Wreaths of Glory
Page 20
“Kansans and Missourians hated each other.”
“Many still do.”
“Do you?”
“Hate Kansans?” He snorted, and the words spilled out freely. “A few years before he died, Frank James got up at one of our reunions, and he says that it was time to forgive. Says he … ‘I believe that if we expect to be forgiven, we must forgive. They did some very bad things on the other side, but we did, too.’ Remember it like it was just the other day.”
He let the reporter finish scribbling. The kid looked up, wiped his brow again. “Frank James really said that?”
“Sure, ’bout ten years back.”
“But have you forgiven?”
“Kansans?” He laughed. “Sure. That was a hell of a war, kid. No glory. No wreaths of glory, not really, but I suspect all wars are like that.” He leaned forward. “But this was nothing like that thing over in Europe a few years back. We were fighting the Huns in that one. Back then, we were fighting each other. They call it ‘Civil War,’ but, trust me, there wasn’t one thing civil about it. I done plenty of wickedness during the war. I’m not proud of anything I did. Didn’t do one good thing. I was a kid, though. Cole Younger once said it’s pretty easy to turn a boy, in his teens or just beginning his twenties, into a killer. Just give him a revolver and a cause and a leader who can make him forget his conscience. That was me. No, I don’t begrudge any Kansans.”
Well, he had done a few skips and hops, and shouted a huzzah or two in 1866, upon hearing that Senator Jim Lane had blown his brains out.
“And what about Beans the Butcher Kimbrough?”
So it had finally come back to Beans. The cardinal took flight, disappearing in the woods beyond the cemetery. Alistair looked at the graveyard, the wilted flowers by the marble headstones, a few flags—American and Rebel—being swallowed by the tall grass that desperately needed mowing.
He was tired of talking. Hadn’t spoken so many words since the Quantrill reunion in 1914, when Frank and Cole were still living. He sat straight again. “Did you ask Maura … Missus Morgan, I mean … about him?”
The reporter studied Alistair’s face before answering deliberately. “She said he never mistreated her in any way when she rode out of Lawrence with him. She said he died as a soldier, fighting for his cause. She bore him no animosity. And as I said, she spoke highly of you.”
He listened to the other birds, the wind rustling through the trees overhead.
“Beans Kimbrough,” the reporter said. “came from Osceola …”
“His name was Benedict,” Alistair said.
“Yes. Yes. I know. There’s no monument to him, and many in Osceola consider him a hero, much as they still admire Bloody Bill Anderson and William Quantrill and Jo Shelby and …”
“Yeah.” Alistair waved his hand. “Plenty of Confederate heroes. I reckon we have enough. Kimbrough wouldn’t want some monument. He’s remembered. And Frank James said something else, it was during the war, he said … ‘He made his monument while he lived.’”
The reporter wrote that down, then said: “A group in Osceola wanted to fund and commission a statue of Beans the Butcher, but my boss, our publisher, he wrote a scathing editorial, pretty much saying the same thing you just said, that we need not stir up animosity, that the war is over, and we need to forget it. And he’s an Osceola native, my editor. He’s old, too, almost as old as …” He stopped himself, smiled sheepishly, and said: “Anyway, he was in Osceola when Union soldiers burned it. Not only that, his last name is Kimbrough. One would think that …”
Alistair looked up. “Kimbrough?”
“Yes, sir. Darius Kimbrough.”
Lips turning upward in a smile, Alistair crossed his legs, shook his head, and whispered: “I don’t know. Maybe I did one thing good during the war, after all.”
The ink-slinger tried to ask another question, begging Alistair to repeat what he had just said, that he hadn’t quite caught all of that, but the nurses had come to the rescue, shooing away the reporter. They tried to load Cummins, Wilson, and Alistair into those confounded wheelchairs, waking up Cummins’ pet raccoon, which leaped down, startling one of the nurses so badly she fell onto her backside. Snarling, the raccoon climbed up a tree. Cummins cursed, started crying for his pet. Henry Wilson pinched one of the nurse’s bottoms, and she slapped his face. Another nurse screamed at the raccoon, then at Cummins. The reporter tried to shout one last question, but Alistair Durant was laughing too hard to hear.
It was good to be alive. It was good to have forgiven, and to have been forgiven.
the end
Author’s Note
This is a work of historical fiction, and since my protagonists are Missouri-born, their thoughts and actions are what I think would be appropriate for a Missouri-born teenager caught up in those horrid War between the States years. According to contemporary accounts, most bushwhackers believed that the collapse of the women’s “prison” in Kansas City was premeditated murder. Some people still regard it as such, despite solid historical evidence citing the cause of the tragedy as this: Union guards unintentionally undermined the structure by tunneling to reach the cells of prostitutes also imprisoned there.
