by Harold Keith
Dedication
TO
Ann and Lane Livingston
of Hutchinson, Kansas
Contents
Dedication
Author’s Note
Map
1. Linn County, Kansas, 1861
2. Bushwhackers
3. Fort Leavenworth
4. Captain Asa Clardy
5. Furlough
6. March
7. Battle of Wilson’s Creek
8. Hard Lessons
9. Light Bread and Apple Butter
10. Foraging in the Cherokee Country
11. Lucy Washbourne
12. Battle of Prairie Grove
13. Expedition to Van Buren
14. The Cow Lot
15. Fate of the Brandts
16. The Name on the Watch
17. The Ride of Noah Babbitt
18. Sunday
19. Wrong Side of the River
20. The Jackmans
21. Boggy Depot
22. Pheasant Bluff
23. The Redbud Tree
24. Flight
25. Linn County, Kansas, 1865
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Author’s Note
Few Americans know how savagely the Civil War raged or how strange and varied were its issues in what is now Oklahoma and the neighboring states of Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas. Rifles for Watie was faithfully written against the historical backdrop of the conflict in this seldom-publicized, Far-Western theater.
In my research, I drew heavily upon the sources of the region. I read the diaries and journals of Civil War veterans, most of them Union, in the State historical collections of Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Colorado, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Tennessee, all of which I visited. I had access to the hundreds of personal letters written during the war by the mixed-blood Cherokees and now contained in the Frank Phillips Collection at the University of Oklahoma. My chief sources of published material were the War of the Rebellion series, The Confederate Veteran, Grant Foreman’s The Texas Road and A History of Oklahoma, Wiley Britton’s The Union Indian Brigade in the Civil War, Dr. Morris L. Wardell’s A Political History of the Cherokee Nation, Mabel Washbourne Anderson’s The Life of General Stand Watie, and Bell Irvin Wiley’s The Life of Billy Yank and The Life of Johnny Reb. Jeff Bussey’s flight on foot from Boggy Depot to Fort Gibson had its actual counterpart. Larry Lapsley, a Negro slave, escaped in 1864 from northern Texas to Fort Gibson over the same route. His account, later published in the Kansas Chronicles, was very useful. So was General James G. Blunt’s account of his Civil War experiences, also published in the Kansas Chronicles.
Because I wanted an authentic flavor of the war in the Far West, I visited and interviewed in the summers of 1940 and 1941 twenty-two Confederate war veterans then living in Oklahoma and Arkansas, and wrote down their reminiscences. Two were in units commanded by General Stand Watie: Daniel Ross of Locust Grove, Oklahoma, Second Cherokee Mounted Rifles and Jim Long of Gravette Arkansas, Company C, Arkansas Cavalry, attached to Watie’s command. Besides Ross, the veterans from Oklahoma were George Frank Miller of Carmen, John W. Harvey of Okmulgee, James R. Arnn of Rush Springs, John A. Willis of Duncan, Frank B. Harrison of Ardmore, Josephus White of Bethany, Wiley Bearden of Sulphur, William H. Freeman of Wetumka, Burrell Nash of Sulphur, William B. Cantwell of Ada, William J. Briscoe of County Line, L. N. Gammell of Purcell, Joseph A. Chipman of Pauls Valley, John F. Trible of Sulphur, Marshall M. Clark of Duncan, J. L. Johnson of Foster, Charles H. Gordon of Ardmore, and Augustus Wilson of Ardmore. I also talked to Tom Wisdom of Mulberry, Arkansas, and Thomas Harris of Ozark, Arkansas. My obligation to all their memories is very deep.
While gathering information for my master’s thesis in history at the University of Oklahoma, I talked several times to George W. Mayes of Pryor and Oklahoma City. He personally knew General Watie and his son, Saladin. He was a boy when the war began and made two attempts to join the Watie outfit, both frustrated by his father, Wash Mayes, who fought in the Watie brigade.
