The Story of Cole Younger, by
Himself
Being an Autobiography of the Missouri Guerrilla Captain
and
Outlaw, his Capture and Prison Life, and the Only
Authentic
Account of the Northfield Raid Ever
Published
By Cole Younger
The Story of Cole Younger, by
Himself Being an Autobiography of the Missouri Guerrilla Captain and
Outlaw, his Capture and Prison Life, and the
Only Authentic Account of the Northfield Raid Ever
Published By Cole Younger Chicago The Henneberry Company 1903 Contents Why This Book Is Here 1. Boyhood Days 2. The Dark and Bloody Ground1 3. Driven from Home 4. The Trap That Failed 5. Vengeance Indeed 6. In the Enemy's Lines 7. Lone Jack 8. A Foul Crime 9. How Elkins Escaped 10. A Price on My Head 11. Betrayed 12. Quantrell on War 13. The Palmyra Butchery 14. Lawrence 15. Chasing Cotton Thieves 16. A Clash with Apaches 17. The Edicts of Outlawry 18. Not All Black 19. A Duel and an Auction 20. Laurels Unsought 21. The Truth about John
Younger 22. Amnesty Bill Fails 23. Belle Starr 24. “Captain Dykes” 25. Eluding the Police 26. Ben Butler's Money 27. Horace Greeley Perry 28. The Northfield Raid 29. A Chase to the Death 30. To Prison for Life 31. Some Private History 32. Lost—Twenty-five Years 33. The Star of Hope 34. On Parole 35. Jim Gives It Up 36. Free Again 37. The Wild West 38. What My Life Has Taught Me An Afterward Cole Younger Nannie Harris and Charity Kerr John Jarrette William Clarke Quantrell William Gregg Jim Younger Jesse James (top) and Frank James
(bottom) John Younger Bob Younger Illustration: Wild West Show
advertisement Why This Book Is Here Many may
wonder why an old “guerrilla” should feel called upon at this late day to
rehearse the story of his life. On the eve of sixty, I come out into the
world to find a hundred or more of books, of greater or less pretensions,
purporting to be a history of “The Lives of the Younger Brothers,” but
which are all nothing more nor less than a lot of sensational recitals, with which
the Younger brothers never had the least association. One publishing house
alone is selling sixty varieties of these books, and I venture to say that
in the whole lot there could not be found six pages of truth. The stage,
too, has its lurid dramas in which we are painted in devilish
blackness. It is therefore my purpose to give an authentic
and absolutely correct history of the lives of the “Younger Brothers,” in
order that I may, if possible, counteract in some measure at least, the
harm that has been done my brothers and myself, by the blood and thunder
accounts of misdeeds, with which
relentless sensationalists have charged us, but which have not even the
suggestion of truth about them, though doubtless they have had everything
to do with coloring public opinion. In this account I propose to set out the little
good that was in my life, at the same time not withholding in any way the
bad, with the hope of setting right before the world a family name once
honored, but which has suffered disgrace by being charged with more evil
deeds than were ever its rightful share. To the host of friends in Minnesota and Missouri who have done
everything possible to help my brother and myself during the last few
years, with no other object than the love of doing good and aiding fellow
creatures in suffering, I wish to say that I shall always conduct myself
so that they will never have the least cause to regret having championed our cause, or feel any shame
in the friendship so generously proven to us. Nothing lies deeper in my
heart than the gratitude I feel to them all, except a desire to prove
myself worthy. In the two
states named these friends are too numerous for me to mention each of
their names, but among those in Missouri who traveled long journeys to
Minnesota to plead my cause, even though they knew it to be unpopular in
many quarters, I wish to especially thank Col. W. C. Bronaugh of Clinton,
Capt. Steve Ragan, Colonel Rogers of Kansas City and Miss Cora MacNeill,
now Mrs. George M. Bennett of Minneapolis, but also formerly of Kansas
City. In concluding these remarks, I wish to say that from cover to
cover there is not a statement which could not be
verified. Yours Truly, COLE YOUNGER Lee's Summit, Mo. 1. Boyhood Days Political
hatreds are always bitter, but none were ever more bitter than those which
existed along the border line of Missouri and Kansas during my boyhood in
Jackson county in the former state from 1856 to '60. These hatreds were
soon to make trouble for me of which I had never
dreamed. Mine was a happy childhood. I was
the seventh of fourteen children, but my father had prospered and we were
given the best education the limited facilities of that part of the West
then afforded. My people
had always been prominent, politically. It was born in the blood. My great
grandmother on my father's side was a daughter of “Lighthorse Harry” Lee,
whose proud memory we all cherish. The Youngers came from Strasburg, and
helped to rule there when it was a free city. Henry Washington Younger, my
father, represented Jackson county three times in the legislature, and was
also judge of the county court. My mother, who was Bursheba Fristoe of
Independence, was the daughter of Richard Fristoe who fought under General
Andrew Jackson at New Orleans, Jackson county having been so named at my
grandfather Fristoe's insistence. Mother was descended from the Sullivans,
Ladens and Percivals of South Carolina, the Taylors of Virginia and the
Fristoes of Tennessee, and my grandfather Fristoe was a grand nephew of
Chief Justice John Marshall of Virginia. Naturally
we were Southerners in sympathy and in fact. My father owned slaves and
his children were reared in ease, though the border did not then abound in
what would now be called luxury. The railroads had not reached Jackson
county, and wild game was plentiful on my father's farm on Big Creek near
Lee's Summit. I cannot remember when I did not know how to shoot. I hunted
wild geese when I could not have dragged a pair of them home unaided. But
this garden spot was destined to be a bloody battle ground when the nation
divided. There had
been scrimmages back and forth over the Kansas line since 1855. I was only
a boy, born January 15, 1844. My brother James was born January 15, 1848,
John in 1851, and Robert in December, 1853. My eldest brother, Richard,
died in 1860. This was before the conflicts and troubles centered on our
home that planted a bitterness in my young heart which cried out for
revenge and this feeling was only accentuated by the cruelties of war
which followed. I refer in particular to the shameful and cowardly murder
of my father for money which he was known to have in his possession, and the cruel treatment
of my mother at the hands of the Missouri Militia. My father was in the
employ of the United States government and had the mail contract for five
hundred miles. While in Washington attending to some business regarding
this matter, a raid was made by the Kansas Jayhawkers upon the livery
stable and stage line for several miles out into the country, the robbers
also looting his store and destroying his property generally. When my
father returned from Washington and learned of these outrages he went to
Kansas City, Mo., headquarters of the State Militia, to see if anything
could be done. He had started back to Harrisonville in a buggy, but was
waylaid one mile south of Westport, a suburb of Kansas City, and brutally
murdered; falling out of his buggy into the road with three mortal bullet
wounds. His horse was tied to a tree and his body left lying where it
fell. Mrs. Washington Wells and her son, Samuel, on the road home from
Kansas City to Lee's Summit, recognized the body as that of my father. Mrs.
Wells stayed to guard the remains while her son carried the news of the
murder to Col. Peabody of the Federal command, who was then in camp at
Kansas City. An incident in connection with the murder of my father was
the meeting of two of my cousins, on my mother's side, Charity Kerr and Nannie Harris (afterwards
Mrs. McCorkle) with first my father and then a short distance on with
Capt. Walley and his gang of the Missouri Militia, whose hands are stained
with the blood of my father. Nannie
Harris and Charity Kerr 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 grocery man 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. 2. The Dark and Bloody Ground Many causes united in embittering the people on both sides of
the border between Missouri and Kansas. Those Missourians who were for
slavery wanted Kansas admitted as a slave state, and sought to accomplish
it by the most strenuous efforts. Abolitionists on the other hand determined
that Kansas should be free and one of the plans for inviting immigration
from the Eastern Northern states where slavery was in disrepute, was the
organization of an Immigrant Aid Society, in which many of the leading men
were interested. Neither the earnestness of their purpose nor the enthusiasm of their fight
for liberty is for me to question now. But many of
those who came to Kansas under the auspices of this society were
undesirable neighbors, looked at from any standpoint. Their ideas on
property rights were very hazy, in many cases. Some of them were let out
of Eastern prisons to live down a “past” in a new country. They looked
upon a slave owner as legitimate prey, and later when lines became more closely
drawn a secessionist was fit game, whether he had owned slaves or
not. These new
neighbors ran off with the horses and negroes of Missouri people without
compunctions of conscience and some Missourians grew to have similarly lax
notions about the property rights of Kansans. These raiders on both sides,
if interfered with, would kill, and ultimately they developed into what
was known during the war as “Freebooters,” who, when they found a stable
of horses or anything easily transportable, would take it whether the
owner be abolitionist or secessionist in
sympathy. It was a
robbery and murder by one of these bands of Kansas Jayhawkers, that gave
to the Civil war Quantrell, the Chief of the
Guerrillas. A boy of
20, William Clarke Quantrell, had joined his brother in Kansas in 1855 and
they were on their way to California overland when a band of Jayhawkers in
command of Capt. Pickens, as was afterwards learned, raided their camp
near the Cottonwood river; killed the older boy, left the younger one for
dead, and carried off their valuables. But under
the care of friendly Indians, Charles Quantrell lived. Changing his name
to Charley Hart, he sought the Jayhawkers, joined Pickens' company, and
confided in no one. Quantrell and three others were sent out to meet an
“underground railroad” train of negroes from Missouri. One of the party
did not come back. Between
October, 1857, and March, 1858, Pickens' company lost 13 men. Promotion
was rapid. Charley “Hart” was made a
lieutenant. No one had
recognized in him the boy who had been left for dead two summers before,
else Capt. Pickens had been more careful in his confidences. One night he
told the young lieutenant the story of a raid on an emigrant camp on the
Cottonwood river; how the dead man had been left no shroud; the wounded
one no blanket; how the mules were sold and the proceeds gambled for.
But Lieut.
“Hart's” mask revealed nothing. Three days later Pickens and two of his
friends were found dead on Bull Creek. Col. Jim
Lane's orderly boasted of the Cottonwood affair in his cups at a banquet
one night. The orderly was found dead soon
after. Quantrell
told a friend that of the 32 who were concerned in the killing of his
brother, only two remained alive, and they had moved to
California. The fight
at Carthage in July 1861, found Quantrell in Capt. Stewart's company of
cavalry. I was there as a private in the state guard, fighting under
Price. Then came Gen. Lyon's fatal charge at Wilson's creek, and Gen.
