St. Clair County
Remnants Of The Past

Noted Guerrillas, John N. Edwards, 1877

To the great mass of the Guerrillas the end of the war also brought an end to their armed resistance. As an organization, they never fought again. The most of them kept their weapons; a few had great need to keep them. Some were killed because of the terrible renown won in the four years of war; some were forced to hide themselves in the unknown of the outlying territories; and some were mercilessly persecuted and driven into desperate defiance and resistance because they were human and intrepid. To this latter class the Jameses and Youngers belonged. No men ever strove harder to put the pat behind them. No men ever submitted more sincerely to the result of a war that had as many excesses on one side as on the other. No men ever went to work with a heartier good will to keep good faith with society and make themselves amenable to the law. No men ever sacrificed more for peace, and for the bare privilege of doing just as hundreds like them had done – the privilege of going back again into the obscurity of civil life and becoming again a part of the enterprising economy of the commonwealth. They were not permitted so to do, try how they would, and as hard, and as patiently.
After the death of Quantrell and the surrender of the remnant of his Guerrillas, Frank James was not permitted, at first, to return to Missouri at all, much less to his home in Clay county. He lingered in Kentucky as long as possible, very circumspect in his actions and very conservative in his behavior. Tempted one day by his beardless face and innocent walk and talk to bear upon him roughly, four Federal soldiers set upon Frank James in Brandenburg and made haste to force an issue. For a moment the old fire of his earlier and stormier days flared up all of a sudden from the ashes of the past and consumed as with a single hot blast of passion prudence, accountability, inaction and discretion. He fought as he had fought at Centralia. Two of the Federals were killed instantly, the third was desperately wounded, while the fourth shot Frank badly in the point of the left hip, inflicting a grievous hurt and one which caused him afterwards a great deal of trouble and pain. Staunch friends hid him while the hue and cry were heaviest, and careful surgical attention brought him back to life when he lay so close to death’s door that by the lifting of a hand he might also have lifted its latch. This fight, however, was not one of his own seeking, nor one which he could have avoided without the exhibition of a quality he never had known anything about and never could know anything about – physical cowardice.
Jesse James – emaciated, tottering as he walked, fighting what seemed to everyone a hopeless battle of “the skeleton boy against skeleton death” – joined his mother in Nebraska and returned with her to their home near Kearney, in Clay county. His wound would not heal, and more ominous still, every now and then there was a hemorrhage. In the spring of 1866 he was just barely able to mount a horse and ride a little. And he did ride, but he rode armed, watchful, vigilant, haunted. He might be killed, waylaid, ambuscaded, assassinated; but he would be killed with his eyes open and his pistols about him. The hunt for this maimed and emaciated Guerrilla culminated on the night of February 18th, 1867. On this night an effort was made to kill him. Five militiamen, well armed and mounted, came to his mother’s house and demanded admittance. The weather was bitterly cold, and Jesse James, parched with a fever, was tossing wearily in bed. His pistols were under his head. His step-father, Dr. Samuel, heard the militiamen as they walked up the front porch, and demanded to know what they wanted. They told him to open the door. He came up to Jesse’s room and asked him what he should do. “Help me to the window”, was the low, calm reply, “that I may look out”. He did so. There was snow on the ground and the moon was shining. He saw that all the horses hitched to the fence had on cavalry saddles, and then he knew that the men were soldiers. He had but one of two things to do – drive them away or die. He had never surrendered and he never would. Incensed at his step-father’s silence, they were hammering at the door with the butts of their muskets and calling out to Jesse to come down, swearing that they knew he was in the house, and that they would have him out, dead or alive. He went downstairs softly, having first dressed himself, crept up close to the front door and listened until from the talk of the men he thought he was able to get a fatally accurate pistol range. Then he put a heavy dragoon revolver to within three inches of the upper panel of the door and fired. A man cried out and fell. Before the surprise was off he threw the door wide open, and with a pistol in each hand began a rapid fusillade. A second man was killed as he ran, two men were wounded severely, and surrendered, while the fifth marauder, terrified, yet unhurt, rushed swiftly to his horse and escaped in the darkness.
