“Jo Shelby’s over in Shreveport,” my brother-in-law said. “I’ve a mind to join him.”
Maybe John’s conscience tore at him, too. Maybe now he understood why I had not let him retrieve that $8,000 when we had fled Lawrence. He did not have to twist my arm.
“I’m game.” Instantly, I crossed camp to tell Frank James.
He sloshed the mixture of rye and coffee in his tin cup, shook his head, and, without smiling, said: “ ‘Away, boy, from the troops, and save thyself …’ ”
’Twas good, and warmed my heart, to hear him cite Shakespeare again.
“You’ll ride with us?” I asked.
He took a drink, set the cup on a rock, but shook his head. “I got my brother to look after, Bud.”
I understood, and with sadness walked away. The sadness deepened when I found my own brother and told him my plan.
“Ride off, then,” Jim snapped at me. “I’m stickin’ with Colonel Quantrill.”
“Jim,” I pleaded, but he backed away.
“Why in hell would I want to ride off to Louisiana? I don’t give a dead rat’s ass about anyone there. Nor should Jo Shelby. Missouri’s our home. That’s where I’m fighting. That’s why I’ll stay with Quantrill.”
“I’m going, Jim,” I said.
He nodded, but, ever the loyal brother, he held out his right hand. “See you,” he said, “after we’ve licked them.”
Years later, I recalled what Jim had told me, and only then, aged by time, did it strike me that perhaps that was why we lost the war. Most Rebs, like Jim, were fighting for home, and, for Jim, home meant Missouri, western Missouri. Others fought for South Carolina or Alabama or old Virginia. We Confederates remained divided. But the North? Whether the Yanks enlisted to save the Union or free the slaves, or just for the hell of it, they remained united. They had a cause. They fought as one, and there were a lot of them.
Amongst ourselves, our rift widened. After I left, George Todd abandoned Quantrill. So did Bloody Bill Anderson. By then, even Frank and Jesse were divided, with Jesse riding off with Bloody Bill, to help in the butchery at Centralia in 1864. Having to choose between blood and loyalty, Frank stayed with Quantrill. So did my brother Jim. They would be there when Quantrill was mortally wounded and captured in Kentucky in 1865. Frank would manage to escape, but Jim would spend months in a prison in Alton, Illinois.
When I told Quantrill I was leaving with Jarrette—and maybe a dozen others who joined us—he nodded, muttered a thanks, and poured four fingers of brandy into a champagne flute. “You were a fine lieutenant,” he said. I thought I had been a captain, but ranks never much mattered in our outfit, and I wasn’t exactly sure when Quantrill had been promoted to colonel. “Just keep killing Yankees,” he concluded.
Before I left the bushwhackers, I returned to Frank, and we embraced. He had quoted from Othello, so I did the same. “ ‘For the love o’ God, peace!’ ”
As Frank pulled away, I saw sadness in his eyes. “Bishop Cole, you and I will never know peace.”
Time would prove him right, but I already understood the veracity of his comment on that freezing afternoon in 1864.
* * * * *
Basically, the war ended for me when I enlisted with Jo Shelby, who deemed my skills better suited for the spying business. I found myself dispatched to Louisiana to chase after cotton thieves. To Arkansas, to spy on General Steele. I took fifteen men to Mexico, where we made our way to California and up to British Columbia to take charge of a couple of warships to sail back to the Gulf of Mexico and help our cause.
In Canada, the numbing, though half-expected, news reached us. The war had ended. The Confederacy was no more. Our cause was lost, turning us into soldiers without a country.
So I returned to California, to find my namesake uncle, Coleman Younger, who lived in San Jose. I drank wine, ate grapes and fish. I danced at bailes with pretty señoritas. Gambled some in San Francisco. Put on some of the weight I had shed during the war. Tried to forget about the past few years. One thing I never did, though, was recite these words:
I, Cole Younger, do solemnly swear, in the presence of Almighty God, that I will henceforth faithfully support, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and the union of the States thereunder, and that I will, in like manner, abide by and faithfully support all acts of Congress … so help me God.
