James-Younger Gang: Jesse James My Father, ch6

What follows is the text of a book published in 1899 by Jesse Edwards James, son of Jesse James and Zee Mimms James. The first half of the book is Jesse Jr.'s remembrances of his famous father, who he didn't know was the famous outlaw until after his death. He includes all he remembers plus stories told to him by his family. The second half of the book (not to be included on this website) is the story of his own problems being accused of train robbery. Copies of the complete book may be found at ABEBOOKS:

AFTER, the death of Todd, near Independence, and the retreat of General Price from Missouri, the guerrilla band was broken up. Lieut. George Shepherd, taking with him Jesse James, Matt Wayman, John Maupin, Theo. Castle, Jack Rupe [sic: Roupe], Silas King, James and Alfred Corum, Bud Story, Perry Smith, Jack Williams, James and Arthur Devers, Press Webb, John Norfolk, James Cummings, William Gregg and his wife, Dick Maddox and his wife, James Hendrick and his wife, and others to the number of twenty-six, started south from Jackson County to Texas, November 13, 1864.

George Shepherd from Noted Guerrillas

November 22, 1864, Shepherd and his twenty-six veterans were riding southward on Cabin Creek, in the Cherokee nation. They met Capt. Emmet Goss of Jennison's old command, riding northward with thirty-two Kansas jayhawkers. My father had a special grievance against Goss, who was six feet tall and had red hair and was a desperate fighter. My father had encountered him before and had sworn to kill him if he ever met him again. When the two commanders lined up and charged each other my father rode straight for Capt: Goss. Goss fired at him point blank four times while my father was trying to control his horse, which became unmanageable in the melee, owing to the fact that my father was suffering with a wound in his left arm. My father got close to Goss at last and shot him through and through. Goss reeled in his saddle but held on and refused to surrender. My father fired again and killed him. Of the thirty-two Kansans twenty-nine were killed and only three escaped.

At Sherman, Texas, Shepherd disbanded his men December 2, and took a part of them into Western Texas. My father and seven others remained to take service with Arch Clements and the remainder of Bill Anderson's guerrillas.

March 1, 1865, Clements and his command started on a march for old Missouri again. They had many fights and skirmishes on the way and after they got into Missouri.

March 14, 1865, the guerrillas in Missouri held a conference to talk over a plan of surrender. The Confederate armies everywhere had surrendered with the exception of Shelby's brigade, which was going into Mexico to espouse the cause of Maximilian. The guerrillas at this conference decided to surrender, with the exception of Clements, Jesse James and several others, and hearing a flag of truce, they marched into Lexington, Mo., to allow all who wanted to surrender to do so. My father rode at the head of the column and bore the white flag of truce.

They held a conference with Major Rodgers and were marching out again, my father yet in front carrying aloft the white flag, when eight Federal soldiers fired point blank at them and were charged in turn by the guerrillas and routed. Four of the Federals were killed and two wounded. These eight who had charged the guerrillas were the advance of a body of sixty Federals, thirty Johnson County militia and thirty of the Second Wisconsin cavalry. A Wisconsin trooper singled my father out and charged him. At the distance of ten feet both fired together and my father's dragoon pistol bullet went through his heart. Another Wisconsin trooper charged my father, firing as he came. My father killed his horse and the trooper sent a pistol ball through my father's right lung, the same lung that had been torn through by a bullet not so long before at the Flat Rock Ford fight. My father fell and his horse fell dead on top of him. As the Federals galloped past five of them fired at my father as he lay pinned to the ground. My father pulled himself from beneath the horse and ran for the timber. Five Federals pursued him firing as they ran. My father turned once and at a distance of two hundred yards killed the Federal who was leading the chase. This caused a momentary halt of his pursuers, and during it he pulled off his heavy cavalry boots which were nearly full of blood. Before he started again to run in his stockinged feet he fired at his pursuers and shattered the right arm of one of them. The other three Federals were pressing him close. My father was getting weaker and weaker from loss of blood. The leader of the three pursuers yelled at him:

"Damn your soul we've got you at last. Stop and be killed like a gentleman."

My father, at bay, tried to lift his heavy dragoon pistol but was too weak to lift it with one hand alone. He grasped it in his two hands and killed the Wisconsin trooper who had cursed him.

The remaining one of the five turned and ran. My father staggered five hundred yards further and fell fainting upon the bank of a creek.