What else could Jesse James have done? In those evil days bad men in bands were doing bad things continually in the name of law, order and vigilance committees. He had been a desperate Guerrilla; he had fought under a black flag; he had made a name for terrible prowess along the border; he had survived dreadful wounds; it was known that he would fight at any hour or in any way; he could not be frightened out from his native county; he could be neither intimidated nor robbed, and hence the wanton war waged upon Jesse and Frank James, and hence the reasons why to-day they are outlaws, and hence the reasons also that – outlaws as they are and proscribed in county, or State, or territory – they have more friends than the officers who hunt them, and more defenders than the armed men who seek to secure their bodies, dead or alive.
Since 1865 it has been pretty much one eternal ambush for these two men – one unbroken and eternal hunt twelve years long. They have been followed, trailed, surrounded, shot at, wounded, ambushed, surprised, watched, betrayed, proscribed, outlawed, driven from State to State, made the objective points of infallible detectives, and they have triumphed. By some intelligent people they are regarded as myths; by others as in league with the devil. They are neither, but they are uncommon men. Neither touches whiskey. Neither travels twice the same road. Neither tells the direction from which he came nor the direction in which he means to go. They are rarely together, but yet they are never far apart. There is a design in this – the calm, cool, deadly design of men who recognize the perils which beset them and who are not afraid to die. They travel this way because if say so-called friend – tempted by the large rewards offered for the life of either – should seek to take it and succeed, the other, safe from the share and free to do his worst, is pledged to avenge the brother slain through treachery, and avenge him surely. That he will do it none doubt who know the men. In addition, the Jameses trust very few people – two probably out of every ten thousand. They come and go as silently as the leaves fall. They never boast. They have many names and many disguises. They speak low, are polite, deferential and accommodating. They do not kill save in stubborn self-defense. They have nothing in common with a murderer. They hate the highwayman and the coward. They are outlaws, but they are not criminals, no matter what prejudiced public opinion may declare, or malignant partisan dislike make noisy with reiteration. The war made them desperate Guerrillas, and the harpies of the war – the robbers who came in the wake of it and the cut-throats who came to the surface as the honorable combatants settled back again into civilized life – proscribed them and drove them into resistance. They were men who could not be bullied – who were too intrepid to be tyrannized over – who would fight a regiment just as quickly as they would fight a single individual – who owned property and meant to keep it – who were born in Clay county and did not mean to be driven out of Clay county – and who had surrendered in good faith, but who because of it did not intend any the less to have their rights and receive the treatment the balance of the Southern soldiers received. This is the summing up of the whole history of these two men since the war. They were hunted, and they were human. They replied to proscription by defiance, ambushment by ambushment, musket shot by pistol shot, night attack by counter attack, charge by counter-charge, and so will they do, desperately and with splendid heroism, until the end.