Price's march on Lexington to dislodge Col. Mulligan and his
command. Here
Quantrell came into the public eye for the first time. His red shirt stood
out in the first rank in every advance; he was one of the last when the
men fell back. After Lexington, Quantrell went with the command as far as the
Osage river, and then, with the consent of his officers, came up the
Kansas line again to settle some old scores with the
Jayhawkers. 3. Driven from Home I was only
seventeen when Col. Mockbee gave a dancing party for his daughter at his
home in Harrisonville which was to terminate seriously for some of us who
were there. The colonel was a Southerner, and his daughter had the
Southern spirit, too. Probably this was the reason that inspired the
young Missouri militiamen who were stationed at Harrisonville to intrude
on the colonel's party. Among them was Captain Irvin Walley, who, even
though a married man, was particularly obnoxious in forcing his attentions
on the young women. My sister refused to dance with him, and he picked a
quarrel with me. “Where is Quantrell?” he asked me, with a
sneer. “I don't know,” I answered. “You are a liar,” he continued, and as he went down in a heap
on the floor, he drew his pistol, but friends came between us, and at
their solicitation I went home and informed my father of what had taken
place. He told me to go down to the farm in Jackson county, and to keep
away from the conflict that Walley was evidently determined to force. Next
morning I started. That night
Walley and a band of his scouts came to my father's house and demanded
that he surrender me, on the ground that I was a spy, and in communication
with Quantrell. Father denounced it as a
lie. Though a
slave-owner, father had never been in sympathy with secession, believing,
as it turned out, that it meant the death of slavery. He was for the
Union, in spite of his natural inclinations to sympathy with the
South. A demand
that I surrender was conveyed to my father by Col. Neugent, who was in
charge of the militia at Harrisonville, again charging that I was a spy. I
never doubted that his action was due to the enmity of Walley. My parents
wanted me to go away to school. I would have liked to have stayed and
fought it out, and although I consented to go away, it was too late, and I was
left no choice as to fighting it out. Watch was being kept for me at every
railroad station, and the only school I could reach was the school of war
close at home. Armed with
a shot-gun and revolver, I went out into the night and was a qanderer. Instant
death to all persons bearing arms in Missouri was the edict that went
forth Aug. 30 of that year from Gen. John C. Fremont's headquarters at St.
Louis, and he declared that all slaves belonging to persons in arms
against the United States were free. President Lincoln promptly overruled
this, but it had added to the bitterness in Missouri where many men who
owned slaves were as yet opposed to
secession. It was
“hide and run for it” with me after that. That winter my brother-in-law,
John Jarrette, and myself, joined Capt. Quantrell's company. Jarrette was
orderly sergeant. He never knew fear, and the forty that then made up the
company were as brave men as ever drew
breath. We were not
long quiet. Burris had a detachment raiding in the neighborhood of
Independence. We struck their camp at sunset. We were thirty-two; they
eighty-four; but we were sure shots and one volley broke their ranks in
utter confusion. Five fell at the first fire, and seven more died in the
chase, the others regaining Independence, where the presence of the rest of the regiment
saved them. That day my persistent pistol practice showed its worth when
one of the militiamen fell, 71 yards away, actual measure. That was Nov.
10, 1861. All that
winter Independence was the scene of a bloody warfare. One day early in
February Capt. Quantrell and David Pool, Bill Gregg and George Shepherd,
George Todd and myself, charged in pairs down three of the streets to the
court house, other members of the company coming through other streets. We
had eleven hurt, but we got away with ammunition and other supplies that
were badly needed. Seven militiamen died that day. Another charge, at
daybreak of Feb. 21, resulted badly. Instead of the one company we
expected to find, there were four. Although we
killed seventeen, we lost one, young George, who fell so close to the guns
of the foe that we had considerable difficulty in getting him away for
burial. Then we disbanded for a time. Capt. Quantrell believed that it was
harder to trail one man than a company, and every little while the company
would break up, to rally again at a moment's
notice. 4. The Trap That Failed In March
Quantrell planned to attack Independence. We met at David George's and
went from there toward Independence as far as Little Blue church, where
Allen Parmer, who afterward married Susie James, the sister of Frank and
Jesse, told the captain that instead of there being 300 Jayhawkers in
Independence, there were 600. The odds were too strong, and we swung around
to the southwest. Thirteen
soldiers who guarded the bridge at the Big Blue found their number
unlucky. The bridge was burned and we dined that day at the home of Alex.
Majors, of Russell, Majors & Waddell, the freighters, and rested for
the night at Maj. Tale's house, near New Santa Fe, where there was
fighting for sure before morning. A militia
command, 300 strong, came out to capture us, but they did not risk an
attack until nearly midnight. Capt. Quantrell, John Jarrette, and I were
sleeping together when the alarm was given, the sentry's challenge, “Who
are you?” followed by a pistol shot. We were up on the
instant. So stealthy
had been their approach that they had cut the sentry off from us before
alarming him, and he fled into the timber in a shower of
lead. There was a
heavy knock on the outer door, and a deep voice shouted: “Make a light.”
Quantrell, listening within, fired through the panel. The visitor
fell. While we
barricaded the windows with bedding, the captain polled his men. “Boys,”
he said, “we're in a tight place. We can't stay here and I do not mean to
surrender. All who want to follow me out can say so; all who prefer to
give up without a rush can also say so. I will do the best I can for
them.” Four voted
to surrender, and went out to the besieging party, leaving seventeen.
Quantrell, James Little, Hoy, Stephen Shores and myself
held the upper story, Jarrette, George Shepherd, Toler and others
the lower. Anxious to see who their prisoners were, the militiamen exposed
themselves imprudently, and it cost them
six. Would they
permit Major Tate's family to escape? Yes. They were only too glad, for
with the family out, the ell, which was not commanded by our fire, offered
a tempting mark for the incendiary. Hardly had the Tales
left than the flames began to climb the ell. There was another parley.
Could we have twenty minutes? Ten? Five? Back came
the answer: “You have one minute. If at its expiration you have not
surrendered, not a single man among you shall escape alive.”
“Thank you,” said I; “catching comes before
hanging.” “Count six then and be d—d to you!” shouted back George
Shepherd, who was doing the dickering, and Quantrell said quietly,
“Shotguns to the front.” There were
six of these, and behind them came those with revolvers only. Then
Quantrell opened the door and leaped out. Close behind him were Jarrette,
Shepherd, Toler, Little, Hoy and myself, and behind us the
revolvers. In less
time than it takes to tell it, the rush was over. We had lost five, Hoy
being knocked down with a musket and taken prisoner, while they had
eighteen killed and twenty-nine wounded. We did not stop till we got to
the timber, but there was really no pursuit. The audacity of the thing had
given the troops a taste of something new. They kept
Hoy at Leavenworth for several months and then hanged him. This was the
inevitable end of a “guerrilla” when taken
prisoner. 5. Vengeance Indeed Among the
Jackson county folks who insisted on their right to shelter their friends
was an old man named Blythe. Col. Peabody at Independence had sent out a
scouting party to find me or anyone else of the company they could “beat
up.” Blythe was
not at home when they came but his son, aged twelve, was. They took him to
the barn and tried to find out where we were, but the little fellow
baffled them until he thought he saw a chance to break through the guard,
and started for the house. He reached it safely, seized a pistol, and made
for the woods followed by a hail of bullets. They dropped him in his
tracks, but, game to the last, he rolled over as he fell, shot one of his
pursuers dead, mortally wounded a second, and badly hurt a third. They put
seventeen bullets in him before he could shoot a fourth
time. A negro
servant who had witnessed the seizure of his young master, had fled for
the timber, and came upon a party of a dozen of us, including Quantrell
and myself. As he quickly told us the story, we made our plans, and
ambushed at the “Blue Cut,” a deep pass on the road the soldiers must take
back to ndependence. The banks are about thirty feet high, and the cut
about fifty yards wide. Not a shot was to be fired until the entire
command was in the cut.
Thirty-eight had started to “round up” Cole Younger that morning;
seventeen of them lay dead in the cut that night and the rest of them had
a lively chase into Independence. To this day
old residents know the Blue Cut as “the
slaughterpen.” Early in
May, 1862, Quantrell's men were disbanded for a month. Horses were needed,
and ammunition. There were plenty of horses in Missouri, but the
ammunition presented more of a problem. Capt.
Quantrell, George Todd and myself, attired as Union officers, went to
Hamilton, a small town on the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad, undetected
by the company of the Seventh United States Cavalry in camp there,
although we put up at the principal hotel. Todd passed as a major in the
Sixth Missouri Cavalry, Quantrell a major in the
Ninth, and I a captain in an Illinois regiment. At Hannibal there was a
regiment of Federal soldiers. The commander talked very freely with us
about Quantrell, Todd, Haller, Younger, Blunt, Pool and other guerrillas
of whom he had heard. While in
Hannibal we bought 50,000 revolver caps and such other ammunition as we
needed. From there we went to St. Joseph, which was under command of Col.
Harrison B. Branch. “Too many majors traveling together are like too many
roses in a bouquet,” suggested Todd. “The other flowers have no
show.” He reduced
himself to captain and I to lieutenant. Our disguise was undiscovered.
Col. Branch entertained us at his headquarters most
hospitably. “I hope you may kill a guerrilla with every bullet I have sold
you,” said one merchant to me. “I think if ever there was a set of devils
let loose, it is Quantrell, Todd, Cole Younger and Dave
Pool.” From St.
Joseph we went to Kansas City in a hack, sending Todd into Jackson county
with the ammunition. When within three miles of Kansas City the hack was
halted by a picket on outpost duty, and while the driver argued with the
guard, Quantrell and I slipped out on the other side of the hack and made
our way to William Bledsoe's farm, where we were in friendly
hands. 6. In the Enemy's Lines Col. Buell,
whose garrison of 600 held Independence, had ordered that every male
citizen of Jackson county between 18 and 45 years of age should fight
against the South. Col. Upton Hays, who was in Jackson county in July and
August, 1862, recruiting a regiment for the Confederate army, decided that
it was the time to strike a decisive blow for the dislodging of Buell. In
reconnoitering the vicinity he took with him Dick Yager, Boone Muir and
myself, all of whom had seen service with Capt. Quantrell. It was finally
decided to make the attack August 11th. Colonel Hays wanted accurate information about the state of things
inside town. “Leave that to me,” said I. Three days remained
before the battle. Next morning there rode up to the picket line at
Independence an old apple-woman, whose gray hair and much of her face was
nearly hidden by an old-fashioned and faded sun-bonnet. Spectacles half
hid her eyes and a basket on her arm was laden with beets, beans and
apples. The left rein was leather but a rope replaced the right.