This encounter occurred March 15, 1865. That night, the next day and all of that night and till sunset of the third day my father lay alone on the banks of the creek, bathing his wound and drinking the water. He had a burning fever, and the bullet hole through his lung gave him the most intense pain. At sunset of March 17 he crawled to a field where a man was ploughing and this man proved to be a friend of the Southern cause. This new-found friend carried my father on horseback that night to the home of Mr. Bowman, a distance of fifteen miles. There my father was tenderly nursed by his inseparable companion Arch Clements, till the surrender of Poole, March 21, with one hundred and twenty-nine guerrillas. It was well understood by these guerrillas and also by Major Rodgers to whom they surrendered, that my father was considered one of the number who surrendered, although his wounds kept him from actually surrendering. Major Rodgers understood this so well, and he was so fully convinced that my father would die, that he thought it unnecessary to parole him when he paroled the other guerrillas, and Major Rodgers declared then that this was why he did not parole him, because he thought it an unnecessary formality to go through with in the case of a dying man.

I have gone thus into detail about this because it has been published thousands of times and is generally believed, that my father did not surrender at the close of the war. He did surrender, and surrendered in good faith. The attack upon him and the handful of guerrillas with him when they were returning with a white flag after negotiating the terms of surrender with the proper official, shows how bitter was the prejudice against the guerrillas. It was a prejudice that developed into a persecution most cruel and which prevented my father from surrendering or from living at home, and which made him a hunted man, with a price on his head, for sixteen long years and finally caused his murder. Arch Clements refused absolutely to surrender on any terms; he preferred to fight to the death.

To enable my father to reach his mother, who had been banished by Federal militia from her home in Clay County, to a home among strangers in Nebraska, Major Rodgers furnished my father with transportation, money and a pass on a steamboat.

To show how genuine was the surrender of my father, and that the Federal forces thereabouts looked upon it as genuine, I will state, as a matter of fact, that while waiting at Lexington for a steamboat up the Missouri river my father became acquainted with the soldier who had shot him through the lung. He was John E. Jones, Company E, Second Wisconsin cavalry. My father and he became fast friends and exchanged photographs.

At the time of his surrender my father had the scars of twenty-two wounds in his body.

At this point I will quote again from the writings of Major John N. Edwards, that faithful historian of the guerrilla warfare of the border. He says in extenuation of the things the guerrillas did:

"Was it justifiable? Is there much of anything that is justifiable in civil war? Two civilizations struggled for the mastery, with only that imaginary thing, a state line, between them. On either side the soldiers were not as soldiers who fight for a king, for a crown, for a country, for an idea, for glory. At the bottom of every combat was an intense hatred. Little by little there became prominent that feature of savage atrocity which slew the wounded, slaughtered the prisoners, and sometimes mutilated the dead. Originally the jayhawkers in Kansas had been very poor. They coveted the goods of their Missouri neighbors, made wealthy or well-to-do by prosperous years of peace and African slavery. Before they became soldiers they had been brigands, and before they destroyed houses in the name of retaliation they had plundered them at the instance of individual greed. The first Federal officers operating in Kansas--that is to say, those who belonged to the state--were land pirates or pilferers.

"Stock in herds, flocks, droves and multitudes, were driven from Missouri into Kansas. Houses gave up their furniture; women their jewelry; children their wearing apparel; storerooms their contents; the land its crops; the banks their deposits. To robbery was added murder, to murder arson, and to arson depopulation. Is it any wonder, then, that the Missourian whose father was killed should kill in return? Whose house was burned should burn in return? Whose property was plundered should pillage in return? Whose life was made miserable, should hunt as wild beast and rend accordingly. Many such were in Quantrell's command--many whose lives were blighted; who in a night were made orphans and paupers; who saw the labor and accumulation of years swept away in an hour of wanton destruction; who, for no reason on earth save that they were Missourians, were hunted from hiding place to hiding place; who were preyed upon while a single cow remained or a single shock of grain; who were shot at, outlawed, bedeviled and proscribed, and who, no matter whether Union or Disunion, were permitted to have neither a flag nor a country."