Jesse James, to-day however, owes his life to Dr. A.P. Lankford. After the night attack on his mother’s house, and after his escape from the toils which beset him so closely there, much exposure in pitiless weather made his wound open and bleed afresh. He could neither walk, ride, nor be hauled about in a wagon. He had to be left at a house deep in some heavy timber, and to run twice the risk of death – once from the wound which would not heal, and once from the blood-thirsty enemies up and after him in every direction. Lankford even then was both surgeon and Samaritan. He had a theory that he never knew a man until he handled his wrist, and he had also two mistresses, science and great good humor. An excellent appetite gave him always a hearty laugh, and this to a certain extent was infectious. It had this principle of magnetism, it was always genial. In the capacity of a man of all hours he came to surprise the secrets of this wounded Guerrilla. Maybe he was a little superstitious; what physicians are not? He had also his favorites. He believed in calomel, pulled off his hat to quinine, flattered carbolic acid high up in the pharmacopoeia, caressed chloroform, gazed at opium through his half shut eyes, laid a hand warily upon hydrate of chloral, and kept his knifes and his needles, his cutting things and his thrusting things as the young Lochinvar kept the steed that he was to ride out of the West. He called nature the good God of the cleanly man. He loved to meet death face to face, to grapple with him, to overthrow him. Death is a coward, he said. Half the time he will run if he is crowded. It was this manner of a man who went deep into the brush in quest of the crippled Guerrilla, and found him where on one hand was a swamp, on the other a river bottom, and everywhere malaria. He stripped him and summed him up. Those blue and red spots about his body were bullet wounds. Across his head was a long white scar. The breech of a gun in the sinewy hands of a powerful Federal had made this. The great open ulcer from right breast to back was the ulcer of the ounce ball the carbine of a Wisconsin cavalryman fired. At intervals the skeleton was hot or cold, at intervals it shook or was on fire. The malaria had taken hold. For a month Lankford waited on James, put him once more on his feet, enabled him once more to encompass praying ground and pleading terms, added a little color to his cheeks one day and a little iron to his blood the next, forced him to ride and to walk, built up the fortifications in one direction that fever and suppuration had thrown down in another, and finally cured his patient for good, and all by getting him aboard a ship at New York and ordering him to stay aboard until he got to San Francisco.
The future of the Youngers after the war closed was similar in many respects to that of the Jameses. Cole was in California when the surrender came, and he immediately accepted the situation. He returned to Missouri, determined to forget the past, and fixed in his purpose to re-unite the scattered members of his once prosperous and happy family, and prepare and make comfortable a home for his stricken and suffering mother. Despite everything that has been said and written of this man, he was during all the terrible border war a generous and a merciful man. Others killed, and killed at that in any form, or guise, or fashion – he alone in open and honorable battle. His heart was always kind, and his sympathies always easily aroused. He not only took prisoners himself, but he treated them afterwards as prisoners, and released them to rejoin commands that spared nothing alive of Guerrilla associations that fell into their hands. He was the oldest son, and all the family looked up to him. His mother had been driven out of Cass county into Jackson, out of Jackson into Lafayette, and out of Lafayette into Jackson again. Not content with butchering the father in cold blood, the ravenous cut-throats and thieves followed the mother with a malignity unparalleled. Every house she owned or inhabited was burnt, every out-building, every rail, every straw stack, every corn pen, every pound of food and every store of forage. Her stock was stolen. Her household goods were even appropriated. She had no place to lay her head that could be called her own, and but for the kindness and Christianity of her devoted neighbors, she must have suffered grievously. At this time Coleman and James returned to Missouri and went hopefully and bravely to work. Their father’s land remained to them. That at least had neither been set fire to, hauled off in wagons, appropriated, confiscated, nor driven over into Kansas. Western Missouri was then full of disbanded Federal soldiers, organized squads of predatory Red Legs and Jayhawkers, horse thieves disguised as vigilance committees, and highway robbers known as law and order men. In addition, Drake’s constitution disfranchised every property owner along the border. An honest man could not hold office; a civilized man could not officially stand between the helpless of his community and the imported lazzaroni who preyed upon them; a decent man’s voice could not be heard above the clamor of the beggars quarrelling over stolen plunder; and a just man’s expostulation penetrated never into the councils of the chief scoundrels who planned the murders and the robberies.
