There is not much to say about the fight in the way of description. The Federals were in Lone Jack; the Confederates had to get them out. House fighting and street fighting are always desperate. The hotel became a hospital, later a holocaust, and over all rose and shone a blessed sun while the airy fingers of the breeze ruffled the oak leaves and tuned the swaying branches to the sound of a psalm.
The graycoats crept nearer. On east, west, north or south. Hays, Cockrell, Tracy, Jackman, Rathburn or Hunter gained ground. Farmer lads in their first battle began gawkies and ended grenadiers. Old plug hats rose and fell as the red fight ebbed and flowed; the shotgun’s heavy boom made clearer still the rifle’s sharp crack. An hour passed, the struggle had lasted since daylight.
Foster fought his men splendidly. Wounded once, he did not make complaint; wounded again, he kept his place; wounded a third time he stood with his men until courage and endurance only prolonged a sacrifice. Once Haller, commanding thirty of Quantrell’s old men, swept up to the guns and over them, the play of their revolvers being as the play of the lightning in a summer cloud. He could not hold them, brave as he was. Then Jackman rushed at them again and bore them backward twenty paces or more. Counter-charged, they hammered his grip loose and drove him down the hill. Then Hays and Hunter—with the old plug hats and wheezy rifles—finished the throttling; the lions were done roaring.
Tracy had been wounded. Hunter wounded. Hays wounded, Captains Bryant and Bradley killed, among the Confederates, together with thirty-six others and one hundred and thirty-four wounded. Among the Federals, Foster, the commander, was nigh unto death; his brother, Captain Foster, mortally shot, died afterwards. One hundred and thirty-six dead lay about the streets and houses of the town, and five hundred and fifty wounded made up the aggregate of a fight, numbers considered, as desperate and bloody as any that ever crimsoned the annals of a civil war. A few more than two hundred breaking through the Confederate lines on the south, where they were weakest, rushed furiously into Lexington, Haller in pursuit as some beast of prey, leaping upon everything which attempted to make a stand between Lone Jack and Wellington. Captain Trow, who was in this battle, narrates that at one time during the battle, “I was forced to lie down and roll across the street to save my scalp.”
A mighty blow seemed impending. Commanders turned pale, and lest this head or that head felt the trip-hammer, all the heads kept wagging and dodging. Burris got out of Cass County; Jennison hurried into Kansas; the Guerrillas kept a sort of open house; and the recruits—drove after drove and mostly unarmed—hastened southward. Then the Federal wave, which had at first receded beyond all former boundaries, flowed back again and inundated Western Missouri. Quantrell’s nominal battalion, yielding to the exodus, left him only the old guard as a rallying point. It was necessary again to reorganize.
After the Guerrillas had reorganized they stripped themselves for steady fighting. Federal troops were everywhere, infantry at the posts, cavalry on the war paths. The somber defiance mingled with despair did not come until 1864; in 1862 the Guerrillas laughed as they fought. And they fought by streams and bridges, where roads crossed and forked and where trees or hollows were. They fought from houses and hay stacks; on foot and on horseback; at night when the weird laughter of owls could be heard in the thickets; in daylight, when the birds sang as they found sweet rest. The black flag was being woven, but it had not yet been unfurled.
Breaking suddenly out of Jackson County, Quantrell raided Shawneetown, Kansas, and captured its garrison of fifty militia. Then at Olathe, Kansas, the next day, the right hand did what the left one finished so well at Shawneetown; seventy-five Federals surrendered there. Each garrison was patrolled and set free save seven from Shawneetown; these were Jennison’s Jayhawkers and they had to die. A military execution is where one man kills another; it is horrible. In battle, one does not see death. He is there, surely—he is in that battery’s smoke, on the crest of that hill fringed with the fringe of pallid faces, under the hoofs of the horses, yonder where the blue or the gray line creeps onward trailing ominous guns—but his cold, calm eyes look at no single victim.
The seven men rode into Missouri from Shawneetown puzzled; when the heavy timber along the Big Blue was reached and a halt made, they were praying. Quantrell sat upon his horse looking at the Kansans. His voice was unmoved, his countenance perfectly indifferent as he ordered: “Bring ropes; four on one tree, three on another.” All of a sudden death stood in the midst of them, and was recognized. One poor fellow gave a cry as piercing as the neighing of a frightened horse. Two trembled, and trembling is the first step towards kneeling. They had not talked any save among themselves up to this time, but when they saw Blunt busy with some ropes, one spoke up to Quantrell: “Captain, just a word: the pistol before the rope; a soldier’s before a dog’s death. As for me, I’m ready.” Of all the seven this was the youngest—how brave he was.
The prisoners were arranged in line, the Guerrillas opposite to them. They had confessed to belonging to Jennison, but denied the charge of killing and burning. Quantrell hesitated a moment. His blue eyes searched each face from left to right and back again, and then he ordered: “Take six men, Blunt, and do the work. Shoot the young man and hang the balance.”
The oldest man there, some white hair was in his beard, prayed audibly. Some embraced. Silence and twilight, as twin ghosts, crept up the river bank together. Blunt made haste, and before Quantrell had ridden far he heard a pistol shot. He did not even look up; it affected him no more than the tapping of a woodpecker. At daylight the next morning a wood-chopper going early to work saw six stark figures swaying in the river breeze. At the foot of another tree was a dead man and in his forehead a bullet hole—the old mark.