Hard Way Out of Hell

by Johnny D. Boggs

  With my right hand on one of my Colts, I challenged the crazed man. “Make your play, Bill, and show us that you are no coward.”

  Frank James stepped in front of Anderson, and Jim put his hand on my right arm.

  “This I must rebuke,” Quantrill said. “We are men of honor, and we must not quarrel amongst ourselves. Captain Younger has never shown yellow, and, Anderson, I would trust with my life.” He drew in a deep breath, held it, and smiled sadly at me. “I understand and appreciate our bishop’s sentiments, yet, Cole, I ask you this … will you ride with us?”

  I could only nod. “By majority rule I abide.”

  The vote was three hundred and nine to destroy Lawrence. Two joined me in dissent, but Quantrill refused to count the votes of slaves. The slaves, John Lobb and Henry Wilson, remained on the Blackwater. I rode with Quantrill.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Always, it comes back to Lawrence, doesn’t it? Lawrence or Northfield. In the memoir I published in 1903, I called Lawrence “a day of butchery.” Oh, Parson, it was that, but much, much more horrible.

  Colonel John Holt joined us on the Big Blue, with a hundred new men, and Quantrill persuaded him to “christen” his recruits in our assault on Lawrence. Hard we rode, in columns of fours, to the middle fork of the Grand, where we camped in the big woods and rested until midafternoon. By the time we reached the Kansas line, our numbers swelled to around four hundred and fifty.

  In the rough country north of Gardner, Oll Shepherd kidnapped a farmer who agreed to guide us through that labyrinth. When the sodbuster got us lost, Oll Shepherd slit the befuddled fool’s throat, tossed the body into a slough, and Quantrill sent John T. Noland to locate a better guide. That man got us out of the rough country, but he, too, was paid with a Bowie knife to the neck and left to sleep the eternal sleep propped up against a hackberry tree.

  The moon approached its half phase, but clouds often obscured it, and as good of a scout as Noland was, it is hard for a man to know a country he has visited but a few times. We rode to another farmhouse around midnight. As fate would have it, when we barged into the home, we found Joseph Stone, a renegade Missourian who had fled our state to settle in Kansas, in his nightshirt with a musket in his hand. The weapon dropped, and he ran, only to be tackled by two of our men.

  “Please, George …” he begged.

  George Todd grinned. “Well, bless my soul, Joseph Stone. I haven’t seen you since you got me arrested in Kansas City.” Todd picked up the musket the farmer had dropped, but Quantrill cleared his throat.

  “We are close to Lawrence, Captain,” he said calmly. “Yankee patrols might be in the area, and a shot could raise the alarm.”

  Todd lowered the musket. “Let’s hang him.”

  But no one had thought to bring a rope, so Todd used the musket on the poor man, crushing his skull, his dignity. On we rode, guessing our way, and when the grayness appeared behind us, we pushed our mounts into a gallop. Reaching the outskirts of Lawrence, we halted, letting our mounts breathe while checking the caps on our pistols. Yes, nerves tested our resolve, and, though few men spoke, Quantrill understood his men.

  “Do as you will,” he snapped. “I ride to Lawrence.”

  Quantrill kicked his horse into a trot, and we watched him ride off. I glanced at Frank, who was biting off a chaw of tobacco just as my brother Jim was first to ride out after our leader. To a man, four hundred and fifty followed.

  * * * * *

  She was a pretty city, on the banks of the Kansas and Wakarusa Rivers, a home to perhaps two thousand people. Most were sleeping or just beginning their day on that fine Friday morn, August 21, 1863.

  We arrived at a farm to find a man in homespun milking his cow. “That’s Snyder,” John Noland said, and the farmer, recognizing the black man, nodded and rose from his milking stool. Snyder’s crime? He preached abolition and had raised a militia of Negroes to fight for the North. When we rode off, Snyder lay in his barn, his blood mingling with the spilled milk.

  “You have your lists,” Quantrill said, standing in his stirrups, referring to the names we had been given of men who must die. “Women, Negroes, and children must be spared. Now give the Kansas people a taste of what every Missourian has suffered at the hands of Redlegs and Jayhawkers. Kill! Kill! Kill, and you will make no mistake.”

