Wildwood Boys

by James Carlos Blake

  Bill stiffened. “I’ll avenge my sister, Bill—against the fucken Federals. They killed her and I’ll kill them all day long and every day. I yearn to. And I mean their informers too. I’ll hang an informer—burn his damn house, widow his wife, orphan his pups. But this…” Again a gesture at the door.

  “I know,” Quantrill said.

  “You know? Then why…?” He wasn’t sure what he would ask of him.

  “Because the madness is also my own,” Quantrill said. His smile was near to serene. “I’ve not unholstered a pistol today. I’ve not struck a single matchstick. But I’ll not deny, today or any day to come, that my hand is on every death and every lick of fire. Some will call me a coward for this day but they will be lying.”

  He quit his smile and leaned on the table toward Bill. “Mark me, William T. The mass of men know that their hearts are a riot of lusts and base desires, but they fear the risks of acceding to those wants. They desire to do violence to their enemies but they are too fearful of provoking violence unto themselves. They fear consequences, you see, and such fear is the rankest sort of cowardice. They cannot bear this truth and so they cleave to the lie of morality, that sum of shams, to defend themselves against it, and thus do they lay a second kind of cowardice atop the first. They warrant no pity.” He pointed at the door. “I desired to kill them and I was willing to risk any odds set against me, prepared to suffer any consequence. They can call me a monster for this day, but not a coward.”

  He sat back and resumed his tranquil smile and contentedly puffed his cigar.

  Bill stared at him. “I don’t know if that’s an admirable argument or the rankest load of bullshit I ever heard,” he said. “But I guess it’s worth a shot in the neck.” He pushed the bottle over to him and Quantrill picked it up, raised it in a toast to Bill, and took a deep drink. They grinned hard at each other.

  Then one of Pool’s lookouts came rushing into the saloon to report the dust of a distant column of riders bearing for the town. “It’s Federals for sure, Captain,” the scout said.

  Quantrill stood up. “Gentlemen,” he said, “the ball is over.”

  Ten minutes later the guerrillas were ahorse and heading back to their Missouri hideaways with their wagonloads of loot, some of them so drunk they swayed in the saddle as they rode away, rebel yells trailing behind them. Quantrill led them in a southward swing to get by the advancing Feds.

  Not until days later would they come to know that Jim Lane had escaped them by bare minutes. When he’d been wakened by the shooting and the warning cries, he’d run downstairs and snatched the nameplate off his front door, then raced back through the house and past his gaping wife and child and out the back way, still bootless and in his nightshirt. He ran into the nearest cornfield and raced between the cornrows and did not stop running until he reached a deep ravine nearly two miles out of town and there he collapsed, breathless with fear and exhaustion, his feet bloody. Yet he survived.

  Not so lucky was the town’s mayor, who’d hid himself in a waterwell in the shed beside his house. When the bushwhackers set both buildings on fire, the smoke was drawn into the well and suffocated him.

  A RECKONING

  Lawrence lies in smoldering ruin. The spires of smoke cast far shadows over the eastern countryside. The business district is entirely razed and more than a hundred homes are now charred rubble. Of the houses still standing, few have escaped looting. The hazed air holds a horrid stench. There are bodies on every street and some are mistaken for Negroes until recognized as burnt white men. Young boys are impressed into service to keep the crows away from the dead. Women wander the streets in search of husbands and sons, and every anguished cry of discovery adds to the unceasing chorus of grief. The town will be finding and burying bodies for a week, and some will go into private graves and some into graves together. No accurate count of the dead will be made. The records will show that at least 150 men and boys were interred in the days following the raid, but the true count is certainly closer to 200. For a fact, not a woman has been killed. Not a woman has been deliberately harmed in any way beyond the devastations to her heart and soul….

  Yet Larkin Skaggs is still at pillaging. Raging drunk, shooting anyone he comes upon who does not give him cash or jewelry on his demand. He reels in the saddle as he trots his horse through the smoky streets, drawing a growing attention as he goes, for the word is spreading that the guerrillas have gone, all but this drunk and laggard graybeard.

