Started with nine men to St. Francois county.—Stopped in the Pike Run Hills.—Robbed the store of Christopher Lepp.—Hung Mr. Kinder‘s negro.—Attacked by Federals.—Killed two and lost a man.—Shot two soldiers on a furlough.—The strange camp.
I had not been at home long before I formed the acquaintance of a man by the name of Gibson, who had come to our little Green County Confederacy for the purpose of joining the “bushwhacking department.” Gibson was a man possessing some superior advantages over most of Capt. Bolin‘s men; he had an accomplished education, and was endowed with a peculiar faculty of making all the men like him. He was the best marksman in our whole company, with one single exception; and that exception, I must modestly assert for the sake of truth, was myself.
On the 16th day of July, I selected Gibson and eight other men for another trip into St. Francois county. Having made so many failures in that quarter, I had some forebodings that I would again meet with disappointments; but I had long since resolved to let my old enemies have no peace while I labored under no greater disadvantages than I did. It is true that they were backed by a great nation of untold wealth, whose enemies actually in the field numbered more than one million and a half of armed men, and whose line of garrisoned territory extended one hundred and fifty miles south of their nest on Big river; yet while I thought that I was backed by the South with her armies of three hundred thousand men, I asked no better amusement than that of striking at my enemies under the ponderous wing of Federal protection.
Unlike my enemies, I had no commissary department, no steam presses running night and day striking off greenbacks, no outlet to other nations by commercial treaties, no people at my back willing to be saddled with a debt of three or four thousand millions of dollars merely to carry into effect a Utopian idea. My long marches had to be made in the night and with the utmost caution and secrecy. The woods were my home, the moon my orb of light, and the hooting owls my spectators.
My enemies long since had learned to fear my name; the fear of retributive justice was sufficient to make them cower; their militia organization only assumed a tangible shape when I was absent; for on my approach they secreted themselves so securely that nothing short of the prolonged sound of Gabriel‘s trump could ever be able to bring them forth.
We passed quietly through Butler county, along the western line of Madison, then through St. Francois and across Big river to those native hills and hunting grounds of my boyhood, known as the Pike Run hills.
The reader must bear in mind that these hills possess peculiar advantages over any other part of the country between St. Louis and the Arkansas line.
They look like the fragments of a broken up world piled together in dread confusion, and terminating finally in an abrupt bluff on the margin of Big river, where nature has left a cavern half way up the perpendicular rock, now known as “The Hildebrand Cave,” the mouth to which cannot be seen either from the top or bottom.
Among these rugged hills, covered over by the dense forest and wild grape vines, are many yawning caverns known to some hunters, while there are doubtless many others never yet seen by the eye of man. We took up our abode in one of these caverns during the inclemency of the weather, and as the ground was too soft to venture out on horseback, for fear of leaving a trail, I went around through the Big river neighborhood on foot, for the purpose of finding some of my enemies. The only one I saw was James Craig; I discovered him one day in the act of leaving home on foot, so I made a circuit through the woods and stationed myself in advance with the intention of arresting him. I wished to take him to my cavern that my comrades also might see him hung; but he never came along, and thus I missed my game entirely.
By this time my men were tired of inaction, so we started on our march, and on going about fifteen miles we came to a place called the Tunnel, on the Iron Mountain railroad.