  Thinking of Duck, and the horrors that still disturbed her after having survived the collapse of the building in McGee’s Addition; of my father; of my mother forced to burn down one of our farms, yes, I rode like some bloodthirsty butcher. Down Massachusetts Street, following Quantrill. Some of the men turned onto New Hampshire Street. Or Vermont—streets named after Yankee states, which fueled our hatred even more. Gunshots exploded. Men stepped out of their businesses or homes, their expressions confused, fearful. They died like that.

  “Remember our women!” came a cry from behind me.

  “Osceola! Osceola! Kansas City!”

  John T. Noland swung out, pointing the way to the army camp. Several boys followed him to cut down the soldiers as they stirred from slumber. Many tried to swim across the river, only to drown, or be shot.

  Now, the Kansans understood what was happening. “Secesh!” came their cry. “Secesh!” Eventually, people must have realized an even greater horror had descended on their city.

  “Quantrill!”

  As we passed a house, a second-story window opened and a Negro woman waved her fist. “You sons of bitches!” she yelled, and died from a pistol shot, tumbling out of the window, rolling over the awning, and landing in the street to be trampled by dozens of horses.

  Jim Cummins killed the poor woman. “I didn’t see she was a woman till I pulled the trigger,” he said later. Oll Shepherd forgave him. “Boy, don’t go sobbin’ over no uppity darky wench.”

  At the Eldridge House, a hotel and known gathering spot of Jim Lane and other Jayhawkers, Quantrill reined up and swung from his horse. He motioned several of our followers to ride on, and they obeyed with murderous glee. I dismounted, as did Jim, Frank James, Little Arch Clement, George Todd, and several more.

  “I’m hungry,” Little Archie Clement said, and he shot a man who had stepped out the door, his hands raised.

  The lobby of the Eldridge House was beautiful.

  Men and women stood about nervously, most of them raising their hands without having to be ordered. Already, we could smell the smoke that would soon blacken the morning sky.

  The handsome clock against the wall chimed. It was 6:15 a.m.

  “Is Governor Carney in town?” Quantrill asked, looking resplendent in his gleaming black riding boots, a gray hunting shirt, a flat-crowned black hat of Spanish style with golden cord around his neck and the brim adorned with another gold cord with tassels on the front.

  “No … sir,” came a whispered reply.

  “Your name, sir?”

  The man, his shirt untucked and wearing only stockings on his feet, wet his lips, swallowed, and glanced at his neighbors as if asking for help with the question. Finally, receiving no assistance from any of the men and women standing about, whose faces were ashen, he replied: “Spivey. Arthur Spivey.”

  “Mr. Spivey”—Quantrill holstered the pistol he held in his right hand—“do you know where Senator Lane lives?”

  His head nodded slightly.

  “Good. You will lead a detail to Lane’s house. If you mislead them, you will die, but if you fulfill your obligations, I assure you that you will survive this day. Is this contract agreeable, sir?”

  “Yes,” Spivey answered after a long pause.

  “Then do your duty. Captain Younger, I give you the honor of killing Lane. See to it that Mr. Spivey survives, unless he betrays you. Now, I believe Mr. Clement said something about breakfast …”

  * * * * *

  Arthur Spivey walked in front of our horses as he led the way to Jim L
ane’s mansion. We passed burning buildings, and as I walked my black steed—the orneriest horse I would ever own, named, appropriately, Jim Lane—I recognized many of my fellow bushwhackers for what they were … or had become.

  “Is this your son, ma’am?” a woman was asked.

  “Please, spare him … he’s fifteen years old,” she cried.

  “Old enough to be carryin’ a gun, I see.”

  “Please.”

  “How old are you, ma’am?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  “Well, hell, woman. You’s young enough to have another son.”

  The pistol cracked. The woman screamed as she fell to her knees. “Maybe your next boy won’t be no Jayhawker.”

  John Jarrette walked out of a home as smoke and flames belched behind him, the body of a man in a blood-soaked nightshirt on the porch. Jarrette, a man I had always admired, even before he married my sister, carried a pillowcase filled with plunder in one hand, and a silver candlestick in the other.