  Despite his besotted state, Skaggs abruptly arrives at the same awareness and thinks to make away. He heels his horse to a canter but heads in the wrong direction and comes upon a large crowd of citizens and all of them bearing arms. He yanks his mount around as the men open fire. Bent low over the horse, he kicks it hard and goes galloping back through town, a hue and cry rising behind him.

  A fifteen-year-old boy whose two brothers were killed this day sees him coming and braces his ancient musket against a hitching post and shoots him in the side as he comes by. Skaggs yelps and tumbles off the horse. He struggles to his feet as a party of Delaware Indian army scouts comes riding around the corner. The boy yells, “That’s one of them!” and points at Skaggs, who staggers toward he knows not where, completely bewildered by this turn of fortune. He sees a scout riding toward him and sees the Indian’s carbine come up and sees its muzzle flash and in that instant his days are done.

  Thus did Larkin Milton Skaggs of Kentucky—who in better times did preach the Gospels and the merciful ways of Jesus—become the only guerrilla casualty in Lawrence, Kansas, on the 21st of August in 1863.

  The Delaware scalped him. Then the pursuing townsmen came running up and they shot the dead man a dozen times more and then clubbed him with their gun butts until his teeth were broken out and his eyes crushed, until his bearded visage was but hairy pulp. Some of the men wept in their fury as they battered him. They tied a rope around his neck and dragged his body through the town, calling to neighbors as they went, laughing to see women smiting the corpse with horse apples, to see little boys urinating on Larkin Skaggs whose indifference to it all was absolute.

  They hanged him by his feet from a tree branch and ripped away the last of his clothes and shot him several times more. Later in the day some Negroes cut him down and pulled him through the streets behind their wagon as they sang “Kingdom Coming.” They finally flung the debased body into a ravine beyond the town limits, and there the crows descended to it.

  Over time, the wracked remains of Larkin Skaggs would rot and deliquesce to the bones. Portions of the skeleton would be disjointed and carried away by dogs. A gang of boys would discover the skull, toothless and variously perforated and fractured, and it rattled with rifle balls when they took it for use in their club’s rituals. Months later the clubhouse would burn down and the skull come apart in the fire. In time even the last of its shards would reduce to powder under the wear of the world’s turning and mingle with the dust and be blown out to the trackless regions of open prairie and then to the deserts beyond.

  REPERCUSSIONS

  From the New York Daily Times:

  Quantrill’s massacre at Lawrence is almost enough to curdle the blood with horror. In the history of the war thus far, full as it has been of dreadful scenes, there has been no such diabolical work as this indiscriminate slaughter of peaceful villagers. Even the rebel authorities in Richmond, steeped in wickedness as they are, cannot yet be so dead to all human feelings as to sanction such monstrous outrages. We find it impossible to believe that men who have ever borne the name of American can have been transformed into such fiends incarnate. It is a calamity of the most heartrending kind—an atrocity of unspeakable character.

  From a message directed to Federal authorities by the governor of Kansas:

  I must hold Missouri responsible for this fearful, fiendish raid. No body of men large as that commanded by Quantrill could have been gathered together without the people residing in Western Missouri knowing everything about it. Such peopl
e cannot be considered loyal, and should not be treated as loyal citizens; for while they conceal the movements of desperadoes like Quantrill and his followers, they are, in the worst sense of the word, their aiders and abettors, and should be held equally guilty.

  From General Order #11, August 25, 1863:

  All persons living in Jackson, Cass, and Bates Counties, Missouri, and in that part of Vernon included in this District…are hereby ordered to remove from their present places of residence within fifteen days of the date hereof…. Officers commanding companies and detachments serving in the counties named, will see that this [order] is promptly obeyed.

  Now would this war even more earnestly afflict everyone caught in it—soldier, guerrilla, civilian, each and all. If there had been any doubt that the massacre at Lawrence presaged still harder days ahead, General Order 11 did dismiss it.

