Wildwood Boys (41 page)
NATHANIEL SOBELSKI
,
PHOTOGRAPHIST
—
HAR
-
RISONVILLE
,
MISSOURI
.
“A Missour girl sweet on a Yank,” Butch Berry said. “It’s enough
to make me spit.”
her misplaced loyalty.”
He did not show them the small gilded locket and neckchain he’d
taken off the dead man. When he’d opened the locket and seen the
small tangle of dusky yellow curls nestled within, he’d stared at it for
a time before accepting that it was a lock of her private hair. He’d
felt of its springiness between his fingers, put it to his nose and
believed he detected a faint scent of female essence. He imagined her
as she applied the scissors and his chest went tight.
always admired. He would henceforth compose nightly letters to her
in his head, would praise her beauty and her daring heart, would tell
her everything of himself and his deepest yearnings, would inquire
after her opinions on the whirling world. He would envision her as
she read his letters on a porch swing in the soft gold light of late
afternoon. In nights to come he would imagine a time when the war
had ceased to be, imagine himself seeking her out, wooing her, gaining her favor, declaring himself, promising to provide for her and to
protect her better than the corporal ever could (the corporal unable,
after all, to protect even himself). He would imagine them married
and with a home and children, living on a fine tract of bottom he
knew of in Ray County, making their way in this life with no need of
anyone but each other and their sons and daughters. It was a life so
right his eyes would go hot every time he dwelt on it.
would open the locket and touch the special hair. And if her true
name was not Rachel, that was all right. He would love her, did
already love her, whatever it was.
They buried Lionel Ward under a purpling maple, adding to the wide
earth’s mass of interred bones and bonedust, to its store of dead
beyond number. The ninety-one Yankee dead they left to rot under
the passing sky—two dozen of them scalped and blood-crowned,
many more of them docked an ear, absent a nose, minus an index finger. The crows were already at feed on them, and the wind would
carry the swelling stink with its news of the waiting feast and draw
more scavengers yet. Let the damn Feds find their fellows in such
state and take warning from it.
The Camps
6
1863–1864
They ferried across the Red River into Grayson County, Texas, on a
cool October afternoon of cloudless sky and bright tangerine sun. A
flock of blue herons as tall as schoolchildren rose off the upriver
bank with a smooth working of wide slow wings. Bill Anderson
regarded their flight and rued his lack of art to capture the beauty of
it. He wondered what Poe might write about those gangly birds with
their snake necks and dagger beaks and fierce mad eyes.
The ferryman spat a streak of tobacco at a watersnake wriggling
near the pushpole. He told Quantrill he was smart not to try to ford
the river, that there were quicksand bogs all along the Red of such
size they’d been known to swallow entire wagons and their teams
with them. “There’s more human bones rotting under the Red than
in all the cemeteries twixt here and Fort Worth,” the ferryman said,
showing a black grin through his stained beard.
Bill Anderson heard him and smiled. And thought the Red was a
Poe river, all right.
and they were waiting on the south bank to report to Quantrill.
They’d found a good spot on Mineral Creek, and Quantrill said to
lead the way. They rode along a trail winding through yellow grass
to their stirrups, through shinnery and groves of cottonwoods
squalling with crows. Just before sunset they reined up at a wide
shortgrass meadow bordering the creek. Quantrill studied it carefully and then nodded. “This is it, boys. Our winter home.”
thick with turtles, with catfish and trout. The surrounding woodlands abounded with deer and wild pig. They formed into work parties and set to hewing trees and trimming timber and constructing a
cookshed and rude quarters against the coming cold. They built
large stone firepits and dug slit trenches in the woods. A family of
hardfaced moonshiners emerged cautiously from the trees one day to
sell them excellent spirits at better prices than they’d get in town,
and the guerrillas made a deal with them for two wagonloads of
whiskey every week. All else they would need by way of supplies
they could get at the town of Sherman, some fifteen miles to the
southeast, and Quantrill and his officers established rosters for supply runs.
A courier came to them from General Henry McCulloch, C.S.A.,
commander of the District of North Texas, whose headquarters was
in Bonham, some twenty-five miles east of Sherman. He conveyed his
regards and congratulations to Quantrill and his men on their splendid victory over General Blunt at Baxter Springs. He’d heard the
news from General Sterling Price himself, who was encamped in
Arkansas and to whom Quantrill had sent a report about the engagement. He said he might call on Quantrill to assist in various military
objectives in the Red River region. Quantrill responded with his own
compliments and said he and his men stood ready to serve the general in any capacity.
At first they were content to spend most of their time in camp, making trips to town only as part of a supply detail or to visit the pleasure houses. Having lived in constant wariness for so long, they were
slow to let down their guard, to believe fully that they were at safe
remove from Yankee territory and its relentless hunting patrols.
They passed their first weeks preparing for winter and tending to
other requisite matters. They hunted and fished, smoked and jerked
meat to lay by. They reshod their horses, made pistol cartridges,
mended their clothes with needle and thread.
For recreation they drank and played music and sang. They had
shooting contests and Quantrill usually came out the winner,
although Bill Anderson won sometimes and so too did Todd. Nobody
else ever won except Cole Younger and Butch Berry, who each won
once. They held horse races, but Quantrill’s Charley couldn’t be
beaten, and after a time nobody would bet against him anymore, so
Quantrill proudly retired the horse from the competitions.