“Good morning, grandmother,” bantered the first picket. “Does
the rebel crop need any rain out in your country?” The sergeant at the
reserve post seized her bridle, and looking up said: “Were you younger and
prettier, I might kiss you.” “Were I younger and prettier, I might box your ears for your
impudence.” “Oh, ho! You old she-wolf, what claws you have for scratching!”
he retorted, and reached for her hand. The quick
move she made started the horse suddenly, or he might have been surprised
to feel that hand. But the horse was better than apple-women usually ride,
and that aroused some suspicion at Col. Buell's headquarters, so that the
ride out was interrupted by a mounted picket who galloped alongside and
again her bridle was seized. The
sergeant and eight men of the guard were perhaps thirty paces
back. “What will you have?” asked the apple-woman. “I am but a poor
lone woman going peaceably to my home.” “Didn't you hear the sergeant call
for you, d—n you?” answered the sentinel. A
spurred boot under the ragged skirt pierced the horse's flank; the hand
that came from the apple basket fired the cocked pistol almost before the
sentry knew it, and the picket fell dead. The reserve stood as if
stupefied. That night I gave Quantrell, for Col. Hays, a plan showing the
condition of affairs in Independence. The morning of the 11th the attack was made and
Col. Buell, his force shot to pieces, surrendered. The apple-woman's
expedition had been a success. 7. Lone Jack It was in
August, 1862, nearly a year after the party at Col. Mockbee's, that I was
formally enrolled in the army of the Confederate States of America by Col.
Gideon W. Thompson. I was eighteen, and for some little time had been
assisting Col. Hays in recruiting a regiment around my old
home. It was
within a day or two after the surrender of Buell at Independence that I
was elected as first lieutenant in Capt. Jarrette's company in Col. Upton
B. Hays' regiment, which was a part of the brigade of Gen. Joseph O.
Shelby. We took the oath, perhaps 300 of us, down on Luther Mason's farm,
a few miles from where I now write, where Col. Hays had encamped after
Independence. Millions of
boys and men have read with rising hair the terrible “black oath” which
was supposed to have been taken by these brave fighters, but of which they
never heard, nor I, until I read it in books published long after the war.
When Col. Hays camped on the Cowherd, White, Howard and Younger
farms, Quantrell had been left to guard the approaches to Kansas City, and
to prevent the escape to that point of news from the scattered Confederate
commands which were recruiting in western Missouri. At the same time he
was obtaining from the Chicago and St. Louis papers and other sources,
information about the northern armies, which was conveyed by couriers to
Confederate officers in the south, and he kept concealed along the
Missouri river skiffs and ferry boats to enable the Confederate officers,
recruiting north of the river, to have free access to the
south. The night
that I was enlisted, I was sent by Col. Hays to meet Cols. Cockrell,
Coffee, Tracy, Jackman and Hunter, who, with the remnants of regiments
that had been shattered in various battles through the south, were headed
toward Col. Hays' command. It was Col.
Hays' plan for them to join him the fifteenth, and after a day's rest, the
entire command would attack Kansas City, and, among other advantages
resulting from victory there, secure possession of Weller's steam
ferry. Boone Muir
and myself met Coffee and the rest below Rose Hill, on Grand river. Col.
Cockrell, whose home was in Johnson county, had gone by a different route,
hoping to secure new recruits among his neighbors, and, as senior colonel,
had directed the rest of the command to encamp the next evening at Lone
Jack, a little village in the southeastern portion of Jackson county, so
called from a solitary big black jack tree that rose from an open field
nearly a mile from any other timber. At noon of
Aug. 15, Muir and I had been in the saddle twenty-four to thirty hours,
and I threw myself on the blue grass to sleep. Col. Hays, however, was
still anxious to have the other command join him, he having plenty of
forage, and being well equipped with ammunition as the result of the
capture of Independence a few days before. Accordingly I was shortly
awakened to accompany him to Lone Jack, where he would personally make
known the situation to the other
colonels. Meantime,
however, Major Emory L. Foster, in command at Lexington, had hurried out
to find Quantrell, if possible, and avenge Independence. Foster had nearly
1,000 cavalrymen, and two pieces of Rabb's Indiana battery that had
already made for itself a name for hard fighting. He did not dream of the
presence of Cockrell and his command until he stumbled upon them in Lone
Jack. At
nightfall, the Indiana battery opened on Lone Jack, and the Confederate
commands were cut in two, Coffee retreating to the south, while Cockrell
withdrew to the west, and when Col. Hays and I arrived, had his men drawn
up in line of battle, while the officers were holding a council in his
quarters. “Come in, Colonel Hays,” exclaimed Col. Cockrell. “We just sent
a runner out to look you up. We want to attack Foster and beat him in the
morning. He will just be a nice breakfast
spell.” Col. Hays
sent me back to bring up his command, but on second thought
said: “No, Lieutenant, I'll go, too.” On the way back he asked me
what I thought about Foster being a “breakfast
spell.” “I think he'll be rather tough meat for breakfast,” I replied.
“He might be all right for dinner.” But
Cockrell and Foster were neighbors in Johnson county, and Cockrell did not
have as good an idea of Foster's fighting qualities that night as he did
twenty-four hours later. The fight started at daybreak, hit or miss, an
accidental gunshot giving Foster's men the alarm. For five hours it waged, most of
the time across the village street, not more than sixty feet wide, and
during those five hours every recruit there felt the force of Gen.
Sherman's characterization—“War is hell.” Jackman,
with a party of thirty seasoned men, charged the Indiana guns, and
captured them, but Major Foster led a gallant charge against the invaders,
and recaptured the pieces. We were out of ammunition, and were helpless,
had the fight been pressed. Riding to
the still house where we had left the wagon munitions we had taken a few
days before at Independence, I obtained a fresh supply and started for the
action on the gallop. Of that mad
ride into the camp I remember little except that I had my horse going at
full tilt before I came into the line of fire. Although the enemy was
within 150 yards, I was not wounded. They did mark my clothes in one or
two places, however. Major Foster, in a letter to Judge George M. Bennett
of Minneapolis, said: “During the
progress of the fight my attention was called to a young Confederate
riding in front of the Confederate line, distributing ammunition to the
men from what seemed to be a ‘splint basket.’ He rode along under a most
galling fire from our side the entire length of the Confederate lines, and
when he had at last disappeared, our boys recognized his gallantry in
ringing cheers. I was told by some of our men from the western border of
the state that they recognized the daring young rider as Cole Younger.
About 9:30 a.m., I was shot down. The wounded of both forces were gathered
up and were placed in houses. My brother and I, both supposed to be
mortally wounded, were in the same bed. About an hour after the
Confederates left the field, the ranking officer who took command when I
became unconscious, gathered his men together and returned to Lexington.
Soon after the Confederates returned. The first man who entered my room
was a guerrilla, followed by a dozen or more men who seemed to obey him.
He was personally known to me and had been my enemy from before the war.
He said he and his men had just shot a lieutenant of a Cass county company
whom they found wounded and that he would shoot me and my brother. While
he was standing over us, threatening us with his drawn pistol, the young
man I had seen distributing ammunition along in front of the Confederate
line rushed into the room from the west door and seizing the fellow,
thrust him out of the room. Several
Confederates followed the young Confederate into the room, and I heard
them call him Cole Younger. He (Younger) sent for Col. Cockrell (in
command of the Confederate forces) and stated the case to him. He also
called the young man Cole Younger and directed him to guard the house,
which he did. My brother had with him about $300, and I had about $700.
This money and our revolvers were, with the knowledge and approval of Cole
Younger, placed in safe hands, and were finally delivered to my mother in
Warrensburg, Mo. Cole Younger was then certainly a high type of manhood,
and every inch a soldier, who risked his own life to protect that of
wounded and disabled enemies. I believe he still retains those qualities
and would prove himself as good a citizen as we have among us if set free,
and would fight for the Stars and Stripes as fearlessly as he did for the
Southern flag. I have never seen him since the battle of Lone Jack. I know
much of the conditions and circumstances under which the Youngers were
placed after the war, and knowing this, I have great sympathy for them.
Many men, now prominent and useful citizens of Missouri, were, like the
Youngers, unable to return to their homes until some fortunate accident
threw them with men they had known before the war, who had influence
enough to make easy their return to peace and usefulness. If this had
occurred to the Youngers, they would have had good homes in
Missouri.” It is to
Major Foster's surprise of the command at Lone Jack that Kansas City owes
its escape from being the scene of a hard battle August 17, 1862.
Quantrell was not in the fight at Lone Jack at all, but Jarrette and Gregg
did come up with some of Quantrell's men just at the end and were in the
chase back toward Lexington. In proportion to the number of men engaged,
Lone Jack was one of the hardest fights of the war. That night there were
136 dead and 550 wounded on the
battlefield. 8. A Foul Crime With two
big farms in Jackson county, besides money-making stores and a livery
stable at Harrisonville, my father at the outbreak of the war was wealthy
beyond the average of the people in northwestern Missouri. As a mail
contractor, his stables were filled with good horses, and his property was
easily worth $100,000, which was much more in those days, in the public
esteem, than it is now. This,
perhaps, as much as Walley's enmity for me, made him the target for the
freebooters who infested the Kansas line. In one of Jennison's first
raids, the Younger stable at Harrisonville was raided and $20,000 worth of
horses and vehicles taken. The experiment became a habit with the
Jayhawkers, and such visits were frequent until the following fall, when
the worst of all the indignities heaped upon my family was to be charged
against them—the murder of my father. When the body was discovered, it was taken in charge by Capt.
Peabody, who was in command of the militia forces in Kansas City, and when
he found $2,000, which father had taken the precaution to conceal in a
belt which he wore about him, it was sent home to our
family. It has been
charged that my father tried to draw his pistol on a party of soldiers,
who suspected me of the murder of one of their comrades and wanted to know
my whereabouts. This is false. My father never carried a pistol, to my
knowledge, and I have never had any doubt that the band that killed him
was led by that same Capt. Walley. Indeed he was suspected at the time,
accused of murder, and placed under arrest, but his comrades furnished an
alibi, to the satisfaction of the court, and he was released.