While quoting on this subject from the writings of Major Edwards I wish to use one more extract from them, which gives Major Edwards' estimate of Cole Younger. He says:

"The character of this man to many has been a curious study, but to those who knew him well there is nothing about it of mystery or many sideness. An awful provocation drove him into Quantrell's band. He was never a bloodthirsty or a merciless man. He was brave to recklessness, desperate to rashness, remarkable for terrible prowess in battle; but he was never known to kill a prisoner. On the contrary there are alive to-day fully two hundred Federal soldiers who owe their lives to Cole Younger, a man whose father had been brutally murdered, whose mother had been hounded to her death, whose family had been made to endure the torment of a ferocious persecution, and whose kith and kin, oven to most -emote degrees were plundered and imprisoned. At Lawrence he was known to have saved a score of lives; in twenty other desperate combats he took prisoners and released them; when the steamer Sam Gaty was captured, he stood there a protecting presence between the would-be slayers and their victims; at Independence he saved more lives; and in Louisiana probably fifty Federals escaped certain death through Younger's firmness and generosity. His brother James did not go into the war until 1864, and was grave, dauntless, high-spirited boy who never killed a soldier in his life save in fair and open battle. Cole was a fair-haired, amiable, generous man, devoted in his friendships, and true to his word and comradeship. In intrepidity he was never surpassed. In battle he never had those to go where he would not follow, aye, where he would not gladly lead. On his body to-day there are scars of thirty wounds. He was a guerrilla, and a giant among a band of guerrilla, but he was one among three hundred who only killed in open and honorable battle. As great as had been his provocation, he never murdered; as brutal as had been the treatment of every one near and dear to him, he refused always to take vengeance on those who were innocent of the wrongs, and who had taken no part in the deeds which drove him, a boy, into the ranks of the guerrillas, but he fought as a soldier who fights for a cause, a creed, an idea, or for glory. He was a hero and he was merciful.

"John Thrailkill, another of Quantrell's band, who fought with Jesse James along all the border side, was a Missourian turned Apache. He slept little; he could trail a column in the starlight; his only home was on horseback, and he had already mixed with the warp and woof of his young life the savage agony of tears. Thrailkill, when the war begun, was a young painter in Northwest Missouri, as gentle as he was industrious. Loving a beautiful girl, and loved ardently in return, he left her one evening to be absent a week. At its expiration they were to be married. Generally the woman who is loved is safe, but this one was in peril. Her father, an invalid of fifty, was set upon by Federal militia and slain, and the daughter, bereft of her reason at the sight of the gray hairs dabbled in blood, went from paroxysm to paroxysm, until she too was a corpse. The wildest of her ravings were mingled with the name of her lover. It was the last articulate thing her lips lingered over or uttered. He came back as a man in a dream. He kissed the dead reverently. He went to the grave as one walks in his sleep. It was bitter cold and someone remarked it to him. 'Is it,' he said, 'I had not felt it.' Another friend tried to fashion something of solacement. The savage intensity of the answer shocked him: 'Blood for blood; every heir in her head shall have a sacrifice!' The next day John Thrailkill began to kill. He killed over all Northwest Missouri; of the twenty militia who were concerned in the murder of his sweetheart's father, and, indirectly in the murder of his sweetheart, he killed eighteen.

"William Anderson was another of Quantrell's men who had a wrong to avenge. He was a strange man. If the waves of the civil war had not cast him up as the avenger of one sister assassinated and another maimed, he would have lived through it peacefully, the devil that existed in him sleeping on, and the terrible powers latent there remaining unaroused. It is probable that he did not know his own nature. He certainly could not have anticipated the almost miraculous transfiguration that came to him on the eve of his first engagement--that sort of a transfiguration which found him a stripling and left him a giant.

"He was a pensive, brooding, silent man. He went to war to kill, and when this self-declared proposition was once well impressed upon his followers, he referred to the subject no more. Generally those who fought him were worsted; in a majority of instances annihilated. He was a devil incarnate in battle, but had been heard over and over again to say: 'If I cared for my life I would have lost it long ago; wanting to lose it I cannot throw it-away.' And it would appear from the history of his career up to the time of his death, that what in most men might have been regarded as fatalism was but the inspiration of a palpable destiny. Mortal bullets avoided him. At desperate odds fortune never deserted him. Surrounded, he could not be captured. Outnumbered, he could not be crushed. Surprised, it was impossible to demoralize him. Baffled by adversity, or crippled and wrought upon often by the elements, he wearied no more than a plough that oxen pull, or despaired never so much as the granite mass the storms beat upon and the lightnings strike. Shot dead from his saddle at last in a charge reckless beyond all reason, none triumphed over him a captive before the work was done of the fetters and the rope. His body, however, remained in the hands of the enemy, who dragged it for some distance as two mules might drag a saw log, and finally propped it up in a picture gallery in Richmond, Mo., and had pictures taken of the wan, drawn face of the dead lion and his great mane of a beard that was full of the dead leaves and the dust of the highway."

[much of the text in this section Jesse Edwards James got from "Noted Guerrillas" by the man he was named for, John Newman Edwards]

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