Coleman Younger’s work was like the work of a pioneer in the wilderness, but he did it as became the hardy descendant of a stalwart race of pioneers. He cut logs and built a comfortable log house for his mother. He made rails and fenced in his land. In lieu of horses or mules, he plowed with oxen. He staid steadfastly at home. He heard rumors of threats being made against his life, but he paid no attention to them. He took part in no political meetings. He tried to hide himself and be forgotten. The blood-hounds were on his track, however, and swore to either kill him or drive him from the country. A vigilance committee composed of skulking murderers and red-handed Kansas robbers went one night to surprise the two brothers and end the hunt with a massacre. Forewarned, James and Coleman fled. The family was wantonly insulted, and a younger brother, John, a mere boy, was brutally beaten and then hung until life was nearly extinct. This was done to force him to tell of the whereabouts of James and Coleman. Mrs. Younger never entirely recovered from the shock of this night’s work, lingering along hopelessly yet patiently for several months and finally dying in the full assurance of the Christian’s blessed hereafter.
The death of this persecuted woman, however, did not end the persecution. Cole Younger was repeatedly waylaid and fired at. His stock was killed through mere deviltry, or driven off to swell the gains of insatiable wolves. His life was in hourly jeopardy, as was the life of his brother James. They plowed in the fields as men who saw suspended over them a naked sword-blade. They permitted no lights to be lit in the house at night. They traveled the public highways warily. They were hunted men and proscribed men in the midst of their own people. They were chased away from their premises by armed men. Once Cole was badly wounded by the bullet of an assassin. Once, half-dressed, he had to flee for his life. If he made a crop, he was not permitted to gather it, and when something of success might have come to him after the expenditure of so much toil, energy, long-suffering and forbearance, he was not let alone in peace long enough to utilize his returns and make out of his resources their legitimate gains.
Of course there could be but one ending to all this long and unbroken series of malignant persecutions, lyings-in-wait, midnight surprises, perpetual robbings, and most villainous assaults and attempted murders – Coleman and James Younger left home and left Jackson county. They buckled on their pistols and rode away to Texas, resolved from that time on to protect themselves, to fight when they were attacked, and to make it so hot for the assassins and the detectives who were eternally on their track that by and by the contract taken to murder them would be a contract not particularly conductive to steady investments. They were hounded to it. They endured every species of insult and attack, and would have still continued to endure it in silence and almost unresisting, if such forbearance had mitigated in any manner the virulence of their enemies, or brought any nearer to its appeasement the merciless fate which seemed to be eternally at their heels. What they did in self-defense any Anglo-Saxon would have done who did not have in his veins the blood of a slave. The peaceful pursuits of life were denied to them. The law which should have protected them was over-ridden. Indeed there was no law. The courts were instruments of plunder. The civil officers were cut-throats. Instead of a legal process, there was a vigilance committee. Men were hung because of a very natural desire to keep hold of their own property. To the cruel vigor of actual war, there had succeeded the irresponsible despotism of greedy highwaymen buttressed upon assassination. The border counties were overrun with bands of predatory plunderers. Some Confederate soldiers dared not return home, and many Guerrillas fled the country. It was dark everywhere, and the bravest held their breath, not knowing how much longer they would be permitted to remain peacefully at home, or suffered to enjoy the fruits of their labors. Fortunately for all, however, the well nigh extinct embers of a merciless border war were not blown upon long enough and persistently enough to kindle another conflagration.
But neither the Jameses nor the Youngers have been permitted to rest long at any one time since the surrender of the Confederate armies. Some dastardly deeds have been done against them, too, in the name of the law. Take for example Pinkerton’s midnight raid upon the house of Mrs. Zerilada Samuel, the mother of the James boys. The family were wrapped in profound sleep. Only women and children were about the premises, and an old man long past his prime. The cowards – how many is not accurately known, probably a dozen – crept close to this house through the midnight, surrounded it, found its inmates asleep, and threw into the kitchen where an old negro woman was in bed with her children, a lighted hand-grenade, wrapped about with flannel saturated with turpentine. The lurid light from this inflammable fluid awakened the negro woman, and she in turn awakened the sleeping whites. They rushed to subdue the flames and save their property. Children were gathered together in the kitchen, little things, helpless and terrified. All of a sudden there was a terrible explosion. Mrs. Samuel’s right arm was blown off above the elbow, a bright little boy, eight years of age, had his bowels torn out. Dr. Samuel was seriously cut and hurt, the old negro woman was maimed, and several of the other children more or less injured. The hand-grenade had done its work, and there had been a tragedy performed by men calling themselves civilized, in the midst of a peaceful community and upon a helpless family of women and children that would have disgraced Nero or made some of the monstrous murders of Diocletian as white is to black. Yet Pinkerton’s paid assassins did this because his paid assassins knew better how to kill women and children than armed men in open combat.