The eagerness of northern manufacturers to sell arms to the seceding states resulted in a traffic so common that it became a national scandal. For those who would like more information, I suggest an hour spent with Firearms of the Confederacy, by Claud E. Fuller and Richard D. Steuart, printed by Standard Publications, Inc., Huntington, West Virginia; or a talk with my friend, Don Rickey, custodian of the Custer Monument, Crow Agency, Montana, who first called it to my attention. Repeating rifles, invented by Christopher Miner Spencer, got into the war late but they got in.
The plot is wholly fictional. I know of no attempt by General Watie to secure repeating rifles. I found it necessary to alter the lives of Generals Watie and James G. Blunt, Colonel William Penn Adair, and Major Elias Cornelius Boudinot only when they came into direct contact with my hero, Jeff Bussey. Noah Babbitt was a real-life itinerant printer and pedestrian of the early 1870’s who occasionally wandered through Kansas, setting type for the Wichita Eagle. I do not know whether he fought in the Civil War. The other characters are almost totally imagined. They do, however, represent families and names typical of the region and the time. Incidentally, General Watie’s name is pronounced as though it were spelled “weighty.”
I am grateful to Dr. E. E. Dale, research professor emeritus of history at the University of Oklahoma and my teacher in the 1920’s there, and to Dr. Edwin C. McReynolds, professor of history, for reading the galleys. Each took valuable time from a book he was writing to help with mine.
I am indebted to Virginia, my wife, for typing, for advice, and for tolerating our lack of social life as I tried to fit the five-year writing labor around my duties as sports publicist at the University of Oklahoma. I am also indebted to Mrs. Addie Lee Barker, my assistant in sports publicity at Oklahoma, and to Kathleen Keith, my daughter, for typing. Professor Dwight Swain, Mrs. Mary H. Marable, Dr. Jim Haddock, Bill Hoge, and Beatrice Frank all gave valuable assistance.
HAROLD KEITH
University of Oklahoma
January 10, 1957
Map
1
Linn County, Kansas, 1861
The mules strained forward strongly, hoofs stomping, harness jingling. The iron blade of the plow sang joyously as it ripped up the moist, black Kansas earth with a soft, crunching sound, turning it over in long, smooth, root-veined rectangles.
Leather lines tied together over his left shoulder and under his right arm, Jeff trudged along behind the plow, watching the fresh dirt cascade off the blade and remembering.
Remembering the terrible Kansas drouth of the year before when it hadn’t rained for sixteen long months. The ground had broken open in great cracks, springs and wells went dry, and no green plant would grow except the curly buffalo grass which never failed. That drouth had been hard on everybody.
Jeff clutched the wooden plow handles and thought about it. He recalled how starved he had been for wheat bread, and how his longing for it grew so acute that on Sundays he found excuse to visit neighbor after neighbor in hopes of being invited to share a pan of hot biscuits, only to discover that they, too, took their corn bread three times a day.
A drop of perspiration trickled down his tan, dusty face. It was a pleasant face with a wide, generous mouth, a deep dimple in the chin, and quick brown eyes that crinkled with good humor. The sweat droplets ran uncomfortably into the corner of his mouth, tasting salty and warm.
But now the drouth was broken. After plenty of snow and rain, the new land was blooming again. Even his mother was learning to accept Kansas. Edith Bussey had lived all her life in Kentucky, with its gently rolling hills, its seas of bluegrass, its stone fences festooned with h
oneysuckle, and its stately homes with their tall white columns towering into the drowsy air. No wonder she found the new Kansas country hard to like.
She had called Kansas an erratic land. Jeff remembered she had said it was like a child, happy and laughing one minute, hateful and contrary the next. A land famous for its cyclones, blizzards, grasshoppers, mortgages, and its violently opposed political cliques.
Jeff ducked his head and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his homespun shirt, never taking his eyes off the mules. He would never forget the scores of covered wagons he had seen, during the drouth last fall, on the Marais des Cygnes road that went past his father’s farm as one-third of the hundred thousand people living in Kansas Territory gave up, abandoning their claims and heading back to their wives’ folks.
Curious, he had leaned on his father’s corral fence of peeled cottonwood logs and asked some of them where they were going.
“Back to Ellinoy,” or “Back to Injeany,” they replied in their whining, singsong voices. “Don’ wanta starve to death here.”