He is dead
now, and probably he rests more comfortably than he ever did after that
night in '62, for whether he had a conscience or not, he knew that
Missouri people had memories, and good ones,
too. But the
freebooters were not through. My sisters
were taken prisoners, as were the girls of other families whose sons had
gone to join the Confederate army, their captors hoping by this means to
frighten the Southern boys into
surrender. After my
mother's home was burned, she took her children and went to Lafayette
county. Militiamen followed her, shot at Jim, the oldest of the boys at
home, fourteen, and drove him into the brush. Small wonder that he
followed his brother as a soldier when he became old enough in
1864! Despairing
of peace south of the Missouri, mother crossed into Clay county, remaining
until the War between the States had ended. But not so the war on her. A
mob, among whom she recognized some of the men who were pretty definitely
known to have murdered my father, broke in on her after she had returned
to Jackson county, searched the house for Jim and me, hung John, aged
fourteen, to a beam and told him to say his prayers, for he had but a
little time to live unless he told where his older brothers were. He
defied them and was strung up four times. The fourth
time the rope cut deep into the flesh. The boy was unconscious. Brutally
hacking his body with knives, they left him for dead. That was early in
1870. June 2 of that year, before John had recovered from his injuries,
mother died. 9. How Elkins Escaped It was
along about the first week in October, 1862, that I stopped with a dozen
men at the home of Judge Hamilton, on Big Creek, in Cass county. We spent
the afternoon there, and just before leaving John Hays, of my command,
dashed up with the news that Quantrell was camped only two miles west. He
also gave the more important information to me, that some of Captain Parker's
men had arrested Steve Elkins on the charge of being a Union spy, and were
taking him to Quantrell's camp to hang
him. I lost no
time in saddling up, and followed by my little detachment, rode hastily
away to Quantrell's camp, for red tape occupied little space in those
days, and quick action was necessary if anything was to be done. I knew
Quantrell and his men well and was also aware that there were several
Confederate officers in the camp. The moment we reached our destination, I
went at once to Captain Charles Harrison, one of the officers, and my warm
personal friend, and told him openly of my friendship and esteem for
Elkins. He promised to lend me all his aid and influence, and I started
out to see Quantrell, after first telling my men to keep their horses
saddled, ready for a rescue and retreat in case I failed of a peaceable
deliverance. Quantrell
received me courteously and kindly, as he always did, and after a little
desultory chat, I carelessly remarked, “I am surprised to find that you
have my old friend and teacher, Steve Elkins, in camp as a
prisoner.” "What! Do
you know him?" asked Quantrell in astonishment. I told him that I did, and
that he was my school teacher when the war broke out, also that some half
a hundred other pupils of Elkins were now fighting in the Southern
army. “We all care for him very deeply,” I told Quantrell, and then
asked what charges were preferred against him. He explained that Elkins
had not been arrested on his orders, but by some of Parker's men, who were
in vicious humor because of their leader's recent death. They had told
Quantrell that Elkins had joined the Union forces at Kansas City, and was
now in Cass county as a spy. I jumped to
my feet, and said that the men that made the charges lied, and that I
stood ready to ram the lie down their throats with a pistol point.
Quantrell laughed, and chided me about letting my hot blood get the better
of cold judgment. I insisted, however, and told him further that Elkins'
father and brother were Southern soldiers, and that Steve was a
non-combatant, staying at home to care for his mother, but that I was in
no sense a non-combatant, and would stand as his champion in any
fight. Quantrell
finally looked at his watch, and then remarked: “I will be on the move in
fifteen minutes. I will release Elkins, since you seem so excited about
it, and will leave him in your hands. Be careful, for Parker's men are
rather bitter against him.” Happy at
heart, I dashed away to see Elkins, with whom I had only passed a few
words and a hand-shake to cheer him up. He knew me, however, and realized
that I would save him or die in the attempt, for from a boy it was my
reputation that I never deserted a
friend. When I
joined him again, several of Parker's men were standing around in the
crowd, and as I shook hands with Elkins and told him of his freedom, I
added, “If any damned hound makes further false charges against you, it's
me he's got to settle with, and that at the pistol
point.” I made that
talk as a sort of bluff, for a bluff is often as good as a fight if it's
properly backed up. As Quantrell and his men rode away in the direction of
Dave Daily's neighborhood, I told Elkins to hit out West until he came to
the Kansas City and Harrisonville road, and then, under cover of night, he
could go either way. I shook his hand goodbye, slapped him on the
shoulder, and have never seen him since. I followed
Quantrell's men for half a mile, fearing that some stragglers might return
to take a quiet shot at Elkins, and then stopped for something to eat, and
fed our horses. At the time that I defended Elkins before Quantrell, I
knew that Steve's sympathies were with the North, and had heard that he
had joined the Federal army. But it mattered nothing to me—he was my
friend. 10. A Price on My Head When Col.
Hays went south in the fall to join Shelby, Capt. Jarrette went with as
many of his company as were able to travel and the wounded were left with
me in Jackson county. Missouri militia recognized no red cross, and we
were unable for that reason to shelter our men in farm-houses, but built
dugouts in the hills, the roofs covered with earth for concealment. All
that winter we lay in the hollows of Jackson county, while the militia
sought to locate the improvised
hospitals. It was a winter of battles too numerous to be told here, and it
was a winter, too, that laid a price upon my head. Capt. Quantrell and his
men had raided Olathe and Shawneetown, and among the killed at Paola on
the way out from Olathe was a man named Judy, whose father had formerly
lived in Cass county, but had gone to Kansas as a refugee. Judy, the
father, returned to Cass county after the war as the appointive
sheriff. It was a
matter of common knowledge to the guerillas, at least, that young Judy had
been killed by Dick Maddox and Joe Hall, and that as a matter of fact at
the time of the fight I was miles away at Austin, Mo. But Judy had secured
my indictment in Kansas on the charge of killing his son, and threatened
me with arrest by a posse so that from 1863 to 1903 I was never in Cass
county except as a hunted man. Years afterward this killing of Judy turned
up to shut me out of Missouri. Frequent
meetings with the militia were unavoidable during the winter and there was
fight after fight. Clashes were almost daily, but few of them involved any
large number of men. George Todd
and Albert Cunningham, who were also caring for squads of soldiers in our
neighborhood, and I made an expedition early in the winter across the
Kansas line near New Santa Fe, where our party of 30 met 62 militiamen.
Todd led the charge. With a yell and a rush, every man with a revolver in
each hand, they gave the militia a volley at a hundred yards, which was
returned, but no men could stand in the face of a rush like that and the
militia fell back. In their retreat they were reinforced by 150 more and
returned to the attack, driving Todd and his comrades before them. With six men I was holding the rear in
the timber when a detachment of 52 ran down upon us. It was a desperate
fight, and every man in it was wounded more or less.
John
McDowell's horse was killed under him and he, wounded, called to me for
help. Packing him up behind me, we returned to our camp in safety. This
was the McDowell who less than three months later betrayed one of our
camps to the militia in Independence and brought down upon us a midwinter
raid. Todd had his camp at Red Grenshaw's, Cunningham was on the Little
Blue, and mine was near Martin O. Jones' farm, eight miles south of
Independence. Todd's
spirit of adventure, with my hope to avenge my father's murder, combined
in a Christmas adventure which has been misrepresented by other writers.
Todd said he knew some of the band who had killed father were in Kansas
City, and Christmas day six of us went in to look them up.
Leaving
Zach Traber with our horses just beyond the outposts, the rest of us
hunted them until it must have been nearly midnight. We were in a saloon
on Main street. I had called for a cigar, and glancing around, saw that we
had been recognized by a trooper who had been playing cards. He reached
for his pistol, but he never pulled it. I do not
know how many were killed that night. They chased us well out of town and
there was a fight at the picket post on the Independence road. Col.
Penick, in command at Independence, hearing of the Kansas City adventure,
put a price of $1,000 on my head and other figures on those of my
comrades. It was to get this blood money that six weeks later, Feb. 9, the
militia drove my mother out of her house and made her burn it before their
eyes. I was a hunted man. 11. Betrayed The day
after they burned my mother out of her home they made another trial for
the $1,000 reward, and this time they had a better prospect of success,
for they had with them the traitor, McDowell, whom I had carried out on my
horse in the fight at New Santa Fe a few weeks before. McDowell said he
wanted to go home to see his wife and assure her he was all right, but he
did not go near her. Instead he hurried into Independence and that evening
the militia came out, eighty strong, to take us prisoners. Even they did
not trust McDowell, for he, closely guarded, was kept in
front. Forty
of them had come within twenty yards of us on the south when my horse
warned me, and I called out: “Is that you Todd?” “Don't mind us; we're
friends,” came the answer, but I saw they were not, and the lieutenant in
command fell at the first fire. The boys swarmed out of the dug-outs, and
the fighting was hot. Retreat to
the north was cut off by the other forty and they had us between them. We
made for the west, firing as we went, and the soldiers fell right and
left. I stayed by Joe Hardin till they dropped him in his tracks, and
fought fifteen of the militia while Otho Hinton stopped to get his heavy
boots off. Tom Talley, too, had one boot off and one foot stuck in the leg
of the other. He could not run and he had no knife to cut the leather. I
yanked his boot off and we took to our heels, the militia within 20 yards.
Talley's
pistol had filled with snow and he could not fire a shot. But we reached
the timber and stood at bay. George Talley was shot dead at this last
stand, but when the militia fell back, their dead and wounded numbered
seventeen. Nathan Kerr, Geo. Wigginton, Bill Hulse and John McCorkle did
well that day. We were all in our socks, having taken off our overcoats,
gloves and heavy boots to lighten our burdens, and the icy road promised
to cut our feet to pieces, but we made our way to a rock bridge where a
hog trail would hide our tracks, and when we left this trail, I made every
one of the boys follow in my footprints, leaving but the one trail till we
got to the cedar bluffs. For a stretch of three miles here, these bluffs
were practically impassable to horsemen, but we climbed down them and
found our way to the home of Mrs. Moore where we were safe
again. The
soldiers took back to Independence a pair of gloves marked “Presented to
Lieut. Coleman Younger by Miss M. E. Sanders” and they thought Cole
Younger was dead for a time. Her brother, Charles Sanders, was one of my
company. Making our way out to Napoleon and Wellington we got new coats
and gloves and also located some of the red sheepskin leggings worn by the
Red-leg scouts, with which we made a trip over into what was known as
“Hell's corner” on the Missouri, near Independence. Col.
Penick's men, who had in many cases “collected” more horses than they really had use for, had left
them with friends at various points. As we went in we spotted as many of
these as we thought we could lead out, and took them out with us on our
way back. One of the
horses I got on that trip was the meanest horse I ever rode and I named
him “Jim Lane” in honor of one of the most efficient raiders that ever
disgraced an army uniform. This horse a young woman was keeping for her
sweetheart who had left it with her father for safety, as he feared it
might be shot. As I mounted the nag, she suddenly grasped the bridle reins.