  We passed crushed gardens, dead dogs, dead men in the streets, while all around us, smoke rose. It was not yet seven in the morning, but the air felt chokingly hot. Sweat poured down my forehead and drenched my bushwhacker shirt.

  I saw women clutching their young children, and I yelled at them: “Get off the street!” I pointed my Navy at a cornfield. “Hide! Get your kids and hide, women! Don’t watch this. Don’t let your little ones see this!”

  Some obeyed, while others could not move, could not look away from the horrors we—I—kept inflicting.

  Whooping, hollering, waving his hat over his head, William Gregg came galloping by, dragging the Stars and Stripes behind him. Gregg had led the butchery at one of the army camps.

  “That’s it.” Arthur Spivey pointed at a fine house. Behind it stood a beautiful cornfield where, at last, some of the women were taking their children to hide from the barbarity. A woman stood by the front door, arms folded, her countenance rock-hard.

  After reining up, I removed my hat.

  Behind me came the awful noise of cries, shouts, prayers, pistol shots, laughter, and the crackling of flames.

  “We’ve come for Jim Lane, ma’am,” I said.

  “You won’t find him inside.” She was cool. “Go in and see.”

  Six boys quickly dismounted, climbed up the steps, and went through the open door behind her. One accidentally brushed her right arm, and George Shepherd stopped, removed his hat, and said: “Sorry, ma’am.” Then he followed the others. Inside the house, the men shouted. Glass shattered. The woman just stared at me with cold, unblinking eyes.

  Ten minutes later, George Shepherd led the boys back out. Most of them carried silver. Bud Pence even had one of Mrs. Lane’s dresses wrapped around his neck, a present, he said, for his mother. Three had bottles. Whiskey or wine? I could not tell.

  “He ain’t here,” Shepherd said, who had claimed but one spoil of war.

  “I told you,” the woman said, and Shepherd, grinning, unfurled the flag he had taken from above the Lanes’ mantle.

  A black flag, inscribed: presented to general james h. lane by the ladies of leavenworth. That was the flag he had carried to Osceola. That was the one black flag we saw during the war. Quantrill later mailed it to General Sterling Price with his compliments.

  We had missed the craven butcher. Turned out, Jim Lane hid in that cornfield where I had sent women and children, on his belly in his nightshirt.

  “You best take to that field, Mrs. Lane,” I said, and turned to my brother Jim and best friend Frank. “Burn this damned house to the ground.”

  By ten that morning, little remained of Lawrence except widows and children, flames and ashes. When Noland saw Yankee troops approaching, Quantrill decided that we should ride like hell back to Missouri.

  We did, leaving behind between one hundred fifty and two hundred dead. Oh, the Yanks chased us, but not too hard. Someone shot John Jarrette’s horse from under him, but I wheeled my horse, kicked free of a stirrup, and popped a Navy at the bluebellies, who no longer seemed riled enough to avenge Lawrence. Jarrette lunged for the pillowcase of loot but missed it.

  “Forget the plunder, John!” I roared.

  “But …”

  “Leave it, damn you, or I leave you.”

  A bullet whistled overhead. With a curse, Jarrette hurried to my skittish black horse, found my arm and stirrup, and leaped behind me. We galloped to disappear in the cloud of dust.

  “What’s got into you, Bud?” Jarrette said as we bounded across Kansas sod. “I had at least eight thousand dollars and goods in that sack.”

  “I came to Lawrence to avenge those dead and injured women, not make off like some petty thief.”

  “Eight thousand dollars is no petty amount.”

  “Shut up.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  I have little else to say of that day. Except I would like to correct one myth. Jesse James was not with us. In fact, Frank’s kid brother would not join the cause until the following year, when feuds had divided Quantrill and Bloody Bill and George Todd, when, as our numbers fell both to bullets and hangman’s nooses, our leaders no longer turned away anyone who could fork a saddle and pull a trigger.

  Some of us rode away sickened by what we had witnessed, what we had done. Many, of course, felt the elation of victory. Quite a few thought they were rich. Bloody Bill Anderson, when we slowed our horses to a walk, busied himself tying fourteen new knots in his silken cord.

  Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.

  Luke 23:34.