Although Jeff had felt sorry for them and their families, his father, a veteran of the Mexican War, was disgusted with their faint-heartedness. Emory Bussey believed that in one respect the drouth had been a blessing to the new state.
“We got rid of the chronic croakers who never could see good in anything,” he maintained. Emory was a Free State man in the raging guerilla warfare over slavery that had divided people on the Kansas-Missouri border into free and slave factions. It was a political dispute that was far more serious than the drouth.
Jeff yelled at the mules and whistled piercingly between his teeth to keep them going. He liked the new Kansas country. He meant not only to live and work in it but also to go to college in it. His father had told him that the first Kansas constitution, made in 1855, contained a provision saying that “The General Assembly may take measures for the establishment of a university.” Jeff wondered if the drouth would delay its coming. At the end of the row he halted the mules.
He took off his hat to cool his brown head. His mother had made the hat from wheat straw she had platted with her own hands at night, shaping the crown to his head and lining it inside with cloth to keep it from being scratchy. While Jeff stood bareheaded, enjoying the warm breeze blowing through his hair, his dog Ring trotted up, panting, and nudged Jeff’s leg affectionately.
Jeff reached down and pulled Ring’s ears, and the big gray dog’s plumed tail waved in slow half-circles of delight. Ring was half shepherd and half greyhound. He had big shoulder muscles and a white ring around his neck. Although the dog weighed almost ninety pounds now, Jeff recalled how six years ago he had brought him home in his coat pocket. His father and mother hadn’t wanted him to have the dog; they already had a collie and a feist. But Jeff begged so hard that they relented on condition that he keep the animal at the barn.
However, that first night Jeff had heard the pup crying lonesomely for its mother. He slipped out of bed in the dark, walked to the barn, and brought the pup back to his bedroom. The next morning his father and mother discovered the dog in bed with him. When they scolded him, Jeff hung his head and took his reprimand without speaking. Now he and Ring were such good friends that Jeff couldn’t wrestle with the other boys at the three-months district school without Ring taking his part.
He put his hands back on the plow handles and looked around, smelling the freshly turned sod. The morning was alive with a soft stirring and a dewy crispness. Jeff heard the sharp, friendly whistle of a quail from the waving blue-stem beyond the plowed space, and from somewhere in the warm south wind his nostrils caught the wild, intoxicating whiff of sand-plum blossoms. But the boy felt strangely out of tune with the beauty and freshness of the morning.
His mind was filled with a restlessness and a yearning. At breakfast his father had told him that six Southern states had seceded from the Union and that a war would probably be fought between the North and the South, a big war that might easily spread to Kansas.
Jeff’s heart beat faster beneath his blue homespun shirt. If, by a miracle, a general war could be avoided, soldiers were still needed to halt the guerilla warfare in Kansas, brought on by the Missouri proslavery faction across the border. Jeff’s dearest wish was to become a soldier.
It was all he talked about at home. He was small for his sixteen years but strong, wiry, cheerful, and not at all abashed in the presence of strangers. There was no doubt in his mind which army he wanted to enlist in.
He had known ever since that time he and his father had ridden horseback through the snow in the winter of 1859 to Leavenworth to hear Abraham Lincoln speak in behalf of his candidacy for the Presidency. Lincoln had just touched the northeast tip of the new Kansas Territory on his tour, speaking at Elwood, Troy, Doniphan, Atchison, Stockton and Leavenworth. Jeff never forgot him. He could still repeat from memory portions of Lincoln’s speech he had heard.
The day was bitterly cold. Lincoln and his party had traveled in sleighs and were wrapped in buffalo robes.
Before the meeting Jeff saw Lincoln’s kindly face and his rangy profile through the window of a Leavenworth barber shop. Conducted there by Kansas City newspapermen to get his hair cut, Lincoln was reading the New York and Chicago newspapers they had bought for him at the post-office newsstand while he waited his turn in the chair.
Later the cold prairie wind rocked the little bare-walled courthouse in which Lincoln spoke. Not more than forty people were present. Jeff was surprised when the tall lawyer from Illinois rose up behind a rough table and, with his long hands wandering awkwardly in and out of his pantaloon pockets, began, in a tenor voice freely punctuated with “jist” and “sich,” not to orate but just to talk. At first Jeff had squirmed in his seat.
