Wildwood Boys

by James Carlos Blake

  Over the following days his talk was all of Kansas territory. On his way back from California he had come on a fine tract of homestead land some hundred miles east of Missouri. It was set near Agnes City, a few miles removed from the Santa Fe Trail, well-wooded and richly topsoiled and cut through by a swift creek. He was decided they would move there. Martha could not refrain from asking why. How much better could that portion of Kansas be than the good bottom they had on the Black Owl? He said he just knew it was better and would brook no further argument.

  And so they removed to the Kansas tract Will had set his eye upon. They built a dogtrot cabin and a stable, put up fences, planted corn and raised pigs. And by the end of the year Will Anderson was again at doing what he had in truth moved to Kansas to do—stealing horses. This time with his sons at his side and learning the rustler’s trade. California had convinced him for good and all that a man ought to stay with doing what he could do best, and that bloodkin was the only partnership for it.

  BLEEDING KANSAS

  The farm was as always good cover for the rustling, and by the rustling they did prosper. In the same year the Andersons moved to Kansas, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed and new settlers were pouring into the region. The increase in traffic along the Kansas portion of the Santa Fe Trail was the boon to horsethieving Will Anderson had thought it would be. By the time they had been in Kansas a year, he was taking Bill and young Jim on late-night raids of waystation corrals and grazing pastures, sometimes of the local ranches that provided horses to the stage and freight lines. They took as many as two dozen head each time and moved them fast across the southern backcountry along old stock traces and over isolated prairie and along the Marais des Cygnes River and in a week had them in Bates County, Missouri, and sold off to ready buyers who asked no questions except “How many?” and “How much?”

  Every raid gave Bill Anderson a quivering thrill as they cut out the horses and made away with them in a raise of dust. He loved the look of their manes and tails lifting in the night wind, the sounds of their deeply sonorous breathing and the drumming of their galloping hooves. He delighted in their wonderful variety as they raced under the stars—bays and duns and buckskins, blacks and claybanks, sorrels and paints, horses blazed and raindropped, skewbald and mottled and ass-spotted, all kinds. Every rustling made his blood jump with the chance of being found out, with the possibility of violent encounter. He laughed at the wild grin of his brother Jim, hardly more than a child and already more seasoned to risk than most grown men. They naturally took the very best of the animals for their own, the fastest and boldest. Bill was proud of the big sable stallion he named Edgar Allan, and Jim had taken for himself a speedy Appaloosa he called Buck.

  They were good at their work and were rarely discovered. In the few instances when they were caught in the act and pursued, they usually had only to fire a few rounds behind them and their chasers would fall away, especially on hearing the blasts of Bill’s big Walker. When the chasers proved brave and returned fire and continued to come for them, they would let the horses go in one direction and themselves veer off in another, racing into the darker cover of the woodlands, galloping through the shadows of the river traces with their hatbrims folded back in the wind and the cries and gunfire of their hunters growing faint behind them until the only sounds they heard were their own laughter and the clattering of their horses’ hooves.

  Even on the rare occasion of an unsuccessful rustle, when they got back home they would sit out on the porch and recount to each other the grand fun they’d had. Bill and his father would pass the jug between them, but even young Jim, from the time he was twelve, was permitted a small cup of whiskey as his earned right for engaging in a man’s work. The females of the house would be abed but awake and listening to them—Martha with her head full of fears for the future, Mary and Josie and little Jenny holding each other close, their eyes wide, their hearts thumping with thrill and envy.

  They did not go uninformed during their Kansas years, these Andersons. Newspapers and the talk of neighbors at barn dances and village stores, the conversations of strangers in the little towns they passed through on their hundred-mile rides back from horse sales in Missouri—through such sources did they keep up with the news of the day, most of it about the antagonisms attending the matter of slavery and Kansas’s own part in the issue. The Andersons well knew of the clamor attached to the territorial election of ’55 when the Federal government allowed Kansas to decide for itself to sanction or reject slavery. They’d heard tale upon tale of abolitionists come all the way from New England in pretense of being settlers but in truth only to vote in league with the nigger-stealers and the damned Dutch—hypocritical interlopers who held themselves morally superior to every man of southern ancestry and yet were avid to spill blood, the proof of it in the Bible shipments they received from back East that in fact were crates of Sharps rifles.