  The order pertained to an area of the border from the Missouri River south to the Little Osage and encompassing nearly three thousand square miles. Its intention was to rid the border of those who had long been providing the wildwood boys with shelter, horses, food and information. Except for the very few who could prove their loyalty to the Union, all residents in the region were forced to abandon everything they owned except what they could bear away, which in most cases was very little. Most of them had already been robbed of all money, all worthwhile stock, all good wagons, and had to make do for conveyance with whatever worn mule or ill-used ox they still possessed, with whatever rude cart or makeshift wagon. Or they had to leave on foot and take only what they could carry on their persons.

  The enforcement of the order was charged to redlegs and militia units and they attended to the duty with high zeal. They torched every farm they came to, and where the families had not yet departed they robbed them of everything of value and then burned the rest together with the farm. He who objected was shot dead where he stood—or hanged, if the enforcers were militia in a mood for sport, or dragged to death behind a horse as a redleg entertainment.

  In the span of two weeks twenty thousand people were dispossessed. Columns of refugees crowded the dusty roads and wagon traces. Some of the pilgrims were set upon by bandits nearly as ragged as themselves and robbed of their last small portion of shabby goods. The countryside grew hazed with the smoke of their burning properties and nothing would remain standing of them but the blackened chimneys. For decades to come, this woebegone region of Missouri would be known as the “burnt district.”

  Some lucky few had kin in other parts of Missouri where they could take refuge, and some had people in the deeper Southland. But most of the banished had nowhere to go. What kin they had were likely to be alongside them. Some navigated for Texas, some to the western wildlands, some to the northern plains. But most set out with no clear notion of where they were going except that it was away from a home no longer standing, a place gone to ash and smoke.

  LITTLE ARCHIE

  They sat their horses in the shadows at the edge of a wood near the north line of Vernon County and watched a militia patrol closing up fast behind a southbound refugee train. The exiles were more than a week past the Order 11 deadline for clearing out of the region. Six wagons lumbering along the borderland road under the newly risen sun, all of them listing on unevenly-sized wheels, all of them lugged by worn mules with ribs stark against the hides. The only man among them was a one-legged scarecrow of a figure who rode with the piled furniture in one of the wagons. The only other males were boys, the eldest about thirteen. They were looking back at the soldiers, and even from this distance, watching them through field glasses, Bill Anderson could sense the refugees’ fear. He passed the glasses to his brother and yawned.

  The train halted and the militia closed up around them. Jim Anderson said he counted fifteen soldiers. They were making the party unload the wagons. The women pitching out cookware, armfuls of clothes, shoving furniture off the wagonbeds to crash on the ground. “Looking for hid money,” Jim said. Bill nodded. He was studying a pair of crows perched on a lower branch of an elm.

  A pair of soldiers dragged the one-legged man out of the wagon and another Fed flung his crutch into the roadside brush. More soldiers were off their horses now and rummaging through the spill of furniture and clothing. A few yet sat their mounts and seemed to be enjoying the show.

  “I believe those Union stalwarts are in need of counseling toward a more Christian outlook,” Bill Anderson said. Arch Clement laughed behind him, and he turned and grinned at him.

  “Christian outlook,” Archie said. “That’s what they’re in need of, all right.” He was seventeen years old and still so fair of skin his attempt at a mustache was but a line of fine blond wisps. He was short and hardmuscled, with thick wrists and large hands admirably adept with most tools and every sort of weapon. He’d been with the bunch only a month but had already proved himself utterly….

  He had come to them from the horde of orphans and runaways wandering the desolate border country since the advent of Order 11. As refugee families streamed out of the region, many of the boys among them, some as young as fifteen, broke away to go join the guerrillas. Grown men too were still finding their way to the bushwhacker bands—deserters from the regular army, fugitives from the law, hardcases of every stripe. Despite Order 11’s vast dispossessions on the border, the guerrillas suffered no shortage of recruits.

  Arch Clement had found the Anderson band’s camp and sneaked past the pickets to present himself at the main campfire before anyone even realized there was a stranger in their midst. When the boy said he was looking for Bill Anderson, Frank James was suddenly at his side and holding a cocked pistol to his head. Arch cut his eyes at him and said he better shoot or take it away. Frank laughed at his audacity and likely would have killed him where he stood except that Bill stepped out of the shadows and told him to put up the gun. Bill was impressed with the boy’s achievement in getting by the pickets and his bold indifference to Frank’s gun at his ear. “Say your piece, then,” he said.