If the people of Illinois considered this a great man, their ideas must be peculiar. Despite his youth, Jeff knew a lot about slavery. It was all his father discussed at mealtime.
But as Lincoln talked on and on, Jeff began to change his mind about the gangling visitor from Illinois. Speaking as informally as though he and another man were exchanging thoughts while driving a buggy across the prairie, Lincoln discussed the question of slavery in the Territories with kindly but naked frankness. Although Jeff’s father had told Jeff that Leavenworth was a slavery town, the frontier people there believed in fair play, and Jeff noticed that they listened courteously to Lincoln.
Jeff never forgot one thing Lincoln told the proslavery audience. “Your own statement of it is that if the Black Republicans elect a President, you won’t stand it. You will break up the Union. Do you really think you are justified to break up the government? If you do, you are very unreasonable, and more reasonable men cannot and will not submit to you. If we shall constitutionally elect a President, it will be our duty to see that you submit. We have a means provided for expressing our belief in regard to slavery. It is through the ballot box, the peaceful method provided by the constitution. But no man, North or South, can approve of violence or crime.”
Relaxing against the plow, Jeff frowned and fanned himself with his hat. Every family living along the Kansas-Missouri border knew all about the violence and crime that had arisen over slavery. Jeff was growing tired of it. Three years earlier a band of armed Missouri border ruffians had captured eleven Free State men, marched them to a gulch only eleven miles from the Bussey home, lined them up and fired a volley, killing five. Jeff’s father had ridden over next day to help bury them. Jeff had begged to go along, but his mother wouldn’t hear of it. That was known as the Marais des Cygnes Massacre.
Jeff put his hat back on his head and remembered the time two months ago his younger sisters Bess and Mary had ridden horseback to the trading post to buy an ounce of paregoric. Two miles from home they were surprised by five Missouri bushwhackers. The men took their horses, but the girls persuaded them to let them keep their light saddles. Later they arrived home, carrying the saddles. The stolen horses were the only ones the family possessed. One of them was Charle
y, Jeff’s own three-year-old whom he had raised from a colt. In spite of Lincoln’s speech, violence and crime over slavery still flared all along the border, just three miles from the Bussey home. And now there was going to be a war over it.
Jeff turned the mules, lifting the plow into alignment for the new furrow. He slapped the lines along the mules’ backs and whistled shrilly. Crouching, the mules hit their collars together, leg muscles flexing. The leather traces tightened, creaked, strained. Grunting laboriously, they dug in and pulled hard, and Jeff felt the handles drawn almost out of his hands as the plow moved forward, hurling the black dirt off the moldboard and pulverizing it into the previous furrow.
The sun climbed higher and higher. He plowed for two more hours, then paused again to rest his team. He looked up, feeling strong pangs of hunger. Must be about noon. His home, half a mile away, was a handsome three-room log house with a lean-to barn and a sod smokehouse, nestling snugly in a clearing surrounded by oak, hickory, and blackjack. A column of gray smoke curled from the stone fireplace, and Jeff knew his mother was busy cooking among her pots and ovens there.
There would be fat bacon, corn bread in pone, dandelion greens, wild honey, and fried onions from the new garden. Jeff sighed resignedly. No dinner for him today. His mother had packed a big piece of cold corn pone and given him a bottle of water from the spring. But, boylike, he had eaten all the pone at ten o’clock in the morning and now he was hungry again.
Jeff was proud of his home. It had taken the family seven months to build it. Seven long months of hewing, beveling, chinking, daubing and plastering. Although Jeff had been small, he had helped, working long hours. So had his mother and his sisters. How pleased they all were to see the new house rising, log by log. They were tired of living in the dugout down by the creek. The new home was solidly constructed of hickory logs, warmly chinked with clay.
The floor was of split logs. The wall had been plastered cleanly with clay mud. The house was comfortable and weather-tight. Although his father referred to it as “my mud-dauber’s nest,” its oak-shake roof turned the hardest rains. Jeff thought it the finest home in Linn County.
