I Was a Revolutionary (2 page)

Pelathe, a Shawnee Indian scout, happens to be accompanying one of the Union leaders when the news arrives, and asks to go, to try to beat the raiders to Lawrence. So they saddle him up with their best horse and tell him to fly. Known to other scouts as the Eagle, Pelathe does feel like a bird as he burns a trail through the brambled scrub. He rides full speed for one hour, and then two, through the night until the horse begins to fail, coming to a dead halt in the pitch-black early morning, no water in sight. There are still miles to go. He considers the beautiful animal a minute, runs a slow hand through her mane, then imagines the people in Lawrence, and so he pats her head, whispering a few final words in her ear, before unsheathing his bowie knife and pricking her shoulder with it. The horse whinnies and rears as Pelathe rubs gunpowder into the wounds, and before he can get his feet back in the irons, the sorrel mare takes off again. By means of this sacrifice he's able to get a few more miles out of her before she expires, collapsing, Pelathe tumbling forward over her. He must keep going, though, he tells himself, and begins to run until his own legs give out at the Delaware Indian tribe's camp near the outskirts of Lawrence. He tells them what is happening, of the urgency, that they must rush to town, and with fresh horses they head out, thundering through the purple of early morning. But when they get to the ferry landing on the Kaw River they see it is too late, the horror has already begun. Quantrill has beaten them to town.

A few points of interest:

•
      
A previous raid on Lawrence occurred May 21, 1856, nearly five years before Kansas became the thirty-fourth star on the flag, and seven before Quantrill's Raid. Led by former Senate president David Atchison, a large group of Missourians stormed into town, firing cannons at the Free State Hotel and printing press and looting most of the stores.

•
      
Following Atchison's raid, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts delivered an impassioned speech on the Senate floor, lasting two entire days, called “The Crime Against Kansas.” A few days later, so upset by the rhetoric of the speech and the blame assigned to Southern states, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina calmly walked up to Sumner and began clubbing him with his golden-knobbed cane for several uninterrupted minutes, until the cane broke, upon which time he attempted to stab Sumner with the splintered end, giving the senator a beating from which he would not recover for three years.

•
      
When news of the caning reached Kansas, John Brown demanded retribution. With his company of Free State Volunteers, he set out for Pottawatomie Creek, calling for the lives of five pro-slavery men. This, he said, was what God had told him he must do. First he directed the group to the Doyle family's cabin and led two of Mr. Doyle's sons outside, where they were stabbed, dismembered, and pierced in their sides in front of their father and mother. Then Brown produced a pistol and shot Mr. Doyle in the head. After two more stops of a similar fashion, Brown had his five.

•
      
And so it went, back and forth like this for the next several years, raids perpetrated by both sides with the innocent of
ten paying the price. Like the women who were rounded up in Missouri by federal soldiers and taken to Kansas City and placed in a dilapidated jail cell on suspicion of aiding the rebel bushwhackers. Some of these women were in fact the wives, mothers, and sisters of Quantrill's men. So when the jail collapsed, killing a number of them, one knew there would be consequences. Eight days later, Quantrill was leading his men into Lawrence.

The first to die are the young boys from the Fourteenth Kansas Regiment, encamped on the edge of town, training to join up with the Union Army. Quantrill's men cut right through them, picking the thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds off as they sleep, or as they wander out of their tents, scratching their heads and balls, rubbing their eyes, wondering what the hell all the racket is, then
boom
: they're dead. They are unarmed and defenseless thanks to a recent city ordinance forwarded by Mayor Collamore decreeing all weapons in Lawrence be kept locked inside the armory as a safety measure—all those reliably accurate Sharps rifles sent by train to Lawrence from eastern abolitionists in boxes labeled
BIBLES
so as to go unsearched.

Two blocks away, the Second Colored Regiment, a camp of black troops, reach for pistols that aren't on their hips, rifles that aren't slung over their shoulders, and must make a tough decision. Twenty or so stay long enough to be slaughtered while others flee for the river, away from Quantrill's men, wading across, silently cursing their lack of weapons, then themselves, their unwillingness to martyr.