  Arch told them his name and that he was from Johnson County, that his momma and younger brother had died when he was a child. His daddy had been hanged by redlegs and his two older brothers shot by the Feds, and his only sister had run off a few weeks ago and he had no notion of where to. All he desired to do anymore was kill Union men. He made claim to have killed three men already but didn’t care to say who except for a Kingsville liveryboy who’d been private with his sister and thereafter ignored her as you would a common whore. He’d lain for that one in the shadows outside the livery one night and when the fellow headed for home he’d stepped up to him and brained him with a brick and then brained him a few more times to make sure he was well departed to his Maker. He thought his sister would be properly grateful to know what he’d done, but she only wept when he told her about it and a few days later she was gone.

  “I figure if that was all the sense she had, then to hell with her,” Arch Clement said. He wanted to join Bill’s company above all other guerrilla bands because he’d heard it was the only one that always and truly flew the black flag.

  Bill smiled at the boy’s smooth cherubic features and short stature so out of keeping with the big Army Colt on one hip and the huge bowie sheathed on his lower leg. Riley Crawford was no taller and was skinny besides, but Riley showed broken front teeth and a variety of scars to belie any notion of him as an untried innocent. This Clement manikin looked like a bedraggled choirboy, never mind his tattered hatbrim and variously ripped shirt and his boots held together with wire. But the visible portion of his revolver shone in its worn holster and Bill knew the bowie’s blade would gleam as well and hold a razor edge.

  A big wildbearded man sitting by the fire said, “You best just run along back to your momma’s teat, babyboy.” His name was Holland Peck. He grinned around at the smiles of his fellows and took another pull off his jug.

  Arch Clement showed a smile the company would come to know well—small and privately amused, under blue eyes cool an
d unyielding as marble. “I already got my fill from your momma’s teat,” he said.

  Holland Peck stood two inches over six feet and weighed above 220 pounds. He gawked at five-foot-five Archie Clement for a moment before realizing the runt was serious. “You little shit,” he said. He put his jug aside and stood up, reached into his bushwhacker shirt and produced a foot-long Arkansas toothpick. “I’ll cut you for crowbait.”

  Arch Clement slipped the bowie from its leg sheath.

  “Bladefight!” The call rang through the camp and the company quickly converged in a wide circle around the combatants.

  The shouted betting begged for wagers on the boy. Archie was backing up with the bowie held at his thigh, Peck advancing on him in a crouch, his dagger low and forward. Then Archie feinted to right and left and Peck was awkward in keeping with him and Archie ducked forward and slashed the big man’s knee and sprang clear of his counterstroke. Peck took a step after him but the ruined knee gave way and he went down hard. Archie jumped past him, dodging his wild flail, and backhanded the bowie through his nape and neckbone.

  Holland Peck, paralyzed, toppled onto his back, his clove neck gushing blood. He made an effort to speak, his aspect suggesting sudden possession of a profound secret he would share, but his moving lips made no sound and then he was dead.

  Arch Clement bent and wiped his blade on Peck’s pantleg and then reset it in its sheath.

  It was the quickest mortal knifefight any of them had witnessed, and none was unimpressed. Knife duels to the death were rarely fast affairs. Every man of them had seen some that endured the better part of a hour and claimed both principals. It was commonly held that the winner in a knifefight was the second man to fall dead. And here Arch Clement stood without a nick.

  Some new recruits were assigned to bear away and bury the body, and Arch Clement was welcomed to the company with nods and smiles and a few cautious pats on the shoulder. Because the late Holland Peck had no outstanding debts to anyone in the company, Bill Anderson let Arch have the man’s horse and armament and possibles. Arch also laid claim to Peck’s hat, which had fallen off in the fight and proved only a little large. Among Peck’s possessions he found a guerrilla shirt, which of course was hugely baggy on him, but no matter. He regretted that Peck did not have smaller feet so he might have acquired better boots as well.