TODD AND YOUNGER WENT TO KANSAS CITY TO HAVE A LITTLE FUN
In a week or less it began snowing. The hillsides were white with it. The nights were long, and the days bitter, and the snow did not melt. On the 10th of February, 1863, John McDowell reported his wife sick and asked Younger permission to visit her. The permission was granted, the proviso attached to it being the order to report again at 3 o’clock. The illness of the man’s wife was a sham. Instead of going home, or even in the direction of home, he hastened immediately to Independence and made the commander there, Colonel Penick, thoroughly acquainted with Younger’s camp and all its surroundings. Penick was a St. Joseph, Missouri, man, commanding a regiment of militia. The echoes of the desperate adventure of Younger and Todd in Kansas City had long ago reached the ears of Colonel Penick, and he seconded the traitor’s story with an eagerness worthy the game to be hunted. Eighty cavalry, under a resolute officer, were ordered instantly out, and McDowell, suspected and closely guarded, was put at their head as a pilot.
Younger had two houses dug in the ground, with a ridge pole to each, and rafters. Upon the rafters were boards, and upon the boards straw and earth. At one end was a fireplace, at the other a door. Architecture was nothing, comfort everything.
The Federal officer dismounted his men two hundred yards from Younger’s huts and divided them, sending forty to the south and forty to the north. The Federals on the north had approached to within twenty yards of Younger’s cabins when a horse snorted fiercely and Younger came to the door of one of them. He saw the approaching column on foot and mistaking it for a friendly column, called out: “Is that you, Todd?” Perceiving his mistake, in a moment, however, he fired and killed the lieutenant in command of the attacking party and then aroused the men in the houses. Out of each the occupants poured, armed, desperate and determined to fight but never to surrender. Younger halted behind a tree and fought fifteen Federals for several moments, killed another who rushed upon him, rescued Hinton and strode away after his comrades, untouched and undaunted. Fifty yards further Tom Talley was in trouble. He had one boot off and one foot in the leg of the other, but try as he would he could get it neither off nor on. He could not run, situated as he was, and he had no knife to cut the leather. He too called out to Younger to wait for him and to stand by him until he could do something to extricate himself. Without hurry, and in the teeth of a rattling fusilade. Younger stooped to Talley’s assistance, tearing literally from his foot by the exercise of immense strength the well-nigh fatal boot, and telling him to make the best haste he could and hold to his pistols. Braver man than Tom Talley never lived, nor cooler. As he jumped up in his stocking feet, the Federals were within twenty yards, firing as they advanced, and loading their breech loading guns as they ran. He took their fire at a range like that and snapped every barrel of his revolver in their faces. Not a cylinder exploded, being wet by the snow. He thus held in his hand a useless pistol. About thirty of the enemy had by this time outrun the rest and were forcing the fighting. Younger called to his men to take to the trees and drive them back, or stand and die together. The Guerrillas, hatless and some of them barefoot and coatless, rallied instantly and held their own. Younger killed two more of the pursuers here—five since the fighting began—and Bud Wigginton, like a lion at bay, fought without cover and with deadly effect. Here Job McCorkle was badly wounded, together with James Morris, John Coger and five others. George Talley, fighting splendidly, was shot dead, and Younger himself, encouraging his men by his voice and example, got a bullet through the left shoulder. The Federal advance fell back to the main body and the main body fell back to their horses.
A man by the name of Emmet Goss was now beginning to have it whispered of him that he was a tiger. He would fight, the Guerrillas said, and when in those savage days one went out upon the warpath so endorsed, be sure that it meant all that it was intended to mean. Goss lived in Jackson County. He owned a farm near Hickman’s mill, and up to the fall of 1861, had worked it soberly and industriously. When he concluded to quit farming and go fighting, he joined the Jayhawkers. Jennison commanded the Fifteenth Kansas Cavalry, and Goss a company in this regiment. From a peaceful thrifty citizen he became suddenly a terror to the border. He seemed to have a mania for killing. Twenty odd unoffending citizens probably died at his hand. When Ewing’s famous General Order No. 11 was issued—that order which required the wholesale depopulation of Cass, Bates, Vernon and Jackson Counties—Goss went about as a destroying angel, with a torch in one hand and a revolver in the other. He boasted of having kindled the fires in fifty-two houses, of having made fifty-two families homeless and shelterless, and of having killed, he declared, until he was tired of killing. Death was to come to him at last by the hand of Jesse James, but not yet.
Goss had sworn to capture or kill Cole Younger, and went to the house of Younger’s mother on Big Creek for the purpose. She was living in a double log cabin built for a tenant, by her husband before his death, and Cole was at home. It was about eight o’clock and quite dark. Cole sat talking with his mother, two little sisters and a boy brother. Goss, with forty men, dismounted back from the yard, fastened their horses securely, moved up quietly and surrounded the house.
Between the two rooms of the cabin there was an open passageway, and the Jayhawkers had occupied this before the alarm was given. Desiring to go from one room to another, a Miss Younger found the porch full of armed men. Instantly springing back and closing the door, she shouted Cole’s name, involuntarily. An old negro woman—a former slave—with extraordinary presence of mind, blew out the light, snatched a coverlet from the bed, threw it over her head and shoulders.
“Get behind me, Marse Cole, quick,” she said in a whisper.
And Cole, in a second, with a pistol in each hand, stood close up to the old woman, the bed spread covering them both. Then throwing wide the door, and receiving in her face the gaping muzzles of a dozen guns, she querously cried out:
“Don’t shoot a poor old nigger, Massa Sogers. Its nobody but me going to see what’s de matter. Ole missus is nearly scared to death.”