The horse always, I found afterwards, had a trick of rearing up on his
hind feet, when he was about to start off. Evidently the young woman was
also ignorant of his little habit or else she would never have taken hold
of his bridle in an effort to detain me. He was no respecter of persons,
this horse of her sweetheart, and he rose high in the air with the young
woman still clinging. He turned around and made almost a complete circuit
before he came down and again allowed her to enjoy the security of having
both feet upon the earth. She was a little frightened after having been
lifted off her feet in this way and dangled in the air, and somewhat
piqued, too, that I was about to ride away on her sweetheart's horse, and
when I suggested that the horse was not as quiet as he might be and she
had better not catch hold of his bridle any more, she called to me as a
parting shot, “You horrid old red-leg, you are meaner than Quantrell or
Todd or Cole Younger or any of his gang!” The night
we made our escape, they burned the homes of Grandmother Fristoe, and her
neighbor, Mrs. Rucker, and gray heads suffered because younger ones had
not been noosed. 12. Quantrell on War After the
Lone Jack fight, Capt. Quantrell had joined Gen. Shelby at Cane Hill,
Arkansas, but shortly left his command to go to the Confederate capital at
Richmond to ask to be commissioned as a colonel under the partisan ranger
act and to be so recognized by the war department as to have any
protection the Confederate States might be able to afford him. He knew the
service was a furious one, but he believed that to succeed the South must
fight desperately. Secretary Cooper suggested that war had its amenities and
refinements and that in the nineteenth century it was simply barbarism to
talk of a black flag.
“Barbarism,” rejoined Quantrell, according to Senator Louis T.
Wigfall, of Texas, who was present at the interview, “barbarism, Mr.
Secretary, means war and war means barbarism. You ask an impossible thing,
Mr. Secretary. This secession or revolution, or whatever you call it,
cannot conquer without violence. Your young Confederacy wants victory. Men
must be killed.” “What would
you do, Captain Quantrell, were yours the power and the opportunity?”
inquired the secretary. “Do, Mr.
Secretary? I would wage such a war as to make surrender forever
impossible. I would break up foreign enlistments by indiscriminate
massacre. I would win the independence of my people or I would find them
graves.” “What of
our prisoners?” “There
would be no prisoners,” exclaimed the fiery captain. “Do they take any
prisoners from me? Surrounded, I do not surrender; hunted, I hunt my
hunters; hated and made blacker than a dozen devils, I add to my hoofs the
swiftness of a horse and to my horns the terrors of a savage following.
Kansas should be laid waste at once. Meet the torch with the torch,
pillage with pillage, slaughter with slaughter, subjugation with
extermination. You have my
ideas of war, Mr. Secretary, and I am sorry they do not accord with your
own or with the ideas of the government you have the honor to represent so
well.”
Disappointed, Capt. Quantrell left without his commission. He had
felt the truth of his fiery speech. Our tenders
of exchanges of prisoners had been scorned by the officers of the militia.
There was a boy who was an exception to this rule, to whom I want to pay a
tribute. He was a young lieutenant from Brown county and if my memory
serves me right, his name also was Brown. We had taken him prisoner at
Olathe. At
Leavenworth they had one of our boys named Hoy, who had been taken at the
Tate house, and we paroled Brown, and sent him to Leavenworth to ask the
exchange of Hoy. Brown went, too, and was laughed at for his
earnestness. Exchange was ridiculed. “You are free,” they said to him, “why
worry about exchanges?” But Brown
had given his word as a man and as a soldier and he came back to our camp
and surrendered. He was told to return to the lines of his own army, and
given safe conduct and money to provide for his immediate wants, but he
vowed he would never fight again under his country's flag until he had
been exchanged in accordance with his parole. There was a cheer for that man
when he left the camp, and anyone who had proposed shooting him would
himself have been riddled. 13. The Palmyra Butchery As long as
Pete Donan was the editor of the Lexington Caucasian, that paper once each
year published an account substantially in this
wise: “So long as God gives us life and the earth is cursed with the
presence of McNeil we feel it to be our solemn duty to rehearse once every
year the story of the most atrocious and horrible occurrence in the annals
of barbarous warfare.” “On Friday, the 17th day of October, 1862, a deed was enacted
at the fair grounds at Palmyra, Mo., which sent a thrill of horror through
the civilized world.” “Ten brave and true and innocent men were taken from their
prison, driven to the edge of the town, seated on their rough board
coffins, for no crime of their own, and murdered like so many
swine.” “Murdered!” “Butchered!!” “By the hell-spawned and hell-bound, trebly damned old blotch
upon creation's face, John McNeil, until recently by the grace of
bayonets, Tom Fletcher, and the devil, sheriff of St. Louis
county.” “Murdered!” “Shot to death!!” “There was our poor, handsome, gallant boyhood friend Tom
Sidener—” “As pure a soul as ever winged its flight from blood-stained
sod to that God who will yet to all eternity damn the fiendish butcher,
McNeil.” “Poor Tom!” “He was engaged to
be married to a young lady in Monroe
county.” “When he learned he was to be shot, he sent for his wedding
suit, which had just been made, declaring that if he couldn't be married
in it; he intended to die in it.” “Arrayed in his elegant black broad cloth, and his white silk
vest, when he mounted his coarse plank coffin, in the wagon that was to
bear him to his death he looked as if he was going to be married instead
of shot.” “The very guards cried like children when they bade him
goodbye.” “Raising his cap and bowing to the weeping women who lined the
streets, he was driven from their sight
forever!” “Half an hour afterward six musket balls had pierced his noble
heart, and his white silk vest was torn and dyed with his martyr
blood!” “There was poor old Willis Baker, his head whitened with the
snows of more than seventy winters—” “Heroic old man!” “With his white hair streaming in the wind, he seated himself
on his rude coffin and died without a shudder; refusing with his last
breath to forgive his executioners, and swearing he would
‘meet them and torment them in hell through all eternity.’
” “There was that helpless, half-idiot boy from Lewis county, who
allowed himself to be blindfolded; then hearing Sidener and the others
refuse, slipped up one corner of the bandage, and seeing the rest with
their eyes uncovered, removed the handkerchief from his own, died as
innocent as a lamb.” “There were Humstead and Bixler, and Lake, and
McPheeters.” “And there was that most wondrous martyr of them all—young
Smith, of Knox county—who died for another
man.” “Humphrey was the doomed man.” “His heart-broken
wife, in widow's weeds, with her eight helpless little ones in deep
mourning, that was only less black than the anguish they endured, or the
heart of him to whom they appealed, rushed to the feet of McNeil, and in
accents so piteous that a soul of adamant must have melted under it,
besought him for the life of the husband and father.”
“She was brutally repulsed.” “But Strachan, the monster of Shelby county, whom the angel a
few months afterward smote with Herodian rottenness—Strachan, whose flesh
literally fell from his living skeleton—Strachan, who has long been paying
in the deepest, blackest, hottest hole in perdition the penalty of his
forty-ply damnation-deserving crimes was provost
marshal.” “He saw the frantic agony of the woman; called her into his
office and told her he would save her husband if she would give him three
hundred dollars and then submit—but oh! humanity shudders, sickens at the
horrid proposal.” “The wretched, half-crazed, agonized wife, not knowing what she
did—acceded to save her husband's life—and the next morning she was found
lying insane and nearly dead, with her baby at her breast, near the public
spring at Palmyra.” “And after all this, her husband was only released on condition
that another should be shot in his
place.” “Young Smith was selected.” “And then ensued a contest without a parallel in all the six
thousand years of human history.” “Humphrey refused to let any man die in his stead, declaring he
should feel himself a murderer if he
did.” “Smith protested that he was only a poor orphan boy, and so far
as he knew there was not a soul on earth to grieve for him; that Humphrey
had a large family entirely dependent upon him for daily bread, and it was
his duty to live while he could.” “And Smith, the simple country lad, only seventeen years old,
the Hero without a peer on all Fame's mighty scroll, took his seat on a
rough box—and was shot!” “Will not God eternally damn his
murderers?” “We might dwell for hours on the incidents connected with this
most frightful butchery of ancient or modern
ages.” “But why go on?” “The murder was done!” “The Confederate government talked of demanding the murderer
McNeil.” “Then a ‘memorial’ was gotten up, and signed by two thousand
Missourians, recommending the heaven-earth-and-hell-accursed old monster,
on account of his Palmyra massacre, to special favor and he was promoted
to a brigadier-generalship.” 14. Lawrence Disguised
as a cattle trader, Lieutenant Fletcher Taylor, now a prominent and
wealthy citizen of Joplin, Mo., spent a week at the Eldridge house in
Lawrence, Kansas, from which place had gone out the Jayhawkers who in
three months just previous had slain 200 men and boys, taken many women
prisoners, and stolen no one knows how many
horses. At the
house of Capt. Purdee on the Blackwater in Johnson county, 310 men
answered August 16, 1863, to the summons of Capt. Quantrell to hear the
report of Lieut. Taylor's reconnaissance. The
lieutenant's report was encouraging. The city itself was poorly
garrisoned; the camp beyond was not formidable; the streets were
wide. “You have heard the report,” said Quantrell when the lieutenant
finished. “It is a long march; we march through soldiers; we attack
soldiers; we must retreat through soldiers. What shall it be? Speak out.