  No Anderson had ever owned a slave or would, but Will had early implanted in his sons an aversion to bullies of any stripe, and the boys shared in his resentment of these outsiders from half the continent away who would force their beliefs on Kansas. The Andersons were gladdened by news of the hordes of Missourians who crossed into Kansas to outdo the free-stater vote. “Ruffians” the abolitionists called them, and northern newspapers routinely referred to Missourians as depraved “pukes” hardly fit to be called human.

  There were fewer than three thousand eligible voters in Kansas on election day and over six thousand votes were cast. The Andersons were elated when the southern vote carried the day. And then shortly thereafter were enraged once again when the free-staters formally denounced the new legislature and called for another election. The Kansas government-elect said the matter had been settled and suggested the northerners go back to New England where they damn well did belong. But the abolitionists refused to yield. They established a headquarters in the town of Lawrence, elected their own governor and legislators, and solicited still more Yankees to the territory.

  Hostilities naturally increased. The following spring the Andersons smiled at reports that ruffians had swarmed into Lawrence—“Yankeetown,” the pro-slavers called it, “Boston Colony”—and destroyed the printing presses of both newspapers as well as looted stores and fired several buildings, including the governor’s house and the three-story Free State Hotel. They laughed when they heard about the southern congressman so infuriated by a northern senator’s scurrilous denunciations of the South that he had stalked into the Senate chamber with club in hand and right there on the floor beaten the man to bloody insensibility. But they didn’t laugh when they heard that a self-anointed messenger of God named John Brown and several of his sons and followers had descended on five pro-slavery Kansans in the dark of night and cloven them to death with broadswords.

  “Claymores they used—Sweet Mother Mary!” Will Anderson remarked to his boys about the John Brown murders. “I hope the son of a bitch does hang, but I have to say he knows how to get his point across. Fear, boys—that’s half the fight right there. Make the other fella more afraid of the awfulness of what you’ll do him if he falls in your hands than you are of what he’ll do to you. That’s the secret, and crazy old Brown knows it. Same with the Indians. Damn Indians known it since forever. It’s what scalping’s all about, burning at the stake, all them redskin ways of killing.”

  His sons thought this a novel advisement but would in time come to know it for common credo in this brute portion of the republic.

  And so, five years before Fort Sumter, the war was already under way along the Kansas-Missouri border. “Death to all Yankees and traitors in Kansas!” was the cry of pro-slave Missourians. And the Kansas free-staters did bellow in response: “War to the knife and the knife to the hilt!” Strangers approaching each other on lonely border roads would clutch their weapons and ask, “Free state or slave?”—and the answer could provoke mortal dispute. In newspapers across the country the region now bore the name of “Bleeding Kansas.”
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  In these early years came into being the dread jayhawkers—organized bands of hardcase Kansas vigilantes who preyed upon southern sympathizers on both sides of the border. Among the most notorious of their chieftains were a vicious little man named Charles “Doc” Jennison—a bona fide physician who wore absurdly high-crowned fur hats to make himself appear taller—and a wildbearded half-mad Campbellite preacher named James Montgomery. But the most powerful and reviled of all jayhawkers was James Henry Lane, “the Grim Chieftain,” a redhaired political opportunist who would be elected one of Kansas’ first two senators. He was a fiery orator whose speeches were said to make dogs howl, children wail, women break into tears, and men of Kansas avid to kill and plunder in Missouri. It was Jim Lane’s declared intention to root out all things disloyal to the Union, “from a Durham cow to a Shanghai chicken.” But so utter was his hatred of Missourians that he preyed on them all alike, believing that any who claimed to be pro-Union was a puke lying in his teeth.