At five-thirty in the morning, Massachusetts Street is bedlam, horses thundering every which way, raiders making easy
work of scurrying storeowners—targets hardly more difficult than lone whiskey bottles atop fence posts. Quantrill watches with an unsettled, pensive look: things are going too well; any minute, surely, the federals will sweep through and send his men hightailing back toward the border. He is supposed to die today. But the army never comes and soon his stony look gives way to amusement as cries of his name, audible over pistol shots and whinnies, sound all around him:
Long live Quantrill! Long live Jefferson Davis! Forever the South!
Sure that this raid will win him the respect and recognition of the Confederate army, he is already savoring the sweet euphony of:
General Quantrill
.

Some years ago, before the war, Quantrill had lived in Lawrence for a time, and now he notes the unexpected pleasures of destroying the familiar. He visits Eldridge House, a hotel, the largest building in town, taking a seat in the lobby after his men have cleared the rooms and rounded up the guests. “How about some breakfast,” Quantrill says to the proprietor, who hurries to the kitchen to prepare the food himself. Upstairs, Quantrill's men loot the rooms, stuffing into their pockets watches, jewelry, and women's silken undergarments of amethyst, rouge, and Nile green. Downstairs, the collected guests consider their impending execution, silently mouthing prayers, smatterings of whispered mercies, watching the back of the man who will issue the order, if it is to be. Quantrill sits down at a table by the window, watching the theater in the street, waiting for his biscuits and eggs, listening to the anxious shifting of bodies behind him. Yet his mind is elsewhere, away, thinking of Kate, humming a ballad: “
I don't know when I'll see you again, my dear
. . .” He closes his eyes and sees her face, beautiful, but then her mouth is asking why he's left her and gone to Lawrence.

“What do you want to do?” George Todd asks. “Leave them or kill them?”

One of the ladies shifts her weight to the other foot, nudg
ing a chair, which squeaks, as Quantrill thinks, relishing the privilege of mercy. He tells Todd to take them over to City Hall as prisoners of war. As Todd is about to lead the prisoners into the street, he notices one man wearing a Union uniform: Captain Banks, provost marshal of Kansas. He inspects the man's clothing, examining the pretty blue coloring and careful stitching. He moves over to Banks, hand on his gun, leaning close to his face, and says, “Gimme your clothes,” making the captain undress right there in front of him.

In Ang Lee's 1999 film
Ride with the Devil
, Tobey Maguire plays a Dutch emigrant, now living in Missouri, who takes up the Southern cause, joining the irregulars waging guerrilla warfare on the Kansas-Missouri border. It's a fictionalized account, based on a novel called
Woe to Live On
, though, interestingly, the movie's title is borrowed from an earlier biography of Quantrill. It's mostly a buddy movie and a love story, but Quantrill does make an appearance, a kind of historical cameo almost no one would recognize. Lee attempts to re-create the raid on Lawrence, devoting roughly ten minutes to it, and most of the sequences carry the bogus verisimilitude of Wild West reenactments at Boot Hill in Dodge City. The best part of the movie is before the raid, when Quantrill and his men gather atop Mount Oread, from which they look down at the sleeping, unsuspecting town. Quantrill, played by John Ales, passes out death lists bearing the names, ranked by importance, of the men to kill. He offers a few brief remarks, which elicit a cacophonous hodgepodge of syllables belonging to words like
abolitionistfuckerswhoresniggersfreesoilers
, and the men raise their hats and scarves and head down the mountain in a thunderous swirl of dust, pounding hooves, and rebel yells.

It's not the first film to feature Quantrill. The earliest dates back to 1914, a two-reeler called
Quantrell's Son
, and there was a slew of B westerns in the forties and fifties in which Quantrill, or some incarnation of Quantrill, appears. In
Dark Command
, from 1940, he is Will Cantrell, played by Walter Pidgeon, a Lawrence schoolteacher who loses a local sheriff's election and his girlfriend to John Wayne, which combine to become the impetus for his raid. In this movie, however, the raid fails, and it ends with Wayne killing Pidgeon. The film's not alone in playing fast and loose with history, and it's certainly not the only one to change the outcome of the raid. But even the ones that don't do so—and I've seen them all—approach the raid timidly, presenting a toothless version of the event.