Take for example another set of Pinkerton’s paid assassins. The first party of men sent down into St. Clair County, Missouri, looking for the Youngers, was encountered by Cole Younger, having with him his three brothers, James, Robert and John. There were fifteen of the hunters, heavily armed and prolific in promises of speedy overthrow. Cole came upon them suddenly, covered the whole detachment with a double-barreled shot-gun, and demanded a surrender. It was instantly accorded, and Cole then calmly and kindly reasoned with them against the injustice of their course. Then he restored their arms to the posse and dismissed them without a scratch. These were citizens of the county, however, and were satisfied with the treatment they had received. Not so with Pinkerton and his paid assassins. This great Chicago bugaboo had been worsted in every encounter with those of the border whom it was his especial and self-imposed mission to slay or entrap, and he grew morbidly desirous of striking a blow that had vengeance in it. As an instrument he selected a detective named Lull, said to be cool, skillful, vigilant, and desperate. He had need to be! He came down into St. Clair, with another detective, and recruited at Osceola the deputy sheriff of the county, a young man named Daniels. These three began to hunt the Youngers, jus as any lot of trappers might begin to hunt a pack of wolves. It is not believed that they had any warrant for the arrest of either of the brothers. Only vague rumor or sensational journalism had connected them in any manner with bank or railroad robberies. The people among whom they lived believed in their innocence and had borne testimony to it several times in such a manner as to carry with their defense the convincing evidence of its truth. Nevertheless, according to the theory of Pinkerton and Pinkerton’s paid assassins, they were to be shot down. Lull began his hunt with a bravado and ended it with a bullet. He found John and James Younger, or rather, John and James Younger found him. As Cole had done with the first party of hunters, so would James and John do with the second. They covered Lull’s party with their shot-guns and called out to them to surrender. The desperate Lull, picked man as he was and chosen pre-eminently above a host of men, did surrender to all intents and purposes. He threw his own revolver upon the ground. He caused Daniels also to throw down a pair. He made the other detective give up his, and then when he had succeeded perfectly in disarming his companions, and when because of such disarmament John Younger lowered his own gun and permitted himself for the first and the last time in his history to be taken unawares – he drew a smaller pistol, which up to this time had been concealed, and shot the unsuspecting man through the neck, cutting the jugular vein, yet not knocking him from the saddle. With the hand of death already clutching savagely at his own throat, and with the blood spurting out in great jets at every heart beat, John Younger yet steadied himself by a superhuman effort, mortally wounded Lull, killed Daniels, and dashed at the third detective, who turned about, born coward that he was, and fled, as the wind flies, into Osceola. When James Younger reached John the tragedy was over and the dauntless boy was dead. No more infamous murder was ever committed in Missouri than this killing of John Younger. He had not even been accused of doing criminal things. His name had never even been connected with the name of any railroad or bank robbery. He was a peaceful man, living in the midst of a peaceful community, respected by his neighbors, trusted by men of business, honest, energetic and enterprising. He was hunted to his death because his name was Younger, and because all the guns in the world and all the enemies in the world could neither scare him nor drive him away from his own. In the full flower of his early manhood, his lonely and premature grave to-day in his native State, cries out for vengeance on the head of a civilization which permits an irresponsible and an accursed system of legalized assassination to prey upon innocent people equally with the guilty, and defy and rise above the law while professing to obey its mandates and keep clearly within the limits of its just provisions.