Later that fall, homesick for Ma, my brothers, my sisters, and any comrades in arms that might still be alive, I bade farewell to Uncle Coleman, and set off for home.
Only to realize, upon reaching Missouri, that I had no home.
Part II
1866–1876
Chapter Sixteen
People often asked me if there’s anyone I really wished I had killed. Irvin Walley, who murdered my pa. Doc Jennison, Jim Lane, and other Kansas Redlegs. Maybe Jesse James. Although desire to murder no longer blackens my heart, I think Charles D. Drake would have topped that list.
One of those high-minded Radical Republicans—and worse, a St. Louis lawyer—Drake pretty much wrote the new state constitution for Missouri after the war.
By the time I got home from California, I couldn’t vote, nor could I hold any office had I wanted to follow in Pa’s political footsteps. By Jehovah, I couldn’t even serve as a deacon in Ma’s church. But I could be arrested and tried because while our “Drake” constitution allowed that no Yankee, Redleg, or Jayhawker could be prosecuted for crimes committed during the war, we bushwhackers could still be hanged.
The war had not ended, not for bushwhackers like me. Hell, when I finally got home, Ma, Emilly, and Retta were tending to Mammy Suse. A Kansas posse had come by the previous night, saying they were searching for me, but in reality they had strung up that fine old Negress in the barn, trying to get her to tell them where Pa’s fortunes had been buried. As if my dead father had any fortune left. Emilly was thirteen and Retta only eight. The bastards had made the girls watch.
They were replacing the bandages on our loyal servant’s throat when I found them. Our home was a cabin Pa had once leased to tenants who worked a farm we owned in Jackson County. The roof leaked, the walls needed chinking, and the fireplace sucked more heat out of the cabin than it put in, but the building still stood. Most of the houses I had passed had been reduced to blackened timbers, or merely crumbling brick fireplaces—gravestones in place of what once had been right prosperous farms.
“Where are the boys, Ma?” I asked.
“John and Bob took off to see if we got any rabbits in the snares,” she said.
“Rabbits? I saw a deer in the woods as I rode in,” I said.
“Got no shotgun or rifle to shoot a deer, Coleman,” Ma said as she patted Mammy Suse’s shoulder, and pushed herself off the stool placed by the straw-stuffed ticking on the floor. The war had aged Ma considerably. Bone-thin, pale, she covered her mouth as she coughed hard, then turned to the fireplace to fetch a kettle and pour us some tea.
“Where’s Duck?” I asked.
I had lost track of my favorite sister’s husband, George Clayton, after leaving Quantrill in Texas.
Ma did not turn from the fireplace as she filled a tin cup with tea. Mammy Suse groaned, and little Retta started to sob.
“Caroline’s with Jesus, Coleman.”
It took a while for those words to register, and maybe I didn’t really comprehend what Ma had just told me until Retta ran to me, her sobs now full-blown bawling. My knees buckled, and, as tears welled in my own eyes, I lifted my baby sister to me to cry on my shoulder. Emilly ran to me, too, but she was trying to be brave as she told us: “It’s all right, Retta. It’s all right, Cole. Duck’s with Jesus. She’s in heaven. She ain’t in pain no more.”
I raised my eyes to see Ma staring at me. It seemed as though, in just a few minutes, she had aged another five years.
“Caroline never got over what
happened … when … that jail in Kansas City …” Ma couldn’t finish, and she set the teacup down, sank into a rickety old rocking chair, and stared at the fire.
* * * * *
After I killed and butchered that deer I had seen and hunted down, I gave Bob my Enfield. He and John had brought home three wormy rabbits.
“You always showing me up,” Bob said, dropping the rabbits on the floor and storming outside. I followed him.
Near the ramshackle corral, he whirled and pointed at the Enfield still in my hands. “That the one you used to murder those Yankees?”
“Never murdered any Yankees,” I told him. “And I rarely used a rifle during the war. This Enfield I picked up in California. You can use it. Never was much good with a long gun myself.”
