Wildwood Boys (4 page)
Even on the rare occasion of an unsuccessful rustle, when they
got back home they would sit out on the porch and recount to each
other the grand fun they’d had. Bill and his father would pass the jug
between them, but even young Jim, from the time he was twelve, was
permitted a small cup of whiskey as his earned right for engaging in
a man’s work. The females of the house would be abed but awake
and listening to them—Martha with her head full of fears for the
future, Mary and Josie and little Jenny holding each other close, their
eyes wide, their hearts thumping with thrill and envy.
They did not go uninformed during their Kansas years, these Andersons. Newspapers and the talk of neighbors at barn dances and village stores, the conversations of strangers in the little towns they
passed through on their hundred-mile rides back from horse sales in
Missouri—through such sources did they keep up with the news of
the day, most of it about the antagonisms attending the matter of
slavery and Kansas’s own part in the issue. The Andersons well knew
of the clamor attached to the territorial election of ’55 when the Federal government allowed Kansas to decide for itself to sanction or
reject slavery. They’d heard tale upon tale of abolitionists come all
the way from New England in pretense of being settlers but in truth
only to vote in league with the nigger-stealers and the damned
Dutch—hypocritical interlopers who held themselves morally superior to every man of southern ancestry and yet were avid to spill
blood, the proof of it in the Bible shipments they received from back
East that in fact were crates of Sharps rifles.
No Anderson had ever owned a slave or would, but Will had
early implanted in his sons an aversion to bullies of any stripe, and
the boys shared in his resentment of these outsiders from half the
continent away who would force their beliefs on Kansas. The Andersons were gladdened by news of the hordes of Missourians who
crossed into Kansas to outdo the free-stater vote. “Ruffians” the
abolitionists called them, and northern newspapers routinely
referred to Missourians as depraved “pukes” hardly fit to be called
human.
There were fewer than three thousand eligible voters in Kansas
on election day and over six thousand votes were cast. The Andersons were elated when the southern vote carried the day. And then
shortly thereafter were enraged once again when the free-staters formally denounced the new legislature and called for another election.
The Kansas government-elect said the matter had been settled and
suggested the northerners go back to New England where they
damn well did belong. But the abolitionists refused to yield. They
established a headquarters in the town of Lawrence, elected their
own governor and legislators, and solicited still more Yankees to the
territory.
Hostilities naturally increased. The following spring the Andersons smiled at reports that ruffians had swarmed into Lawrence—
“Yankeetown,” the pro-slavers called it, “Boston Colony”—and
destroyed the printing presses of both newspapers as well as looted
stores and fired several buildings, including the governor’s house and
the three-story Free State Hotel. They laughed when they heard
about the southern congressman so infuriated by a northern senator’s scurrilous denunciations of the South that he had stalked into
the Senate chamber with club in hand and right there on the floor
beaten the man to bloody insensibility. But they didn’t laugh when
they heard that a self-anointed messenger of God named John Brown
and several of his sons and followers had descended on five pro-slavery Kansans in the dark of night and cloven them to death with
broadswords.
“Claymores they used—Sweet Mother Mary!” Will Anderson
remarked to his boys about the John Brown murders. “I hope the
son of a bitch does hang, but I have to say he knows how to get his
point across.
to know it for common credo in this brute portion of the republic.
Fear
, boys—that’s half the fight right there. Make the
other fella more afraid of the awfulness of what you’ll do him if he
falls in your hands than you are of what he’ll do to you. That’s the
secret, and crazy old Brown knows it. Same with the Indians. Damn
Indians known it since forever. It’s what scalping’s all about, burning
at the stake, all them redskin ways of killing.”
And so, five years before Fort Sumter, the war was already under
way along the Kansas-Missouri border. “Death to all Yankees and
traitors in Kansas!” was the cry of pro-slave Missourians. And the
Kansas free-staters did bellow in response: “War to the knife and the
knife to the hilt!” Strangers approaching each other on lonely border
roads would clutch their weapons and ask, “Free state or slave?”—
and the answer could provoke mortal dispute. In newspapers across
the country the region now bore the name of “Bleeding Kansas.”
