Wildwood Boys (52 page)
They impressed another guide in Chariton and over the next days
they left men of the Sixteenth Home Guard hanging from trees and
barn rafters, shot dead in fields and corrals, throatcut in dooryards,
on porches.
One late forenoon they reined up before a young farmer repairing a boundary fence. His eyes were an agitation of uncertainty as
they cut from man to man and saw a blue coat on every one. Bill
asked if he were a Union man, and the man nodded. “Are you certain, now,” Bill asked, leaning forward in his saddle. “For sure,
you’re a champion of Mr. Lincoln?”
The man nodded again, though with less vigor.
Missouri and cannot stand the notion of a Union man breathing our
air.”
not
a Union man!” he cried.
“Secesh! I am secesh! I thought
you
was Union!”
Butch Berry said. He leaned from his saddle and spat.
Guerrilla eyes narrowed all around.
done it now.”
swung their mounts after him, Bill said, “Persuade that Dutchman to
give up his informing ways.”
“The devil is loose in Chariton and Carroll counties with scarcely
three feet of chain to his neck.” Thus spake
in these deepening summer days.
They ranged east into Randolph and into his one-time home of
Huntsville. Former neighbors displayed smiles, professed gladness at
the sight of him, but he cursed them for cowards, for not taking arms
against the Federals. Accompanied by Jim and Arch and the two
James boys, he stalked into the main street bank and when they came
out again Jim carried a sack containing more than $40,000. Frank
James felt his little brother’s elbow in his ribs and heard him whisper,
“Hot
Buck!”
Down into Howard County. They got word that a detachment of
Yankees was in Fayette and bragging they would wipe out Bloody
Bill’s gang and scalp every man of them just as they had been scalping Federals. Bill set up an ambush on the Fayette road and waited
for the Feds to come along in the morning. But the informer who had
brought word of the Federals to Bill had taken back word of the
ambush to the Yanks. The Federals tried to catch the guerrillas by
surprise from behind, but a vidette spotted them and gave the alarm.
The fight was short and fierce and the Feds abandoned the field,
leaving a handful of dead comrades and one killed guerrilla, a man
named Luckett. Riley Crawford lost a little finger to a passing pistol
ball and searched the ground for it in vain, distressed by the thought
of ants or some crow making supper of it.
Bill himself was shot in the hip but the bullet broke no bone. Jim
and Butch would cauterize the wound that night with a heated pistol
barrel and grin at Bill’s yowls and curses and loudly agreed with each
other that he was lucky the round had just missed his ass or it might
have done brain damage.
Bill put $35 in Luckett’s pocket, together with a note instructing
that he be given a proper burial. Then he had the dead man strapped
over his horse and the animal was sent loping down the road toward
town. The fallen Yankees were left where they lay. When a wagon
party came out to collect the bodies, they found them capped with
blood. Between the teeth of one was a folded note: “You come to
hunt bushwhackers. Now you are skelpt. Clement skelpt you.”
This sultry morning they are moving slowly through a region of
shadowed bottomland. Crows calling. Frogs clangoring in the river
reeds. Dragonflies wavering above the high grass. The air heavy with
the smell of mud and verdure. As they ride, the young James boy is
lecturing on the hoop snake.
“There’s just no getting away from a hoop snake if it takes a
mind to go after you,” Jesse says. “It’ll take its tail in its mouth and
make itself into a wheel, and it’ll roll faster than any horse can run.”
“Lord Jesus,” Frank James mutters. He spits and drops farther
back along the column, beyond earshot of his brother.
beaming with his cleverness. “See it get me then.”
up
that hill after you,” Jesse says. “Hoop snake
can roll uphill, can roll
over water,
can roll right up a danged tree. It
can bite you dead right through your boot.”
“You know, like how you treat a rattler bite?” He’d been the one to
bring up the subject—and was sorry he had—after seeing a snake
slither across the road ahead of them. The sight had reminded him of
his baby sister’s claim, years ago, to have seen a hoop snake rolling
along the hog path behind their barn. He hadn’t believed her, but
Jesse said he should have, and had commenced his monologue on the
mythical creature.
says. “First, you have to kill it before it gets away, and to do that,
you have to shoot it in the heart. Now its heart is
exactly
ten inches
below the head. If you don’t hit the heart you’ll never kill it. You can
shoot it a dozen dang times, you can shoot its dang head
off,
but if
you don’t hit the heart it’ll just slither away like a raggedy old rope
and grow a new head before sunup. But you hit it in the heart and
that’s all she wrote. Then what you do is, you cut off a piece of the
carcass and wrap it around the bite and leave it in place for twentyfour hours
exactly,
not a minute longer and not a minute less. You do
that and you’ll be as right as the rain again.”
They went into Boone County and reveled in the river town of
Rocheport. Most of the residents hailed them as heroes. The bushwhackers paid for their first few rounds of drinks in the various taverns and then simply began helping themselves to the liquor, and no
saloonkeeper dared to protest. The women gorged them with homecooking. Men made presents of good horses to those guerrillas in
need of new mounts. They passed to them every scrap of information
they had about Federal doings in the region. They cheered and guffawed like spectators at a stageshow comedy while the bushwhackers fired fusillades at a passing steamboat, the bullets whining off the
smokestack, gouging the railings and woodwork, humming into the
pilothouse and splintering the walls over the heads of the captain
and his officers where they hunkered down and prayed they
wouldn’t run up on a sandbar or tear the hull open on a sawyer.
As he strolled down the main street the next day, Bill spied a
young boy of about eight grinning at him. He stopped and winked at
the boy and said having his company in town was better than a circus, wasn’t it? “Oh,
yes sir
!” the boy said. The day before, Bill had
taken a silver pocketwatch off the bank president, and now he presented it to the boy and smiled at his speechless delight.
