CHAPTER VI.
The Fight.
The Challenge to Surrender and the Defiance—A Long Parley—The Prompt Response to a Call for Aid—The Firing Begins—Flight of Kline and his Deputies—Gorsuch is Killed and his Son Terribly Wounded.
Padgett, guide and informer, led the Southern and Federal forces to within about a quarter mile of the Parker house, where they stopped at a little stream crossing the long lane, ate some crackers and cheese and “fixed their ammunition.” It was then just about daybreak; it was a heavy, foggy morning; and Padgett found it was his time to withdraw. As the party drew near to the short lane which led into the house and little garden-orchard around it they were seen by Nelson Ford and Joshua Hammond, two of the Gorsuch slaves who had evidently been picketed. They retreated to the house; Gorsuch and Kline followed and the Marshal officially announced their errand. Some inmate of the house answered that the men called for were not there; and when Kline, as he testified, went to go up the stairs, followed by the elder Gorsuch, a five-pronged fish “gig” was thrown at him; next came a flying axe. Neither missile hit him; he and Mr. Gorsuch withdrew, and he says a shot was fired at them from the house and he returned the fire. Then Kline made a feint of sending off for a hundred men “to scare the negroes.” His bluff had that temporary effect and a parley ensued. During this it was made manifest that a considerable number of armed men were in Parker’s house.
Meantime, on their way, the officers had heard a bugle blown; conjectures differed whether it was a signal from the Parker house or a summons for the laborers on the railroad to go to work. The evidence on this point was not positive, but the besieged soon sounded their horn from the upper story. Parker is quoted as saying that Kline threatened to burn the house, and he defied him to do it; that Mrs. Parker sounded a horn which brought their allies; and the deputies fired at her as she sounded it, without causing her to desist; that Pinckney counselled surrender, but Parker was for fight. Parker’s own accounts show no lack of self-assertion nor absence of self-confidence. That may or may not enhance their credibility.
Some early summons called a mixed mob together, for while the brief events already described were occurring, Castner Hanway, who lived a full mile away, rode up on a bald-faced sorrel horse; Elijah Lewis came on foot in his shirt sleeves and a straw hat; Zeke Thompson, the Indian negro, arrived with a scythe in one hand and a revolver in the other; Noah Buley rode in on a handsome gray horse and carrying a gun; Harvey Scott was there, weaponless; and a half score of others armed with guns, scythes and clubs, were assembled—far more than the upstairs of that little cabin could have held, even without the women. Other white men came trooping along, who in Parker’s imagination were Gap gangsters enrolled by Kline as “special constables”; but there is no satisfactory proof that these were anybody but residents of the vicinage attracted to the place by the commotion.
The excitement and confusion that subsequently ensued, the quick succession of tragic events, the prompt retreat of the officers and the almost immediate flight from the vicinity of their guiltiest assailants, and the fact that none of them remained or ever returned to tell the whole story, combine to make it difficult even now to aver with certainty what next actually happened. It is, however, reasonably sure that Hanway and Lewis were called upon to interfere and aid in executing the warrants and they declined to do so; but they neither advised nor inspired any violence; nor does it appear that they arrived on the scene by any pre-arrangement or otherwise than from hearing that an attempt was being made by some one to take negroes from the Parker house.
Parker says Dickinson Gorsuch opened the next stage of the battle by firing at him in resentment of a supposed insult to his father, and that he knocked the pistol out of Young Gorsuch’s hand before “fighting commenced in earnest,” and the outside negroes then shot both Gorsuches. Deputy Kline, who made himself somewhat ridiculous on the witness stand, remembered most vividly how he himself went “over the fence and out” through the cornfield and did not very clearly account for the fatal renewal of hostilities. Joshua Gorsuch testified that as Edward Gorsuch started to the house in answer to Kline’s call to him to come on and get his property, his uncle was murderously assaulted with clubs and he fired a revolver to save his kinsman, but his cap burst and the weapon did not go off; he was severely beaten and ran for his life, the infuriated crowd pursuing him; a thick felt hat saved his life and he rode off from the battlefield behind some one on a horse, supposing Edward and Dickinson Gorsuch were already killed; his retreat ended only at York; but it was months before he recovered from his wounds.
Whoever else ran or stayed, the Gorsuches, father and son, stood their ground and took the enemy’s fire. Dickinson warned the elder that they would be overpowered; but when the parent declined to retreat the son stayed by him until he was himself clubbed and shot down, as he went to the rescue of his assaulted father. Eighty shot penetrated Dickinson’s arms, thigh and body—and many of them stayed there; so that when he died in 1882—thirty-one years after he was shot—his body prepared for burial was “pitted like a sponge” with the marks of the “Christiana Riot.” When he was supposed to be dying Dickinson Gorsuch was taken into the shade of a big oak tree, about fifty yards from where the small lane then entered the “long lane.”