Anderson!” “Lawrence or hell,” relied Anderson, instantly. With fire
flashing in his eyes as he recalled the recent wreck from which his sister
had been taken in Kansas City, he added: “But with one proviso, that we
kill every male thing.” “Todd?” called Quantrell. “Lawrence, if I knew that not a man would get back
alive.” “Gregg?” This was Capt. William Gregg, who still lives in Kansas City,
one of the bravest men that ever faced powder, and in action the coolest,
probably, in the entire command. William Gregg “Lawrence,” he relied. “It is the home of Jim Lane; the nurse
of Jayhawkers.” “Jarrette?” “Lawrence, by all means,” my brother-in-law answered. “It is
the head devil of the killing and burning in Jackson county. I vote to
fight it and with fire burn it before we leave.” Shepherd, Dick Maddox, so
on, Quantrell called the roll. “Have you all voted?” shouted
Quantrell. There was no word. “Then Lawrence it is; saddle
up.” We reached
Lawrence the morning of the 21st. Quantrell sent me to quiz an old farmer
who was feeding his hogs as to whether there had been any material changes
in Lawrence since Lieut. Taylor had been there. He thought there were 75
soldiers in Lawrence; there were really
200. Four
abreast, the column dashed into the town with the cry: “The camp
first!” It was a day of butchery. Bill Anderson claimed to have killed
fourteen and the count was allowed. But it is not true that women were
killed. One negro woman leaned out of a window and
shouted: “You—of—.” She toppled
out dead before it was seen she was a woman. The death list that day is
variously estimated at from 143 to 216 and the property loss by the firing
of the town, the sacking of the bank, and the rest, at
$1,500.000. Maj. John
N. Edwards, in his Noted Guerrillas, says: “Cole Younger saved at
least a dozen lives this day. Indeed, he killed none save in open and
manly battle. At one house he captured five citizens over whom he put a
guard and at another three whom he defended and protected. The notorious Gen. James
H. Lane, to get whom Quantrell would gladly have left and sacrificed all
the balance of the victims, made his escape through a corn-field, hotly
pursued but too splendidly mounted to be
captured.” My second
lieutenant, Lon Railey, and a detachment gave Jim Lane a hot chase that
day but in vain. When I joined Brother-in-law Jarrette's company, he
said: “Cole, your mother and your sister told me to take care of
you.” That day it
was reversed. Coming out of Lawrence his horse was shot under him. He took
the saddle off and tried to put it on a mustang that one of the boys was
leading. Some of the boys say he had $8,000 in the saddle bags for the
benefit of the widows and orphans of Missouri, but whether that is true or
not I have no knowledge. While he was trying to saddle the mustang, he was
nearly surrounded by the enemy. I dashed back and made him get up behind
me. The saddle was left for the Kansas men. One of the treasures that we
did bring out of Lawrence that day, however, was Jim Lane's “black flag,”
with the inscription “Presented to Gen. James H. Lane by the ladies of
Leavenworth”. That is the
only black flag that I knew anything about in connection with the Lawrence
raid. Lawrence
was followed by a feverish demand from the North for vengeance. Quantrell
was to be hanged, drawn and quartered, his band annihilated; nothing was
too terrible for his punishment. Four days after the raid, Gen. Thomas
Ewing at St. Louis issued his celebrated General Order No. 11. This
required that all persons living in Jackson, Cass and Bates counties, except one
township, or within one mile of a military post, should remove within
fifteen days. Those establishing their loyalty were permitted to go within
the lines of any military post, or to Kansas, but all others were to
remove without the bounds of the military district. All grain and hay in
the proscribed district was to be turned into the military post before
Sept. 9, and any grain or hay not so turned in was to be
destroyed. It was the
depopulation of western Missouri. Any citizen not within the limits of the
military post after Sept. 9 was regarded as an
outlaw. Pursued by
6,000 soldiers, the Confederates in that vicinity must ultimately rejoin
their army farther south, but they harassed their pursuers for weeks in
little bands rarely exceeding ten. The horrors of guerrilla warfare before
the raid at Lawrence, were eclipsed after it. Scalping, for the first
time, was resorted to. Andy Blunt found Ab. Haller's body, so mutilated, in the woods
near Texas Prairie on the eastern edge of Jackson county. “We had
something to learn yet,” said Blunt to his companions, “and we have
learned it. Scalp for scalp hereafter.” Among the brave fighters who were participants in
the fight at Lawrence were Tom Maupin, Dick Yager, Payne Jones, Frank
Shepherd, Harrison Trow, Dick Burns, Andy McGuire and Ben
Broomfield. 15. Chasing Cotton Thieves In the fall
of 1863, in the absence of Capt. Jarrette, who had rejoined Shelby's
command, I became, at 19, captain of the company. Joe Lea was first
lieutenant and Lon Railey second
lieutenant. When Capt.
Jarrette came north again, I again became lieutenant, but when Capts.
Jarrette and Poole reported to Gen. Shelby on the Red river, they were
sent into Louisiana, and I again became captain of the company, so
reporting to Gen. Henry E. McCulloch in command of Northern Texas at
Bonham. All my orders on the commissary and quartermaster's departments
were signed by me as Capt. C.S.A. and duly
honored. Around
Bonham I did scout service for Gen. McCulloch, and in November he sent me
with a very flattering letter to report to Gen. E. Kirby Smith, at
Shreveport, Louisiana, the headquarters of the Trans-Mississippi
department. Capts. Jarrette and Poole were at Shreveport and Gen. Smith
gave us minute orders for a campaign against the cotton thieves and
speculators who infested the Mississippi river bottom. An expedition to get rid of these
was planned by Gen. Smith with Capt. Poole commanding one company, myself
the other, and Capt. Jarrette over us
both. Five miles
from Tester's ferry on Bayou Macon we met a cotton train convoyed by 50
cavalry. We charged them on sight. The convoy got away with ten survivors,
but every driver was shot, and four cotton buyers who were close behind in
an ambulance were hung in a cotton gin near at hand. They had $180,000 on
them, which, with the cotton and wagons, was sent back to
Bastrop in charge of Lieut.
Greenwood. A more
exciting experience was mine at Bayou Monticello, a stream that was deeper
than it looked. Observing a cotton train on a plantation across the bayou,
I called to my men to follow me and plunged in. Seeing me floundering in
the deep water, however, they went higher up to a bridge, and when I
landed I found myself alone. I was hard pressed for a time, till they came
up and relieved me. There were
52 soldiers killed here. Other charges near Goodrich's Landing and at
Omega put an end to the cotton speculation in that locality. The
Confederate army in that section was not well armed, and our company, each
man with a pair of dragoon pistols and a Sharpe's rifle, was the envy of
the Southern army. Gen. Kirby Smith told me he had not seen during the war
a band so well armed.
Consequently when, in February, 1864, Gen. Marmaduke sent to Gen.
Shelby for an officer and 40 of the best mounted and best armed men he
had, it was but natural that Shelby's adjutant-general, John N. Edwards,
should recommend a part of the Missouri boys, and told me to select my men
and report to Gen. Shelby, who in turn ordered me to report for special
service to Gen. Marmaduke at Warren, Ark. Only
twenty, and a beardless boy, Gen. Marmaduke looked me over rather
dubiously, as I thought, but finally told me what he wanted—to find out
whether or not it was true that Gen. Steele, at Little Rock, was preparing
to move against Price at Camden, and to make the grand round of the picket
posts from Warren to the Mississippi river, up the Arkansas to Pine Bluff
and Little Rock, and returning by way of the western outpost at Hot
Springs. We were to
intercept all messages between Price and Marmaduke, and govern our
movements by their contents. About half way between Pine Bluff and Little
Rock we came up with a train of wagons, followed by an ambulance carrying
several women and accompanied by mounted Federal soldiers. The
soldiers got away into Pine Bluff, but we captured the wagons and
ambulance, but finding nothing of importance let them
proceed. We made a
thorough examination of the interior of Little Rock, and satisfied
ourselves that no movement on Price was imminent, and were on our way out
before we became involved in a little shooting match with the patrol, from
which no harm resulted to our side, however, except a shot in my
leg. Years afterward, in prison, I
learned from Senator Cushman Kellogg Davis, of Minnesota, that he was one
of the officers who galloped into Pine Bluff ahead of us that day. He was
at that time on the staff of the judge advocate general, and they were on
their way into Pine Bluff to hold a court-martial. The women were, as
they had said, the wives of some of the officers. Senator Davis
was among the prominent Minnesotans who worked for our parole, although he
did not live to see it accomplished. 16. A Clash with Apaches In May,
1864, Col. George S. Jackson and a force of about 300, myself among the
number, were sent across the staked plains into Colorado to intercept some
wagon trains, and to cut the transcontinental telegraph line from
Leavenworth to San Francisco. We cut the line and found the trains, but
empty, and on our return were met at the Rio Grande by orders to detail a party to cross
the continent on a secret mission for the Confederate states. Two vessels
of the Alabama type, built in British waters, were to be delivered at
Victoria, B.C., and a secret service officer named Kennedy, who was
entrusted with the papers, was given an escort of twenty men, including
myself, Capt. Jarrette and other veteran
scouts. While on
this expedition we had a brief tilt with Comanches, but in the country
which Gen. Crook afterward fought over inch by inch, we had a real Indian
fight with Apache Mojaves which lasted through two days and the night
between practically without cessation. We had a
considerable advantage in weapons, but the reds were pestiferous in spite
of that, and they kept us busy for fully 36 hours plugging them at every
opportunity. How many Indians we killed I do not know, as we had no time
or curiosity to stop and count them. They wounded some of our horses and
we had to abandon one wagon, but we did not lose a man.
From El
Paso we went down through Chihuahua and Sonora to Guaymas, where the party
split up, Capt. Jarrette going up the mainland, while Kennedy and I, with
three men, took a boat to San Francisco, disguised as Mexican miners. We
were not detected, and then traveled by stage to Puget Sound, sailing
for Victoria, as nearly as I have since been able to locate it,
about where Seattle now is. On
our arrival at Victoria, however, we found that Lee had surrendered at
Appomattox and the war was at an end. For a long
time I was accused of the killing of several people at Centralia, in
September, 1864, but I think my worst enemies now concede that it is
impossible for me to have been there at the
time. Another
spectre that rose to haunt my last days in prison, and long stood between
my parole and final pardon, was the story of one John McMath, a corporal
in an Indiana cavalry company, in Pleasanton's command, that I had
maltreated him when he lay wounded on the battle field close by the Big
Blue, near my old home in Jackson county. McMath says this occurred Oct.
23, 1863. It is true that I was in Missouri on that date, but McMath's
regiment was not, nor Pleasanton's command, and the war department records
at Washington show that he was injured in a fight at the Big Blue Oct. 23,
1864—3 full year later—much as he says I hurt him. This was eleven months after I had left
Missouri and while I was 1,500 miles away, yet this hideous charge was
brought to the attention of Chief Justice Start, of Minnesota, in 1896 by
a Minneapolis newspaper. In his
Noted Guerrillas, Maj. John N. Edwards wrote: “Lee's surrender at
Appomattox found Cole Younger at Los Angeles, trying the best he could to
earn a livelihood and live at peace with all the world. The character of
this man to many has been a curious study, but to those who knew him well
there is nothing about it of mystery or many-sidedness. An awful provocation
drove him into the army. He was never a bloodthirsty or a merciless man.
He was brave to recklessness, desperate to rashness, remarkable for
terrible prowess in battle; but he was never known to kill a prisoner. On
the contrary, there are alive today (1877) fully 200 Federal soldiers who
owe their lives to Cole Younger, a man whose father had been cruelly
murdered, whose mother had been hounded to her death, whose family had
been made to endure the torment of a ferocious persecution, and whose kith
and kin, even to remote degrees, were plundered and imprisoned.
His brother
James did not go into the war until 1864, and was a brave, dauntless,
high-spirited boy who never killed a soldier in his life save in fair and
open battle. Cole was a fair-haired, amiable, generous man, devoted in his
friendships and true to his word and to comradeship. In intrepidity he was
never surpassed. In battle
he never had those to go where he would not follow, aye, where he would
not gladly lead. On his body today there are the scars of thirty-six
wounds. He was a Guerrilla and a giant among a band of Guerrillas, but he
was one among five hundred who only killed in open and honorable battle.