  The Andersons got letters from Martha’s sister Sally Parchman telling of the terrible troubles in Jackson County, of fierce skirmishes between Missouri guerrillas and damnable Kansas jayhawks, of sometimes hearing the gunfire of such fights not a mile from their own farm. She told of shot-dead bodies of strangers stood in a line of upright coffins on town sidewalks that they might be recognized by kin and claimed. Of the burnings of houses and oubuildings, now by this band of nightriders, now by that one. Of the theft of livestock and crops, of torchlight lynchings. Her fear of the jayhawkers, Sally wrote, grew greater by the day. And her hatred.

  By the summer of ’58 there were four abolitionists for every pro-slave resident in Kansas. In a new election overseen by Federal troops the territory voted itself free. But the election did nothing to dissuade the vigilantes of both sides from raiding back and forth across the border, burning what they could and stealing whatever they might make off with, sometimes leaving men sprawled dead in their own fields or hanging from the trees.

  Animosity toward Missouri was now so intense that the Andersons made a secret of their origins. “Used to be nobody’s damn business where a man was from,” Will Anderson said, “but the times being what they are, it’s the first thing anybody wants to know anymore. From now on, somebody asks, we’re from Union Kentucky.” He looked hard at Bill and Jim. “The border scrapping’s got nothing to do with us, you hear? Nor the big war that’s coming. It’s a war between rich factory owners and rich cottongrowers and we ain’t either one or ever will be. Piss on the Yankees twice as much, but piss on the Virginia bigwigs too. It’s their fight, not ours. The only thing the war’s going to mean for us is better business. There’s going to be more call for horses and they’ll bring a better price. We don’t stand to do nothing in this war but make money.”

  And so, when the nation went to war with itself in April of ’61, the Andersons stayed put.

  WAR NEWS, PROSPERITY, A TRIAL

  A rustling foray never kept Will and the boys away from home for more than a few days before they were back with new stock to hide in their woods corrals—but with the advent of the larger war, Will would no longer leave his wife and daughters at home by themselves for as long as it took to get the herds to Missouri and come back. Although it was riskier to sell the rustled stock so close to home, there was no shortage of customers in the region. Newcomers were settling within a day or two’s ride of the Anderson farm, and these homesteaders wanted good horses and few were particular about where they came from.

  While the Andersons prospered in Kansas, the news from Missouri was mostly worse. The Yankees had an iron grip on Saint Louis and its huge arsenal—and had the fierce loyalty of its population, especially its Germans. The Union held the state capital. It had strong garrisons at all the key railheads and river ports. The Federal army had put the state under martial law and its citizens were required to “swallow the dog”—to swear loyalty to the U.S. government—and to post bonds in guarantee of their oaths. It was clear that the Union’s grip in Missouri would not be easily broken—and clear as well that Missouri’s allegiance in the war was fiercely divided. Although most Missourians were of southern ancestry, many of them were pro-Union. Neighbors all over the state had become bitter antagonists. Most wanted nothing more than to be let alone, to stay out of the war altogether. They might as well have wished for wings to fly themselves above it.

  The only glad news from Missouri was of General Sterling Price and his State Guard, who that summer won a major battle against the Union at Wilson’s Creek. But that good tiding was offset by reports of Jim Lane’s jayhawkers. At the rich Osage River town of Osceola, they murdered citizens accused as friends of the Confederacy. They robbed the banks of their every dollar and loaded a train of wagons with all the property they could bear away. Three hundred jayhawks got so drunk they had to be carried on the wagons as well. As they made off, the reivers put the town to the torch and every building but three was burned to ash.

  “We did good to come this far west,” Will Anderson told his sons as they raised a cup to each other in celebration of Christmas Day. “Nobody in Missouri or within fifty miles of this side of the border is safe from that damn war. We did good to come this far west, I say.”

