Missouri Outlaws by Paul Kirkman

Author:Paul Kirkman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2018-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

Jemison’s (sic) Jayhawkers, by Aldabert Volck. Jennison’s Jayhawkers were as notorious for pillage and murder in Missouri as Quantrill was in Kansas. Courtesy Library of Congress: LC-USZ62-100061.

By the spring of 1861, Quantrill had moved down into the Cherokee Nation and befriended Joel Mayes, a war chief. He joined Mayes’s group under Brigadier General Benjamin McCullough during the Battle of Wilson’s Creek and then joined Price’s forces at the Battle of Lexington. It was claimed that he learned guerrilla tactics from Mayes, but it was a short tutelage, as Quantrill was with him just a few months. Quantrill left Price’s force and started his own guerrilla band in November 1861. Starting with around a dozen young men, Quantrill began ambushing Jennison’s and Montgomery’s patrols, stealing back slaves and livestock from the Kansans and causing alarm among the Federal troops, who never knew where the next attack was coming from. By February 1862, Captain W.S. Oliver wrote to General Pope that, in the vicinity of Blue Springs, Quantrill and his gang had robbed mails and stole the coaches and horses. Being mounted on the best horses in the country, the gang members defied pursuit. Quantrill and his group were pursued by Federal and militia forces that far outnumbered them. He and his men knew that capture likely meant death. In Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy, Richard S. Brownlee explains that “Quantrill’s service eliminated all but the wildest rider, the best pistol shot, the boy with the least regard for personal safety.” In January, Jennison’s men burned Dayton and Columbus, and in March, Quantrill retaliated by looting Aubry, Kansas, burning one house and riding right through Union patrols back to Missouri. Quantrill raided a recruiting post in Liberty in March 1862 while Union troops were looking for him to the south in Jackson County. When troops were sent to Clay County to find him, he moved back to Jackson and burned the Blue River Bridge on the road from Independence to Kansas City.

All through the spring of 1862, as Federal armies began winning battles, Missouri’s guerrilla forces were growing larger and their attacks were becoming more effective. By summer, Colonel James T. Buel said he’d lost so many troops protecting mail that he would no longer send it. Instead, he began forcing secessionists to carry it. In June and July, Quantrill’s group ambushed the Little Blue River ferry; attacked mail escorts and patrols in Cass, Johnson and Jackson Counties; and captured a steamboat, Little Blue, loaded with military supplies, at Sibley. Quantrill and his men had a number of narrow escapes that year, and he made several costly mistakes: he was caught with his entire command on the David Tate farm, but they managed to fight their way out, losing several men in the process. He attacked the Union post at Warrensburg that was fortified with a thick board stockade around the brick courthouse and had to leave nine dead and carry away seventeen wounded for his trouble. With each narrow escape, his

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