John had followed us outside.
“Where’s Hardin?” I asked.
“Doing whatever free darkies do,” Bob answered with the bitterness of an old man, not a teenager.
“How many pistols you got, Cole?” John asked in awe. At least he still sounded like a kid.
“Four.” Quickly, I changed the subject. “Don’t any of our old neighbors or our friends in Strother help you out?”
“It ain’t Strother no more,” Bob snapped. “Yanks renamed it Lee’s Summit. And it don’t pay to help the Youngers. And your being here sure won’t help us,” Bob said in conclusion before storming back inside the house.
“You teach me to shoot?” John asked, pointing at one of my Navy Colts.
“Shoot what?” I asked.
He didn’t answer.
But, yeah, I took John into the woods and, over the next few days, gave him a lesson in shooting revolvers. Bob even warmed up to me slightly, and he came out to learn from me, too. So I told my kid brothers some blood-and-thunders, showed them how to do the border shift—with empty revolvers, of course.
I had plenty of practice during the war, throwing a Navy from right hand to left, or vice versa. Retta and Emilly came out to watch, too.
“Why would you do that?” Emilly asked.
“Get shot in one arm,” I said, remembering the first lessons John Jarrette had given me, “you gotta toss it to the other. Or empty one pistol, toss the empty to your other hand and draw another.”
“You ever get shot, Cole?” John asked.
My head shook. “I was lucky.” And I thought about Quantrill, shot in the spine and slowly dying in Kentucky. Or George Todd, felled by some Yankee snake-in-the-grass with a Sharps rifle near Independence in 1864. Or Bloody Bill who, after being killed in an ambuscade, was brought into Richmond, where his head was cut off and stuck atop a telegraph pole and his body dragged down the streets while the citizens and soldiers cheer.
“Did you pray before each fight?” Retta asked.
“Of course,” I said, though I didn’t tell her that once the battle had actually started, we forgot about prayers and started cursing vilely and continued blasphemy and profanity until the gun smoke cleared and the ringing left our ears. And you’ve been listening to me long enough, Parson, to know that’s one habit that I haven’t quite figured out how to break.
There was no room for me in the cabin. Or, at least, that’s what I told Ma. I slept in the woods, with my horse saddled nearby, knowing the new laws passed in Missouri fostered night raiders. And they did show up twice during my visit, yelling and cursing, but not harming any of my family or Mammy Suse again.
Fearing that the Yanks might soon find me, I rode over to Howard County to visit Uncle Thomas, but I came back home to the cabin for Christmas, and again for New Year’s. By then, Jim had been freed from the Illinois prison. At home, he tried to put the war behind him—as well as me, too. Jim worked to get our big farm back into shape. I rarely saw him.
It was in January that I came to regret teaching my brothers how to shoot handguns.
John and Bob had ridden into Independence with Ma to buy supplies with the money I had given to her. While my brothers were loading blankets, winter clothes and boots, and grub into the wagon, this bluebelly named Gillcreas began saying the vilest things about me. I would have let such slander pass, knowing the fiend meant only to provoke a fight. Hell, Bob probably agreed with everything the Yank said about me, but John told him to shut up.
That was exactly what Gillcreas wanted to hear. He grabbed a frozen mackerel that Ma had bought for the next day’s supper, and used it to knock John to the dirt. John leaped up, the Yankee laughed, and Bob cried out to my brother: “Why don’t you shoot him?”
I did not know John had brought one of my Navy Colts with him to town, but as he stood, his hand reached behind, and pulled the .36 from the back of his waistband. Gillcreas was bringing up a slingshot. To my way of thinking, the Yank had figured a slingshot was enough to use on a young boy.
The coward died with a bullet in his brain.
The marshal held John in jail overnight, but the coroner’s inquest ruled that John had acted in self-defense. A slingshot once had slain a giant, and, surely, in the hands of a beast like Gillcreas, could mortally wound a boy.