In these early years came into being the dread jayhawkers—
organized bands of hardcase Kansas vigilantes who preyed upon
southern sympathizers on both sides of the border. Among the most
notorious of their chieftains were a vicious little man named Charles
“Doc” Jennison—a bona fide physician who wore absurdly highcrowned fur hats to make himself appear taller—and a wildbearded
half-mad Campbellite preacher named James Montgomery. But the
most powerful and reviled of all jayhawkers was James Henry Lane,
“the Grim Chieftain,” a redhaired political opportunist who would
be elected one of Kansas’ first two senators. He was a fiery orator
whose speeches were said to make dogs howl, children wail, women
break into tears, and men of Kansas avid to kill and plunder in Missouri. It was Jim Lane’s declared intention to root out all things disloyal to the Union, “from a Durham cow to a Shanghai chicken.”
But so utter was his hatred of Missourians that he preyed on them all
alike, believing that any who claimed to be pro-Union was a puke
lying in his teeth.
The Andersons got letters from Martha’s sister Sally Parchman
telling of the terrible troubles in Jackson County, of fierce skirmishes
between Missouri guerrillas and damnable Kansas jayhawks, of
sometimes hearing the gunfire of such fights not a mile from their
own farm. She told of shot-dead bodies of strangers stood in a line of
upright coffins on town sidewalks that they might be recognized by
kin and claimed. Of the burnings of houses and oubuildings, now by
this band of nightriders, now by that one. Of the theft of livestock
and crops, of torchlight lynchings. Her fear of the jayhawkers, Sally
wrote, grew greater by the day. And her hatred.
By the summer of ’58 there were four abolitionists for every proslave resident in Kansas. In a new election overseen by Federal
troops the territory voted itself free. But the election did nothing to
dissuade the vigilantes of both sides from raiding back and forth
across the border, burning what they could and stealing whatever
they might make off with, sometimes leaving men sprawled dead in
their own fields or hanging from the trees.
Animosity toward Missouri was now so intense that the Andersons made a secret of their origins. “Used to be nobody’s damn business where a man was from,” Will Anderson said, “but the times
being what they are, it’s the first thing anybody wants to know anymore. From now on, somebody asks, we’re from Union Kentucky.”
He looked hard at Bill and Jim. “The border scrapping’s got nothing
to do with us, you hear? Nor the big war that’s coming. It’s a war
between rich factory owners and rich cottongrowers and we ain’t
either one or ever will be. Piss on the Yankees twice as much, but piss
on the Virginia bigwigs too. It’s their fight, not ours. The only thing
the war’s going to mean for us is better business. There’s going to be
more call for horses and they’ll bring a better price. We don’t stand
to do nothing in this war but make money.”
the Andersons stayed put.
A rustling foray never kept Will and the boys away from home for
more than a few days before they were back with new stock to hide
in their woods corrals—but with the advent of the larger war, Will
would no longer leave his wife and daughters at home by themselves
for as long as it took to get the herds to Missouri and come back.
Although it was riskier to sell the rustled stock so close to home,
there was no shortage of customers in the region. Newcomers were
settling within a day or two’s ride of the Anderson farm, and these
homesteaders wanted good horses and few were particular about
where they came from.
and its huge arsenal—and had the fierce loyalty of its population,
especially its Germans. The Union held the state capital. It had
strong garrisons at all the key railheads and river ports. The Federal
army had put the state under martial law and its citizens were
required to “swallow the dog”—to swear loyalty to the U.S. government—and to post bonds in guarantee of their oaths. It was clear
that the Union’s grip in Missouri would not be easily broken—and
clear as well that Missouri’s allegiance in the war was fiercely
divided. Although most Missourians were of southern ancestry,
many of them were pro-Union. Neighbors all over the state had
become bitter antagonists. Most wanted nothing more than to be let
alone, to stay out of the war altogether. They might as well have
wished for wings to fly themselves above it.
The only glad news from Missouri was of General Sterling Price
and his State Guard, who that summer won a major battle against
the Union at Wilson’s Creek. But that good tiding was offset by
reports of Jim Lane’s jayhawkers. At the rich Osage River town of
Osceola, they murdered citizens accused as friends of the Confederacy. They robbed the banks of their every dollar and loaded a train
of wagons with all the property they could bear away. Three hundred jayhawks got so drunk they had to be carried on the wagons as
well. As they made off, the reivers put the town to the torch and
every building but three was burned to ash.