As great as had been his provocation, he never murdered; as brutal as had been the
treatment of every one near and dear to him, he refused always to take
vengeance on those who were innocent of the wrongs and who had taken no
part in the deeds which drove him, a boy, into the ranks of the
Guerrillas, but he fought as a soldier who
rights for a cause, a creed, an idea, or for glory. He was a hero and
he was merciful.” 17. The Edicts of Outlawry While I was
on the Pacific slope, April 8, 1865, to be exact, the state of Missouri
adopted what is known to the disgrace of its author as the Drake
constitution. Confederate soldiers and sympathizers were prohibited from
practicing any profession, preaching the gospel, acting as deacon in a
church, or doing various other things, under penalty of a fine not less than
$500 or imprisonment in the county jail not less than six months. Section
4 of Article 11 gave amnesty to union soldiers for their acts after Jan.
1, 1861, but held Confederates responsible for acts done either as
soldiers or citizens, and Section 12 provided for the indictment, trial
and punishment of persons accused of crime in counties other than the one
where the offense was committed. The result of this was that Missourians
were largely barred by law from holding office and the state was overrun
with “carpetbag” office-holders, many of whom came from Kansas,
and during the war had been freebooters and bushwhackers up and
down the Kansas border. Organizing
a posse from men like themselves, sheriffs or others pretending to be
sheriffs would take their mobs, rout men out of their beds at night under
service of writs, on which the only return ever made was a pistol shot
somewhere in the darkness, maybe in the victim's dooryard, perhaps in some
lonely country road. Visiting
for a time with my uncle on the Pacific slope, I returned to Jackson
county in the fall of 1865 to pick up the scattered ends of a ruined
family fortune. I was 21, and no man of my age in Missouri, perhaps, had
better prospects, if I had been unmolested. Mother had been driven to a refuge in a cabin
on one of our farms, my brother Jim had been away during the last few
months of the war fighting in the army, and had been taken prisoner in
Quantrell's last fight at Wakefield's house near Smiley, Ky. He was taken
to the military prison at Alton, Ill., and was released in the fall of
1865, coming home within a few days of my return.
Our
faithful negro servant, “Aunt Suse,” had been hung up in the barn in a
vain endeavor to make her reveal the whereabouts of my mother's sons and
money; my dead father's fortune had been stolen and scattered to the
winds; but our farms were left, and had I been given an opportunity to
till them in peace it would have saved four wasted lives. In the summer of 1866 the
governor of Kansas made a requisition on the governor of Missouri for 300
men, naming them, who had taken part in the attacks on Lawrence and other
Kansas towns. Attorneys
in Independence had decided that they would defend, free of charge, for
any offense except murder, any of the Jackson county boys who would give
themselves up. No one did more than I to assemble the boys at Blue Springs
for a meeting to consider such course. It was
while at this that I saw Jesse James for the first time in my life, so
that sets at rest all the wild stories that have been told about our
meeting as boys and joining Quantrell. Frank James and I had seen service
together, and Frank was a good soldier, too. Jesse, however, did not enter
the service until after I had gone South in the fall of 1863, and when I saw him early in the
summer of 1866 he was still suffering from the shot through the lung he
had received in the last battle in Johnson county in May,
1865. The spectre
of Paola now rose to haunt me. Although all the guerrillas knew who had
killed young Judy, his father had secured my indictment in Kansas on the
charge of murdering his son. Judy, who had returned to Missouri as the
appointed sheriff of Cass county, had a posse prepared to serve a writ for
me in its usual way—a night visit and then the pistol or the
rope. I consulted
with old ex-Governor King at Richmond, who had two sons in the Federal
army, one of whom I had captured during the war, although he did not know
it at the time, and with Judge Tutt of this district. Judge Tutt said
there was no sheriff in this vicinity who would draw a jury that would
give me a fair trial. If I should so make oath he, as judge, would appoint
a jury commissioner who would summon a jury that would give me a fair trial, but he was
confident that as soon as he did so mob law would be invoked before I
could go to trial. One man had
been taken from the train and hung at Warrensburg and there had been many
like offenses against former Confederate
soldiers. Judy had no
legal rights in Jackson county, but in spite of that his posse started for
the Younger farm one night to take me. George Belcher, a Union soldier,
but not in sympathy with mob law, heard of Judy's plans, and through Sam
Colwell and Zach Cooper, neighbors, I was warned in the evening of the
intended raid. When they came I was well out of reach on my way to the
home of my great-uncle, Thomas Fristoe, in Howard county. Judy and his mob
searched the house in vain, but they put up for a midnight supper which
they compelled the faithful “Aunt Suse” to provide, and left
disappointed. Judy and
his Kansas indictment were the entering wedge in a wasted life. But for
him and his mob law Mr. and Mrs. Cole Younger, for there was a dear
sweetheart awaiting my return, might have been happy and prosperous
residents of Jackson county from 1866 to this
day. It was
while I was visiting my great-uncle in Howard county that there took place
at Liberty the first of a long string of bank and train robberies, all of
which were usually attributed either to the Younger brothers, or to some
of their friends, and which we were unable to come out and successfully
refute for two reasons, first the bringing down of a storm about the heads of those who
had sheltered us; and second, giving such pursuers as Judy and his posse
fresh clues to our whereabouts. 18. Not All Black From the
mass of rubbish that has been written about the guerrilla there is little
surprise that the popular conception of him should be a fiendish,
bloodthirsty wretch. Yet he was, in many cases, if not in most, a man who
had been born to better things, and who was made what he was by such
outrages as Osceola, Palmyra, and a hundred other raids less famous, but
not less infamous, that were made by Kansans into Missouri during the
war. When the
war ceased those of the guerrillas who were not hung or shot, or pursued
by posses till they found the hand of man turned against them at every
step, settled down to become good citizens in the peaceful walks of life,
and the survivors of Quantrell's band may be pardoned, in view of the
black paint that has been devoted to them, in calling attention to the
fact that of the members of Quantrell's command who have since been
entrusted with public place not one has ever betrayed his trust. John C.
Hope was for two terms sheriff of Jackson county, Mo., in which is Kansas
City, and Capt. J. M. Tucker was sheriff at Los Angeles, California. Henry
Porter represented one of the Jackson county districts in the state
legislature, removed to Texas, where he was made judge of the county
court, and is now, I understand, a judge of probate in the state of
Washington. “Pink”
Gibson was for several years county judge in Johnson county; Harry Ogden
served the state of Louisiana as lieutenant-governor and as one of its
congressmen. Capt. J. G. Lea was for many years instructor in the military
department of the University of New Mexico, and, I believe, is there yet.
Jesse Hamblett was marshal at Lexington, and W. H. Gregg, who was
Quantrell's first lieutenant, has been thought well enough of to be a
deputy sheriff under the administration of a Republican. Jim Hendricks,
deputy sheriff of Lewis and Clark county, Montana, is another, but to
enumerate all the men of the old band who have held minor places would be
wearisome. 19. A Duel and an Auction I left
Missouri soon after Judy's raid for Louisiana, spending three months with
Capt. J. C. Lea on what was known as the Widow Amos' farm on Fortune fork,
Tensas parish. We then rented the Bass farm on Lake Providence, in Carroll
parish, where I stayed until 1867, when chills and fever drove me north to
Missouri. When the bank at Russellville, Ky., was robbed, which has been
laid to us, I was with my uncle, Jeff Younger, in St. Clair
county, and Jim and Bob were at home here in Lee's Summit.
At the time
of the Richmond and Savannah, Mo., bank robberies, in which, according to
newspapers and sensationalists, I was largely concerned, I was living on
the Bass plantation, three miles below Lake Providence, in Louisiana.
Capt. J. C. and Frank Lea, of Roswell, N. M., and Tom Lea, of
Independence, Mo., were living in the same house with me, any one of whom will
vouch for the truth of my statement that I was not anywhere near either of
these towns at the time of the robberies in question, but was with them at
the plantation referred to above. Furthermore, right here I want to state,
and I will take my oath solemnly that what I say is the truth, and nothing but the truth, notwithstanding
all the accusations that have been made against me, I never, in all my
life, had anything whatever to do with robbing any bank in the state of
Missouri. I could prove that I was not in the towns where banks
were robbed in Missouri, at the time that the raids took place, and in
many instances that I was thousands of miles
away. In the fall
of 1868 Jim and Bob went with me to Texas. Mother's health had failed
perceptibly, the result in a large measure of her exposure at the time the
militia forced her to burn her house, and we sought to make her a home in
a milder climate in the southwest. The next two or three years we spent
there gathering and driving cattle, my sister joining us and keeping house for
us at Syene, Dallas county, where we made our
headquarters. I was at
Austin, Texas, when the Gallatin, Mo., bank was robbed; another crime of
which we have been accused by the romancers, though never, so far as I
know, by the authorities. In 1870 and
1871 Jim was deputy sheriff of Dallas county. Jim and Bob sang in the
church choir there until 1872, when Bob, who was only seventeen, and in
love with one of the local belles, felt keenly the obloquy attaching to
the accusation that his brother Cole had robbed the Kansas City fair, and
left Dallas. One of the
lies that had been published broadcast concerning me is that I killed five
men and shot five others in a row over a “jobbed” horse race in Louisiana.
