The next day our family moved down through Eudora and on out to Hesper, where, just over the line in Johnson county, my father purchased two hundred acres of Shawnee Indian land, on Captain's creek. On this land my father, mother, a sister and two little brothers lived during the Slaveholders' Rebellion; and after the Quantrill raiders passed our house that memorable August night in 1863, to do at Lawrence what the world already knows, that mother and sister carried from the house, boxes and trunks so heavily laden with household goods to a cornfield, that when the excitement and danger were over they could not lift them, when they found the Ruffians did not return that way.
Before drifting these chapters to the early settlements of southern Kansas, and finally to the mountains and plains of the Southwest, the author deems it pertinent and relevant to follow more or less the Kansas and Missouri border, and on down through Indian Territory and Arkansas, from 1862 to 1865, the final ending of the rebellion, which found me at Little Rock, Arkansas. One incident occurred during the winter of 1861 that gave me my first glimpse of a Missouri guerrilla. My brother Emerson was teaching school at Hesper. One afternoon, one of the scholars left a bright-red shawl on the playground at recess. The road from Lawrence to Olathe ran through this playground. I was seated near a window at the south side of the school-room, in plain view of the road and shawl, when I noticed three men traveling east. One of them dismounted and picked up the shawl, and, mounting his horse, the three rode on. I called my brother's attention to the fact. He went to the door and called to the men, saying, "Bring back that shawl." They looked back and said something to him that he did not understand, and rode on, one of them putting the shawl over his shoulder. My brother dismissed the school, and, going to the nearest house, procured a horse and overtook them at the Bentley ford, on Captain's creek, and brought back the shawl. The words that Turpin of Olathe and his Missouri pals used when my brother overtook them were afterward remembered by one of these desperadoes as he was lying on the floor of a shack on the west side of the public square in Olathe, his life ebbing away from mortal gunshot wounds from Sheriff John Janes Torsey, of Johnson county. My brother, stooping over him, asked the dying bushwhacker if he remembered him. "Yes," came the feeble answer, "and I am sorry I said what I did to you when you came after the shawl last winter."
My next sight of a guerilla was in the summer of 1862, at Eudora. A German named Henry Bausman kept a road-house just north of the Wakarusa bridge, on the Lawrence road. He kept beer, pies, cakes, bologna sausage, and cheese to sell to travelers. His son Henry was about my age, and I thought a good deal of him, and when I would make the seven-mile ride from home to Eudora for the mail, I would cross the bridge and have a few moments chat with young Henry. On this particular occasion we were in the garden, not twenty steps from the road, when we saw a man approaching from the timber from the direction of Lawrence. It was the man that terrorized the border—Charles William Quantrill. But we did not know it at the time. He dismounted, tied his horse to a hitching-rack in front of the house, and went inside. Henry said to me:
"John, I believe that fellow is some kind of a spy. He has passed here several times in the last year, always going the same way. Let's go inside and see him."
When we came into the front part of the house where Bausman kept his beer and eatables, Quantrill was sitting on a bench with his back against the wall. He would look towards the living-room in the house, then toward the front entrance, and two different times he got up and walked to the door, looking up and down the road. He had on two revolvers; his overshirt was red, and he wore a sailor's necktie. After he left and had crossed the bridge going through Eudora, I got on my pony and started for home. When Quantrill got to the old stage line he turned towards Kansas City, I crossing the trail going on southeast to my home.
How did I know it was Quantrill? Only by the general description afterwards.
In the month of August, 1863, at Fort Scott, Kansas, Henry brought me the first published news of the Lawrence massacre. Henry being a poor reader, I read to him the account of the horrible butchery, after which he said:
"Oh if we only knew that that was him at our house last summer how easy we might have saved all this bloody work, for he must have been planning this terrible deed; and just to think my father had two guns loaded leaning against the wall at the head of the bed he and mother sleeps in. We could have killed him so easy and saved the town." Henry was my good German comrade, for we were then both soldiers in the same company.
Early in August, 1862, a gentleman, Booth by name, came into our neighborhood buying steers and oxen to be used in hauling military supplies to New Mexico over the old Santa Fé Trail. The train was being outfitted at the old outfitting post near Westport. My father sold Mr. Booth several head of cattle and he added to this purchase many more in the neighborhood, but could not get near as many as he wanted. He got my father's permission to help him drive the cattle to the outfitting station.
We started the cattle from my father's farm the afternoon of the 16th day of August, 1862, and drove them to Lexington, about four miles from home, on the old Kansas City & Topeka stage line. There was a large hotel there and we put up for the night, turning the cattle in a lot or corral and putting our horses in the stable. We went to the house and were standing on the front porch facing the stage road when suddenly Mr. Booth said: "Johnny, come with me, quick!" and passing through the house and on out and into the barn, and as I followed him in he said "shut the door."