“We did good to come this far west,” Will Anderson told his sons
as they raised a cup to each other in celebration of Christmas Day.
“Nobody in Missouri or within fifty miles of this side of the border is
safe from that damn war. We did good to come this far west, I say.”
His forecast of high profit proved true, and they were not shy about
spending it. Will gave Martha a regular and handsome allowance to
buy whatever pretties she desired for herself and the girls when the
family went to town on Saturday mornings. The Anderson men now
kept themselves in good boots and clothes, and Bill proved something of a dandy in his predilection for shirts with pleated fronts and
ruffled cuffs and in his strutting delight in a broadcloth cloak he
wore even to barn dances.
heads than before. The brothers looked much alike—both lean and
near to six feet tall, sharp-featured, their black hair down to their
collars—but Jim envied Bill his easy way of looking at girls so that
they’d smile even as they blushed and turned away and then kept
sneaking glances at him.
They bought saddles, knives, firearms—were particularly taken
with the .36-caliber Navy Colt revolver, a marvelous engine of
uncanny accuracy. Weighing little more than half as much as the gargantuan Walker, it felt to the Andersons as light as a toy, and they
could work it like a magic trick with either hand.
If any among the Agnes City storekeepers wondered about the
source of the Anderson affluence, they kept their curiosity to themselves.
One Saturday morning as the family was getting ready to go home, a
drunken muleskinner passing on the sidewalk muttered an indecency
to Mary Anderson as she was stepping up into the wagon—and he
made things worse for himself by patting her haunch. Mary turned
to kick at the man, and Bill and Jim both started around the wagon
to get at him, but Will had just come out of Mercer’s Hardware and
seen what happened and his newly purchased pickax was already
describing an arc as he swung it with both hands. The curved iron
blade drove through the man’s spine and various vital organs and
emerged through his front ribs to transfix him to the wagon sideboard. The wide-eyed corpse hung limply pinioned and dripping
dark blood and drew gawkers and blowflies while the constable was
searched out and fetched. Although several bystanders supported the
family’s account of the incident, Will Anderson was charged with
murder and made to stand trial.
This was a time when Missourians stood little chance in a Kansas
courtroom, but the Andersons had now long been passing for
Kansans and were known to most storekeepers as free-spending
patrons. The killed man, on the other hand, was a stranger for whom
no witness could testify. It was rumored he was a border ruffian.
Most of the jurymen, moreover, were fathers of daughters. They
deliberated twenty minutes and voted for acquittal. That evening,
the Andersons celebrated into the late hours with whiskey and
music, dancing and song. And though Bill Anderson would forever
be a Missourian in his bones, he would henceforth feel very much a
man of Kansas too.
Best friends to Bill and Jim Anderson were the Berry brothers—whitehaired Ike, the elder by a year, and roanhaired Butch who had a wayward eye. They were fellow Missourians out of Ray County whose
family had arrived in this part of Kansas a few years after the Andersons, their father bent on getting clear of the violence back home. But
two weeks before Butch’s sixteenth birthday, Alston Berry went by
himself into Emporia to pick up some harnesses he had ordered from
Saint Louis, and in the course of things he found himself in a saloon
where he entered an affray with three men later identified as jayhawkers of Jim Montgomery. He was carried home in the bloodstained bed of his wagon and holding his bowels to himself where a
jayhawker blade had slashed his belly. Their mother repositioned the
entrails as she best could and sewed the wound closed and prayed
over him and expected him to die. But he did not, and three months
later he still lived, though the wound would never heal. Some days it
seemed to be improving and then a few days later it would worsen
once again. Yellow pus and watery blood seeped constantly from the
suture. His pain rose and ebbed by intervals but was unremitting. It
precluded him from sitting up for more than an hour at a time or
sleeping through the night. Bedsores rooted into his back and buttocks. The stench of the wound was unabating and different from the
stink of the bedclothes, which his incontinence persistently soiled and
which the two Berry sisters were ever washing and drying and changing. He wasted to a coal-eyed skeleton hung with waxy skin. His
voice was a raw croak each time he told his family he was shamed by
his lack of courage to shoot himself and end the ordeal for them all.