I tried to tell this to the guitar player when he accompanied me to a matinee showing of
Ride with the Devil
. The movie had come out soon after I graduated, and I was working odd jobs around Lawrence, thanks to my history degree. I saw it eight times before it left Liberty Hall, and on the occasion I took him with me I spent most of the movie leaning over to explain the historical references and inaccuracies. God, how annoying I must have been, but he listened politely, eyes moving between the screen and me. When it was over, he said he was glad I'd brought him, and we smiled at each other. It seemed like something might happen. But when I told him that just once I wished I could see the movie the way he had, without any background knowledge, he grew defensive, distant, and said it seemed like I had enjoyed it pretty well anyway. This was around the time he was starting to get local gigs, playing that night at the Bottleneck, a big deal. He was stuck on some new girl, he said, and was writing great songs about the one who'd just left. I told him I wouldn't be able to come but showed up later, halfway through his set, and stood in the back of the bar, nursing a beer, watching him sing songs about girls he'd left and been left by.

Proprietor of a boardinghouse for local workers, Getta draws a hand to her chest when she realizes what's happening. Her husband, her love, is over at the Johnson House with his brother. She leaves her children with a nurse and rushes into the street, knowing the raiders won't harm her. When she reaches the house, she sees her brother-in-law stumble down the back steps, falling to the ground before her. She cups his head with her hands. He looks at her with the eyes of one who has seen God—with unflinching terror—and then his lids slide closed. She tries to remove her hands, but part of his brain has fallen out the back of his head and now rests in her palms. What she yells then, looking at her hands, is not his name but her husband's, and she drops the bits of jellied brain into the dust and scrambles up the steps of the house, where she finds a trio of bushwhackers holding several local men at gunpoint. Her husband stands near them, and she hurries to his side, pleading for his life. She's convincing, talking two of them out of killing her husband, but the third, the leader, is too soused to abide any talk of mercy and pushes all seven men outside to the street, where he and his compatriots unload multiple rounds into their chests. Getta watches her husband's body fall; it happens so quickly—
crack, thump
—that it's not until he's on the ground that everything slows down. She sits on the bottom step of a storefront near his body, exhaling hard until her breath slows and all that's left is the absence of feeling. She watches the world pass before her, the horror it has so quickly become. A straw hat belonging to one of the dead blows along the street like tumbleweed and she reaches for it, places it over her husband's placid face. She walks away slowly, desultorily, between the bustle of jigging horses, the
giggle and snarl of drunks, and the mangle of the quiet, lonesome dead.

Seventeen-year-old apprentice newspaperman Kasper Kaspar is at the press early on the morning of the raid. He doesn't know it yet, but his father is already dead, killed while asleep in bed, and his mother is in shock, still shaking the body, expecting it to wake at any moment. What brings young Kasper to the office so early, however, has nothing to do with newspapering. He's locked in an embrace with the office printer, an older man affectionately known as Rooster. It is as Kasper finally works up the nerve to take the tip of Rooster's penis in his mouth that he first feels the heat closing in, a warmth more than their own bodies' doing. The raiders have set fire to the building, which goes up instantly, like tinder, thanks to the paper, ink, and kerosene. There's a moment as the two men huddle amid the flames, watching smoke funnel under and over closed doors, when they have a decision to make. A future as outcasts awaits them if they run out into the street as they are, flushed, shivering, womanly. Their decision is communicated through look and gesture as they embrace, kiss, and then whisper in each other's ears only as the fire overtakes them. Barely audible over the hiss of burning wood and the sizzle of steaming printer blocks are their oaths and cries:

“Come closer.”

“What?”

“Hold me.”

“I'll follow you to the other side.”