would manage to take care of me and save me
from being killed. He assured me he would do all he could to protect me.
Cole Younger told Quantrell that my father and brother were in the rebel
army and were good fighters, and that I had stayed at home to take care of
my mother; that I was a good fellow and a non-combatant. This occurred
just before I entered the Union army, and it was generally known, and I am
sure Cole knew, that I was strongly for the Union and about to enter the
army. Cole Younger told me what to do to make good my escape and I feel
that I owe my life to his kindness.”
Another old school-teacher is Capt. Steve Ragan, who still lives in Kansas
City, Mo., and will bear testimony to the fact that I was neither cruel
nor unmanageable.