For the purpose of narrative, I did lengthen the time the girls were imprisoned in Kansas City, and, according to some sources, the “spy period” of Quantrill’s men in Lawrence. Other events are either loosely based on actual events or solidly grounded in historical record.
Alistair Durant and Beans Kimbrough are fictional composites of Missourians who rode with William Quantrill. Maura Shea is loosely based on Lawrence resident Sallie Young, who was captured by Quantrill’s raiders and originally despised (and jailed) as a traitor before being exonerated as a true heroine. Many other characters—Quantrill, Bill Anderson, Jim Cummins, Frank James, Jim Lane, George Todd, and Cole Younger among them—were actual people.
Much appreciation goes to the staffs at the Bushwhackers Museum in Nevada City, Missouri; Confederate Memorial State Historic Park in Higginsville, Missouri; Jesse James Farm and Museum in Kearney, Missouri; Lawrence (Kansas) Convention and Visitors Bureau; Missouri Valley Special Collections at the Kansas City Public Library; and Watkins Community Museum in Lawrence, Kansas. I must also thank Max McCoy of Emporia, Kansas, for recommending several sources.
William Quantrill and the border wars have generated scores of books, some reliable, many not. Among the best sources I found during my research were: Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy (Louisiana State University Press, 1958) by Richard S. Brownlee; Bloody Bill Anderson: The Short, Savage Life of a Civil War Guerrilla (Stackpole, 1998) by Albert Castel and Thomas Goodrich; Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border (Pelican, 2006) by Donald L. Gilmore; Bloody Dawn: The Story of the Lawrence Massacre (Kent State University Press, 1991) and Black Flag: Guerrilla Warfare on the Western Border, 1861–1865 (Indiana University Press, 1995), both by Thomas Goodrich; The Devil Knows How to Ride: The True Story of William Clarke Quantrill and His Confederate Raiders (Random House, 1996) by Edward R. Leslie; Reminiscences of Quantrell’s [sic] Raid upon the City of Lawrence, Kansas, (Isaac P. Moore, 1897) edited by John Shea; “The Burning” of Osceola, Missouri, (self-published, 2009) written and compiled by Richard F. Sunderwirth; and Frank and Jesse James: The Story Behind the Legend (Cumberland House, 2000) by Ted P. Yeatman. And although you can’t believe most of what they said, The Story of Cole Younger by Himself (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2000) and Three Years with Quantrill: A True Story Told by His Scout John McCorkle (University of Oklahoma Press, 1992) written by O. S. Barton were good for flavor.
These are excellent sources to learn more about the Civil War years in Missouri and Kansas, and the Lawrence raid.
Johnny D. Boggs
Santa Fe, New Mexico
About the Author
Johnny D. Boggs has worked cattle, shot rapids in a canoe, hiked across mountains and desert
s, traipsed around ghost towns, and spent hours poring over microfilm in library archives—all in the name of finding a good story. He’s also one of the few Western writers to have won six Spur Awards from Western Writers of America (for his novels, Camp Ford, in 2006, Doubtful Cañon, in 2008, and Hard Winter in 2010, Legacy of a Lawman, West Texas Kill, both in 2012, and his short story, “A Piano at Dead Man’s Crossing”, in 2002 and the Western Heritage Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum (for his novel, Spark on the Prairie: The Trial of the Kiowa Chiefs, in 2004). A native of South Carolina, Boggs spent almost fifteen years in Texas as a journalist at the Dallas Times Herald and Fort Worth Star-Telegram before moving to New Mexico in 1998 to concentrate full time on his novels. Author of dozens of published short stories, he has also written for more than fifty newspapers and magazines, and is a frequent contributor to Boys’ Life and True West. His Western novels cover a wide range. The Lonesome Chisholm Trail (Five Star Westerns, 2000) is an authentic cattle-drive story, while Lonely Trumpet (Five Star Westerns, 2002) is an historical novel about the first black graduate of West Point. The Despoilers (Five Star Westerns, 2002) and Ghost Legion (Five Star Westerns, 2005) are set in the Carolina backcountry during the Revolutionary War. The Big Fifty (Five Star Westerns, 2003) chronicles the slaughter of buffalo on the southern plains in the 1870s, while East of the Border (Five Star Westerns, 2004) is a comedy about the theatrical offerings of Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, and Texas Jack Omohundro, and Camp Ford (Five Star Westerns, 2005) tells about a Civil War baseball game between Union prisoners of war and Confederate guards. “Boggs’ narrative voice captures the old-fashioned style of the past,” Publishers Weekly said, and Booklist called him “among the best Western writers at work today.” Boggs lives with his wife Lisa and son Jack in Santa Fe. His website is www.JohnnyDBoggs.com.