They got up a wrestling tournament and every man was required
to ante two dollars to enter it, whether he wished to wrestle or not,
and the champion would receive the full kitty. The matches in each
elimination round were determined by lot and without regard to differences in size. They took place in the late afternoons with most of
the company in attendance and clamoring with cheers and sidebets.
Not a man refused to wrestle in his turn, not even little Riley Crawford, who within seconds of entering the ring against Dave Pool was
slammed unconscious and didn’t come to for twenty minutes.
Disqualification was common in the early rounds. Arch Clement
had to forfeit after losing his temper in a match with Valentine Baker
and kicking him so hard in the balls that Baker couldn’t walk properly for a day. Buster Parr was ejected for biting off a portion of Dick
West’s ear when it looked like Dick was about to pin him and others
had to intervene to keep Dick from getting a gun and shooting Buster.
Both of the Berrys reached the third round and then Butch lost to
Cole Younger and Ike lost to George Todd. Quantrill surprised most
of the men by making it to the fourth round, then came up against
Todd, who repeatedly and enthusiastically threw him and seemed to
prolong the match deliberately before at last pinning him down. Bill
Anderson did not lose until he went up against Oz Swisby in the fifth
round, and Jim made it to the late rounds before losing to big Hi
Guess.
When Hi defeated Oz, and Todd at last defeated Cole Younger in
an epic two-hour tussle, they were matched for the championship.
Their contest lasted nearly three hours before Todd finally forced
Hi’s shoulders to the ground. Both of them had to be helped to their
feet. Quantrill presented Todd with the prize of eight hundred dollars, and Todd raised the poke over his head with both hands and
grinned at the cheers—which went even louder when he announced
his intention to buy every man of the company a turn with a Sherman whore. Some of them put him on their shoulders and paraded
him around the camp with others following behind and all of them
singing:
Jim Anderson nudged Bill and nodded toward Quantrill, who
stood looking after the celebrant Todd and his crowd of admirers
with the mien of a man watching a funeral train.
Some days later came a notice from General McCulloch’s headquarters that General James G. Blunt, United States Army, was alive and
well and ensconced at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. According to
accounts in the Kansas City newspapers, he had escaped the guerrillas at Baxter Springs in civilian clothes and in the company of a
woman. There was no more to the message, and Quantrill asked
Cole Younger and Bill Anderson if they sensed a frostiness to it.
“Got a cool tone, all right,” Cole said. “Probably thinks we were
lying. Hell, we didn’t
.”
learned the man he’d killed was not General Blunt but only Major
Somebody with a penchant for ornate uniforms, he took the man’s
scalp off his horse’s bridle and flung it in the fire.
Toward the end of their second month in Texas the men began to get
restless. They more often rode into town to take their pleasures in
the cathouses and saloons. The local merchants welcomed them like
heroes and saw their profits soar.
Quantrill rarely went to Sherman with his men. He preferred
long solitary rides on Charley, and where he went no one knew. He
spent much time at reading, in writing daily letters to Kate. She was
living with her father in Blue Springs while the guerrillas were away.
He sent a rider to Missouri every week with his accumulated letters,
and the courier would return with her letters to him.
But now he began to receive complaints about his men‘s conduct
in town—reports of raw profanities bellowed within earshot of
women and children, of loutish public drunkenness, of firearms discharged inside the city limits. When a sheriff’s deputy tried to arrest
a pair of bushwhackers who were fistfighting in an alley while some
of their fellows stood by and made bets, the brawlers turned on the
lawman and plunged him into a water trough and might have
drowned him if W. J. Gregg hadn’t come along and made them stop.
By the end of November, Sherman was lacking deputies and the
sheriff rarely showed himself on the streets. While there was no
denying the prosperity the guerrillas brought to Sherman, some of its
citizens were having second thoughts about these wildwood boys
with their rough manners and dangerous shifts in mood.
Quantrill went into town and had a talk with the mayor, then
with the newspaper editor, who relayed in print his assurances to the
townfolk that his men would henceforth comport themselves in better fashion. Back in camp, he called the company together and
warned them against harassing the citizens. Some of the men looked
sidewise at each other and arched their brows. George Todd smiled
around at them and yawned behind his hand.
At first, Bill more often chose to keep to the camp than to go larking
in town. Evenings he sat by a lantern with his books, days he went
for walks in the woods and passed the hours along the upstream
creek with no company but the chittering crows. One day he idly
began to scale stones over the creek surface and the exercise suddenly put him in such vivid mind of Josephine he felt his breath seize
in his chest. She had always excelled at this game and he remembered
the beautiful grin she’d give him whenever she made a good throw.
The memory made him feel so achingly hollow he did not return to
the creek again, and started going to town with the others.
A cold and windless December night of unseasonable rain a few days
before Christmas. The small room was on the second floor of the
Purple Moon Emporium and was dimly lighted by a candle on a corner shelf. The room’s plank floor only partly muted the din from the
saloon downstairs—the ceaseless piano plunking and lusty singing,
the laughter and bellowed conversations, the sporadic smash of glass
and intermittent rebel yells. The guerrillas had bought the whole
place for themselves on this night and none of the locals dared to
intrude on their fun. The proprietors were a married couple named
Preston, but only the missus was mingling with patrons this rowdy
eve, exhorting the boys to have fun but please don’t break the furniture, making sure the Negro maids kept the girls supplied with fresh
towels. The rulesman—whose duty it was to ensure a proper decorum in the guests—had been granted the night off. The mister had
shut himself in his office and sat listening to the guerrillas at their
frolic, hoping they would not burn the place down nor maim any of
the girls who were making him rich.