The company continued to draw recruits, fierce young men and boys
eager to ride with Bloody Bill, the scourge of Union Missouri. By the
last days of July, the Union command in Missouri elevated him to the
top of their wanted list. “Anderson is the worst of the lot,” wrote
one Yankee general to another. “His brigands are like a pack of
wolves who have tasted human blood and henceforth will feed on
nothing other. The sole solution to the problem he constitutes is to
kill him, for he will surely continue to kill every Union man he can.”
From the start, the Federals had sometimes hanged captured
guerrillas and left them to rot on the rope, posting signs that warned
against removal of the bodies. On rare occasion their Indian scouts
had taken a scalp or two. But in this bloodiest summer of the Missouri war, the Yankees had been regularly retaliating in kind—scalping one or two men in every bunch of killed guerrillas, docking ears
and noses and fingers.
Back in Carroll County, they ambushed Union patrols and cut telegraph lines, then cut them again as soon as they were repaired. They
once more terrified steamboat traffic on the river. They camped in
the bluffs north of DeWitt and Bill sent a pair of scouts to reconnoiter the oxbow region around Wakenda Creek, where Yank patrols
were said to be roaming. By morning the scouts hadn’t returned, so
he set out with two dozen men to look for them.
They found their heads mounted on adjacent posts of a farm
fence within sight of the creek, nettled crows flapping off them and
into the trees as the horsemen came cantering. Pale as wax, hair wild,
eyes hollowed blackly and lips in ruin, the faces looked like poorly
wrought carnival masks swarming with ants. The fence posts
beneath them showed blacked streaks of blood. A search was made
of the area but neither man’s body was found. Butch Berry said they
had likely been flung in the creek and carried on the current to the
Muddy. “Some downriver farmer’s going to have an interesting
moment when he goes to water his mules and sees what comes floating by.”
Arch Clement had been fighting a grin and now yielded to it. “I’ll
tell you what,” he said. “You can’t get your throat cut any worse
than that.”
While a couple of the men dug holes with their bowies to bury
the heads, Jim put his horse up beside Bill’s and said, “I can remember a time when this sort of thing might’ve set me back on my heels
a little.”
“I can’t,” Bill said.
“Damn fools,” Archie said. “We’ll show them jolts.”
At the beginning of August they got word of the Confederacy’s plan
to invade Missouri. General Sterling Price, commanding the rebel
force, would come across the Arkansas border in September, march
up through eastern Missouri, and attack Saint Louis. Once that key
city was in Confederate hands, the South could recapture the rest of
the state. Old Pap sent a request to all Missouri guerrilla chiefs to do
what they could to keep Union forces busy and at a distance from
Saint Louis.
They stormed through Clay County, moving fast, burning Unionist
farms and laying ambushes for Yankee patrols. Fletch Taylor led a
small party of men across the Missouri into Jackson County to cause
what consternation they might, but in a skirmish with Federals he
had his right arm shattered by a rifleball. The doctor his men
impressed to attend him said there was nothing for it but to come
off, and so it was done. His men then took him to a trusted Lafayette
County family, left him there to recover, and rejoined the company
over the river.
East of Richfield they caught a party of twelve Feds out in the
open and killed them all. Every man of the Yanks was scalped but
their leader, a young lieutenant whose severed and earless head hung
dripping from a maple branch where Archie Clement tied it by its
own hair.
They headed back for the central counties, their pace varying,
their route a meander. They came on farms that had been fled minutes before their arrival, the chimneys churning smoke, the animals
in their pens and stalls, dinner plates sometimes still on the table,
half-full and warm. They never bothered to search out the families
hiding in the woods nor tried to determine if they were of Yankee or
rebel allegiance. Bill’s rule was that any who fled them were Unionist, and in every case of a deserted farm he ordered his men to gather
all the food they could carry off, then shoot the stock and fire the
house and outbuildings. By the middle of the month they were being
hunted by every Federal and militia unit in central Missouri.
The very air seems charged with blood and death. East of
us, west of us, north of us, south of us, comes the same harrowing story. Pandemonium itself seems to have broken
loose, and robbery, murder and rapine, and death run riot
over the country.
Journal of Commerce
(Kansas City)
I defer to no man in my hatred of Federals or my joy in
their destruction,—but these newer rituals do sometimes
seem less acts of war than antics of madhouse riot. But then,
as you well know, I have been quite mad for some time,—
from the very instant I met you, I have been mad for YOU.
Never doubt that you are in my heart and thoughts every
minute. I never shut my eyes at night without first stroking
the lock of your hair and then studying your likeness by the
light of the fire. . . .
You do what you must do, I do not doubt it for an instant,
but I do not dwell upon it. I have not used our lovely tub
since your departure, nor will I until you return. I bathe at
the creek. Were I to sit in that grand tub without you, I
would feel adrift at sea. . . .
They met with Clifton Holtzclaw’s company in the hills of north
Boone County and complimented each other on their good work.
They shared a bottle and by the time they had emptied it they’d
agreed to join forces, and so the Kansas First Guerrillas now numbered more than eighty men.
But Holtzclaw had sad news as well, which he’d recently heard
from George Todd. In late July, Todd and Dick Yeager had teamed to
made a good raid on Arrow Rock in Saline County—they drove the
Feds out of town and burned their headquarters, rustled a good
bunch of horses, and got several wagonloads of goods. But as the
Yanks made their retreat, they kept up a steady rear-guard fire, and
Yeager took a bad head wound. Todd transported him a few miles
upriver to the farm of an old couple named Jorgenson, who had several times given the guerrillas refuge and feedings. George gave them
money and left Dick to their tending.