My family came home, but we knew we could not stay. The Yanks now would want to avenge the death of Gillcreas. Ma went down to Cass County. My sister Martha Anne took in Emilly and Retta in Pleasant Hill. I rode with John and Bob to St. Clair County, where I left my baby brothers with Uncle Frank.
I wanted to ride over to the Wayward Rest and surprise lovely Lizzie Brown with a visit. Instead, I made my way to Clay County, found a small town called Centerville (later to merge with another town and become Kearney), where some kindly old Rebels directed me to the farmhouse of Zerelda Samuel.
* * * * *
We Youngers were not the only Missourians persecuted for choosing the losing side in a war.
Frank James introduced me to his mother, who was already showing with child; his stepfather Doc Samuel, whose neck still bore the burn marks from his hanging by Yankee troops during the war; and his little siblings, Sallie, Johnnie, and Fanny. Fanny, just two years old, had been given the middle name, Quantrill. Frank didn’t need to introduce me to his brother, though I almost didn’t recognize Jesse, weak and pale as he was.
“Dingus took a ball through a lung last May,” Frank told me, “while he was riding in to take the oath of allegiance.”
“Put me in a dreadful fix,” Jesse said weakly. “Liked to have died.”
“You’re too ornery to die, Dingus.”
After Quantrill had been shot, Frank said, he stayed around Kentucky for a while, just to let things cool down. The war was over, but he figured the Yankees meant to hang anyone who had ridden with Quantrill.
I related to him my experiences after joining Shelby, and what I had seen upon my return to Missouri.
“About the same here,” Frank said. “When I got home in August, I found a nice corn crop in the field. Then some bluebellies rode up in the middle of the night, trampled the crops, even crushed our cantaloupes and tomatoes.”
“The bastards,” Jesse said.
Mrs. Samuel brought me a plate of corn pone and bacon, and Frank produced a jug of liquor. I did not want to impose on a good Southern family, especially knowing firsthand how hard food was to come by, but I had not eaten in days. Frank’s mother could not cook like Ma or Mammy Suse, but I felt much better after that meal.
After thanking her for the hospitality, I offered to pay for the food, which proved an error in judgment. Mrs. Samuel laid into me with a stream of cussing that would have shocked Oll Shepherd, and then she cursed the Yankees and the Missouri people who made life so hard on good Baptist folks like her and her family.
Frank sniggered and Jesse grinned as the hard rock of a woman walked back to care for her brood. My fingers still held a gold piece.
“Can I see that?” Jesse asked.
I flipped the coin to him.
“Newly minted,”
he said, and the devilment flashed in his blue eyes. “How many more you got?”
“I don’t have many more,” I said. “Won it playing monte in San Francisco.”
“Most folks here pay their debts in apple butter,” Frank said. “We figured to pay ours in corn, till the Yanks fixed our flint.”
We sampled more of Frank’s liquor.
“I’ve been thinking about Texas,” I said. “Try to start over there. Or maybe Louisiana, though it’s hotter than hell and folks talk funny.”
“Not me,” Jesse said. “Not by a damned sight.”
“I don’t know.” Frank sighed. “I just don’t know what to do any more.”
“Besides,” Jesse said, “it would cost money for even us to get to Texas or Louisiana. And other than this”—he flipped the coin to Frank—“I don’t know where you can find any cash money.”
Suddenly, Frank got up, and closed the door. “I do,” he said in an urgent whisper. “Plenty of money. Money that belongs to damnyankees.”
Chapter Seventeen
The bullet wound kept Jesse in bed, though he bitterly complained about us leaving him behind.
“Next time,” I told him as we prepared to leave.
“Next time?” Frank asked.
I gave both brothers the most serious look I could summon despite my nerves. “We start this,” I told them, “and there’s no turning back. Are we agreed?”
“Damned right,” Jesse said.
“All right,” Frank added. “But we’ll need help.”
* * * * *
Finding men to join us came easy. We kept it in our family, the brotherhood of bushwhackers. My brother-in-law, John Jarrette, met us at an abandoned farm on Rush Creek.
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