  His forecast of high profit proved true, and they were not shy about spending it. Will gave Martha a regular and handsome allowance to buy whatever pretties she desired for herself and the girls when the family went to town on Saturday mornings. The Anderson men now kept themselves in good boots and clothes, and Bill proved something of a dandy in his predilection for shirts with pleated fronts and ruffled cuffs and in his strutting delight in a broadcloth cloak he wore even to barn dances.

  Jim japed him for his sartorial flamboyance but secretly conceded that Bill cut a dashing figure and now turned even more pretty heads than before. The brothers looked much alike—both lean and near to six feet tall, sharp-featured, their black hair down to their collars—but Jim envied Bill his easy way of looking at girls so that they’d smile even as they blushed and turned away and then kept sneaking glances at him.

  They bought saddles, knives, firearms—were particularly taken with the .36-caliber Navy Colt revolver, a marvelous engine of uncanny accuracy. Weighing little more than half as much as the gargantuan Walker, it felt to the Andersons as light as a toy, and they could work it like a magic trick with either hand.

  If any among the Agnes City storekeepers wondered about the source of the Anderson affluence, they kept their curiosity to themselves.

  One Saturday morning as the family was getting ready to go home, a drunken muleskinner passing on the sidewalk muttered an indecency to Mary Anderson as she was stepping up into the wagon—and he made things worse for himself by patting her haunch. Mary turned to kick at the man, and Bill and Jim both started around the wagon to get at him, but Will had just come out of Mercer’s Hardware and seen what happened and his newly purchased pickax was already describing an arc as he swung it with both hands. The curved iron blade drove through the man’s spine and various vital organs and emerged through his front ribs to transfix him to the wagon sideboard. The wide-eyed corpse hung limply pinioned and dripping dark blood and drew gawkers and blowflies while the constable was searched out and fetched. Although several bystanders supported the family’s account of the incident, Will Anderson was charged with murder and made to stand trial.

  This was a time when Missourians stood little chance in a Kansas courtroom, but the Andersons had now long been passing for Kansans and were known to most storekeepers as free-spending patrons. The killed man, on the other hand, was a stranger for whom no witness could testify. It was rumored he was a border ruffian. Most of the jurymen, moreover, were fathers of daughters. They deliberated twenty minutes and voted for acquittal. That evening, the Andersons celebrated into the late hours with whiskey and music, dancing and song. And though Bill Anderson would forever be a Missourian in his bones, he would henceforth feel very much a man of Kansas too.

  T
HE BERRY BOYS

  Best friends to Bill and Jim Anderson were the Berry brothers—white-haired Ike, the elder by a year, and roanhaired Butch who had a wayward eye. They were fellow Missourians out of Ray County whose family had arrived in this part of Kansas a few years after the Andersons, their father bent on getting clear of the violence back home. But two weeks before Butch’s sixteenth birthday, Alston Berry went by himself into Emporia to pick up some harnesses he had ordered from Saint Louis, and in the course of things he found himself in a saloon where he entered an affray with three men later identified as jayhawkers of Jim Montgomery. He was carried home in the bloodstained bed of his wagon and holding his bowels to himself where a jayhawker blade had slashed his belly. Their mother repositioned the entrails as she best could and sewed the wound closed and prayed over him and expected him to die. But he did not, and three months later he still lived, though the wound would never heal. Some days it seemed to be improving and then a few days later it would worsen once again. Yellow pus and watery blood seeped constantly from the suture. His pain rose and ebbed by intervals but was unremitting. It precluded him from sitting up for more than an hour at a time or sleeping through the night. Bedsores rooted into his back and buttocks. The stench of the wound was unabating and different from the stink of the bedclothes, which his incontinence persistently soiled and which the two Berry sisters were ever washing and drying and changing. He wasted to a coal-eyed skeleton hung with waxy skin. His voice was a raw croak each time he told his family he was shamed by his lack of courage to shoot himself and end the ordeal for them all.