  We did not know what we had done. We did not know what we had wrought.

  Vengeance is mine? No, retribution belonged to Senator Lane and General Ewing.

  On August 25th, while bushwhackers hid in the hills of Arkansas, General Thomas Ewing instituted the worst crime ever allowed in the history of warfare: General Orders Number 11.

  All persons living in Jackson, Cass, and Bates Counties, Missouri, and in that part of Vernon included in this district, except those living within one mile of the limits of Independence, Hickman Mills, Pleasant Hill, and Harrisonville, and except those in that part of Kaw Township, Jackson County, north of Brush Creek and west of the Big Blue, are hereby ordered to remove from their present places of residence within fifteen days from the date thereof.

  Eventually, we bushwhackers went to winter in Texas, but our loved ones had nowhere to go.

  Oh, the Yanks said that anyone could stay, providing they proved their loyalty to the Union, as if any Missourian could do that to a damnyank’s satisfaction. As if any Missourian with sand would dare attempt to bow to bluebelly rule.

  The exodus broke our hearts. Twenty thousand families cast adrift in a war-ravaged land, many with no money, no shoes, little food, and no direction. They had no place to go, except out of this burned-over district, where they could perhaps set up a shelter to see them through the coming winter.

  When we returned to western Missouri, we found empty homes, starving dogs, shattered memories. Or ashes.

  Since the Yanks had forced the burning of one of our farms, Ma had taken the young ones to our other place in Jackson County. She had lain sick in bed when bluebellies had burst through the door, demanding that she take her brood and leave.

  “I have nowhere to go,” Ma had said.

  The captain in charge did not care, but, oh, he found his heart. With my siblings crying, servants shivering, and Ma coughing that ragged cough that would turn into consumption, that upstanding Yankee acquiesced. He gave my mother until the following day, providing, before she left, she burned the house herself.

  Ma never broke her word. She asked Hardin, our loyal slave, to put a bed in the back of the one wagon the Redlegs had yet to steal. Mammy Suse guided the little ones outside, and Hardin returned, carrying my mother in his giant arms. S
he came out with a torch, which she feebly tossed inside as they moved toward the farm wagon.

  We still had that house in Harrisonville, but Ma refused to go back there. Sick as she was, the memories would have killed her even sooner, and, besides, they couldn’t have made a living in town. Jayhawkers had looted the store, and plundered and practically destroyed the livery. So north they went, to Independence, over to Lexington, and then following the Missouri River to the town of Waverly over in Lafayette County, where Aunt Nancy, Ma’s sister, lived. Sixty, maybe seventy miles in a wagon pulled by two mules, one half-lame and the other blind—otherwise the bluebellies would have confiscated them, too. With little victuals, they survived for four or five days on the charity of churchgoing folk. That made Ma even sicker, and it would harden John and Bob, although my brothers did find some peace after Ma left them with kinfolk in St. Clair County.

  * * * * *

  I didn’t know if Lawrence had disturbed Quantrill back then, but, upon arriving in Texas, he did take to drink much more than he had. We made our winter camp about ten miles north of Sherman, and there the bickering began. Bloody Bill wanted to ride back to Missouri immediately and keep spilling Yankee blood. Jim Cummins backed Anderson. “I ride with the worst devil of the bunch,” he told me. “That’s Bloody Bill.”

  Frank James just sat and chewed tobacco. He didn’t quote Shakespeare and hardly spoke to anyone until Jesse showed up. This time, we did not send him away—even when the fool kid was playing around with a Colt Dragoon, and the hammer dropped on the middle finger of his left hand.

  “That’s the dod-dingus pistol I ever saw!” he wailed.

  Now that got us to laughing, and he laughed alongside us, though he would not be laughing two days later when the infection set in and we had to cut off the top nub of his finger. From then on out, however, we called Frank’s baby brother Dingus.

  Yet rarely did laughter sound. What we had done at Lawrence tore at some souls, and as Quantrill brooded, drank to a state of intoxication, and consorted with his concubines, I realized that this was not the war I had wanted to fight. I had sort of liked being a soldier during that brief campaign with Jo Shelby, and felt I had proved how good I could be at this, so when John Jarrette approached me with an offer, I listened.