There is this much truth about it—there was a jobbed race, and after it I
fought a duel, but not over the race. In the
crowd that was present at the race was one Capt. Jim White, to whom I had
sent word during the war that when I met him again he would have to
apologize or fight because of circulating some scandal about a young woman
friend of mine. White
introduced himself to me after this race, where a friend of mine had been
swindled out of considerable money, and we went over to a neighboring
plantation to shoot it out. At the first fire his right arm was shattered
at the shoulder. He thought he was fatally hurt, and so did I at first,
and he called me over and said: “Captain Younger, whether I die or not, I want to shake hands
with you as a friend. I have had some differences of this sort with others
and came out all right; people have sneered at my success and said, ‘Wait
till Cap'n Younger gets at you. He'll fix you!’ So I finally made up my
mind to fight you, right or wrong.” I told my friend who owned the plantation to take care of
White, and I went to Texas to make in the cattle business some of the
money I had lost trying to raise cotton. The next year I was over in
Mississippi at a dance, and a young lady asked to be introduced to
me. Her name
was White, and we had not talked long before she
said: “Mother says you've made a man of father.” Captain White had
crossed the river, quit his drinking associates, but I have never seen him
since the day we shot it out. This duel
gave Cole Younger a reputation in that section which was of value to a
poor preacher's widow near Bayou Macon some time
later. There was
to be a sale of the property and effects of the Widow Hurley. I attended
the sale, hitched my horse in the barn lot and was walking across the
garden at the back of the house toward an open space, where the crowd was
gathered waiting for the auctioneer to open the sale. As I walked I came
upon Mrs. Hurley, crying. “Good morning, Mrs. Hurley,” I said, “I am sorry
to see you in tears; what is the
trouble?” She
explained that her husband had mortgaged the property and stock before his
death and she had not been able to lift it, and they were about to be
taken away from her. I asked her what the amount of the indebtedness was,
and she told me $80. I took the money out of my pocket and gave it to her,
and told her to bid it in when the time came, and I gave her the
signal. Asbury
Humphreys, who was the auctioneer, knew me from the story of the duel, and
before he began I told him he would have to put the property all up at
once. Some of the
fellows from over on the river wanted the cows and hogs put up separately,
so they could pick out what they wanted, and Asbury declared he was afraid
to change the plan for the sale. They would not let him live there if he
did. “Well, Asbury,” I said, “I'm going to be down beside the wagon
where I can see you and you can see me, and when I give you the sign you
knock the property down or I'll have use for this
pistol.” I had not
had time to coach Mrs. Hurley, so she made it somewhat embarrassing for
Asbury. There was kicking enough when he announced that he had decided to
put all the goods up in a lump, but he looked down where I was learning
against the wheel of his wagon and stood
pat. When he
called for bids Mrs. Hurley bid her whole $80. I had not taken the
precaution to tell her to start it lower, and there were now only two ways
out of it, either to give her more money or have it knocked down to her
right there. I decided
that the shortest way out of it was to have Asbury knock it down to her
then and there, so I gave him the sign. I had to
protect Asbury from the crowd for a few minutes, but there was no harm
done to any one. Mrs. Hurley had her goods, and the creditor had his
money, and I was out $80, while Asbury's reliability as an auctioneer was
called into some question until his position in the matter was fully
understood. 20. Laurels Unsought Although
every book purporting to narrate the lives of the Younger brothers has
told of the Liberty robbery, and implied that we had a part in it, the
Youngers were not suspected at that time, nor for a long time afterward.
It was claimed by people of Liberty that they positively recognized among the robbers
Oll Shepherd, “Red” Monkers and “Bud” Pence, who had seen service with
Quantrell. Jim White and J. F. Edmunson were arrested in St. Joseph, but
were promptly released, their preliminary examination failing to connect
them with the raid in any way. In October
of that year a bank at Lexington, Mo., was robbed of $2,000, but so far as
I know it was never connected with the Younger brothers in any way until
1880, when J. W. Buel published his “Border
Bandits.” March
2, 1867, the bank at Savannah, Mo., was raided, but the five who did this
were identified, and there were no Younger boys in the party. This raid
was accompanied by bloodshed, Judge McLain, the banker, being shot, though
not fatally. May
23 of that year the bank at Richmond, Mo., was raided, Mayor Shaw was
killed, and the robbers raided the jail, where were confined a number of
prisoners whose arrest, it was claimed, was due to their sympathy with
secession. Jailer Griffin and his 15-year-old son were killed there.
Warrants were issued for a number of the old guerrillas, including Allen Parmer, afterward
the husband of Susie James, although he was working in Kansas City at the
time, and proved an absolute alibi. No warrant was issued for the
Youngers, but subsequent historians (?) have, inferentially at least,
accused us of taking part, but as I said before, there is no truth in the accusation.
The bank at
Russellville, Ky., was raided March 20, 1868, and among the raiders was a
man who gave his name as Colburn, who the detectives have endeavored to
make it appear was Cole Younger. Having served in Kentucky with Quantrell,
Jim Younger and Frank James were well known through that state, and it
being known that the previous bank robberies in Missouri were charged to
ex-guerrillas, similar conclusions were at once drawn by the Louisville
sleuths who were put on the case. Jim and John were at home at Lee's
Summit. June 3,
1871, Obocock Bros.' bank at Corydon, Iowa, was robbed of $40,000 by seven
men in broad daylight. The romancers have connected Jim and me with that,
when as a matter of fact I was in Louisiana, Jim and Bob were at Dallas,
and John was in California. April 29,
1872, the day that the bank at Columbia, Ky., was raided and the cashier,
R. A. C. Martin, killed I was at Neosho Falls, Kansas, with a drove of
cattle. September
26 of the same year the cash-box of the Kansas City fair was stolen. A
full statement as to my whereabouts during the day is given in a letter
appended hereto, which also shows that it would have been impossible for
me to be present at the wrecking of the Rock Island train in Adair county,
Iowa, July 21, 1873; the hold-up of the Malvern stage near the Gaines
place Jan. 15, 1874; the Ste. Genevieve bank robbery May 27, 1873, or the
Iron Mountain train robbery at Gad's Hill, Mo., Jan. 31, 1874. It was
charged that Arthur McCoy or A. C. McCoy and myself had been participants
in the Gad's Hill affair and the two stage robberies. Nov. 15,
1874, I wrote a letter to my brother-in-law, Lycargus A. Jones, which was
published in part in the Pleasant Hill Review Nov. 26, the editor having
in the meantime inquired into the statements of facts and satisfied
himself of their truth. The parts
of this letter now relevant are as
follows: "Cass County, Nov. 15, 1874. Dear Curg: You may use
this letter in your own way. I will give you this outline and sketch of my
whereabouts and actions at the time of certain robberies with which I am
charged. At the time of the Gallatin bank robbery I was gathering cattle
in Ellis county, Texas; cattle that I bought from Pleas Taylor and Rector.
This can be proved by both of them; also by Sheriff Barkley and fifty
other respectable men of that county. I brought the cattle to Kansas that
fall and remained in St. Clair county until February.
I then went
to Arkansas and returned to St. Clair county about the first of May. I
went to Kansas, where our cattle were, in Woodson county, at Col. Ridge's.
During the summer I was either in St. Clair, Jackson or Kansas, but as
there was no robbery committed that summer it makes no difference where I
was. The gate at
the fair grounds was robbed that fall. I was in Jackson county at the
time. I left R. P. Rose's that morning, went down the Independence road,
stopped at Dr. Noland's, and got some pills. Brother John was with me. I
went through Independence and from there to Ace Webb's. There I took dinner
and then went to Dr. L. W. Twyman's. Stayed there until after supper, then
went to Silas Hudspeth's and stayed all night. This was the day the gate
was robbed at Kansas City. Next day John and I went to Kansas City. We
crossed the river at Blue Mills and went up on the other side. Our
business there was to see E. P. West. He was not at home, but the family
will remember that we were there. We crossed on the bridge, stayed in the
city all night and the next morning we rode up through the city. I met
several of my friends. Among them was Bob Hudspeth. We then
returned to the Six-Mile country by the way of Independence. At Big Blue
we met Jas. Chiles and had a long talk with him. I saw several friends
that were standing at or near the gate, and they all said that they didn't
know any of the party that did the
robbing. Neither John nor myself was accused of the crime
until several days after. My name would never have been used in connection
with the affair had not Jesse W. James, for some cause best known to
himself, published in the Kansas City Times a letter stating that John, he
and myself were accused of the robbery. Where he
got his authority I don't know, but one thing I do know, he had none from
me. We were not on good terms at the time, nor have we been for several
years. From that time on mine and John's names have been connected with
the James brothers. John hadn't seen either of them for eighteen months
before his death. And as for A. C. McCoy, John never saw him in his life.
I knew A. C. McCoy during the war, but have never seen him since,
notwithstanding the Appleton City paper says he has been with us in that
county for two years. Now if any respectable man in that county will say
he ever saw A. C. McCoy with me or John I will say no more; or if any
reliable man will say that he ever saw any one with us who suited the
description of A. C. McCoy then I will be silent and never more plead
innocence."
Poor John, he has been hunted down and shot like a wild beast, and
never was a boy more innocent. But there is a day coming when the secrets
of all hearts will be laid open before that All-seeing Eye, and every act
of our lives will be scrutinized; then will his skirts be white as the
driven snow, while those of his accusers will be doubly
dark. I will come
now to the Ste. Genevieve robbery. At that time I was in St. Clair county,
Mo. I do not remember the date, but Mr. Murphy, one of our neighbors, was
sick about that time, and I sat up with him regularly, where I met with
some of his neighbors every day. Dr. L. Lewis was his
physician. As to the
Iowa train robbery, I have forgotten the day, I was also in St. Clair
county, Mo., at that time, and had the pleasure of attending preaching the
evening previous to the robbery at Monegaw Springs. There were fifty or a
hundred persons there who will testify in any court that John and I were
there. I will give you the names of some of them: Simeon C. Bruce, John S.
Wilson, James Van Allen, Rev. Mr. Smith and lady. Helvin Fickle and wife
of Greenton Valley were attending the springs at that time, and either of
them will testify to the above, for John and I sat in front of Mr. Smith
while he was preaching and was in his company for a few moments, together
with his wife and Mr. and Mrs. Fickle, after service. They live at
Greenton Valley, Lafayette county, Mo., and their evidence would be taken
in the court of heaven. As there
was no other robbery committed until January, I will come to that time.
About the last of December, 1873, I arrived in Carroll parish, Louisiana.
I stayed there until the 8th of February, 1874. Brother and I stayed at
Wm. Dickerson's, near Floyd. During the time the Shreveport stage and the Hot
Springs stage were robbed; also the Gad's Hill robbery. On reading since
my release the pretended history of my life I find that I was wrong in
stating that there was no robbery during the summer of 1872, the bank at
Columbia, Ky., having been raided April 29 of that year. I had not heard
of that when I wrote the letter of 1874, and to correct any
misapprehension that might be created by omitting it I will say that at
that time I was at Neosho, Kansas, with a drove of cattle, which I sold to
Maj. Ray. It was immediately following the Rock Island robbery at Adair,
Iowa, that there first appeared a deliberate enlistment of some local
papers in Missouri to connect us with this robbery.
New York
and Chicago as well as St. Paul and Minneapolis papers did not connect the
Youngers with the crime, and three days after the robbery these papers had
it that the robbers had been followed into Nodaway county, Missouri, while
we were at Monegaw Springs all that time. Besides those mentioned in
my 1874 letter, Marshall P. Wright's affidavit that he showed Jim
and me at Monegaw Springs the morning paper containing the account of the
robbery the next morning after it took place, was presented to Gov. Clough
of Minnesota in 1898. It is 250
miles or more and no cross lines of railroad existed to facilitate our
passage, so it would be impossible for any one to have made the trip. The
shortest rail lines are roundabout, via St. Joseph and Kansas City, so it
will be apparent that I could not have been at the Rock Island
wreck.
|
|