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WOMEN IN THE
WAR
Indications That They Were More Numerous as Spies Than Were the Men, And Were Considerably More Shrewd, More Zealous and More Unscrupulous. Some of Their Wonderful Exploits in Prison and With Guerrillas. Women of the Border Who Lived Amid Scenes of Murder and Rapine. There were more
rebel women spies than men during the war, says a correspondent of the St.
Louis Globe-Democrat, and they were the shrewdest, the most zealous and
the most unscrupulous. Some of these underwent all sorts ofexperiences in
their efforts to help the Southern cause. Some of them risked not only
their lives, but their honor — aye, and lost it, too, tossing it gladly
into the scale, believing that the end would justify the means. Sometimes
the deed of shame was done to save a life, sometimes to destroy one, and
sometimes to get a piece of news or a hundred gun caps and a bag of
buckshot. The women of the border, where few indeed were the neighborhoods
over which murder and rapine did not hold sway, were perhaps the most
denioralized.
. There was Anna Fickel, of Lafayette, a fair young rebel girl, who made Quantrell's black silk flag from the skirt ofher dress, and supplied the guerrillas with so much powder, shot and caps that Quantrell ought to have made her his chief of ordnance. It was Anna and a woman old enough to be her grandmother who compassed the murder of two Union soldiers in order to effect the release of Andy Blunt, a guerrilla prisoner, who was permitted to visit the grandmother's house. Blunt escaped for the time, but a few days later the Saline county militia came upon him and beat out his brains with tobacco sticks. Miss Fickel was sent to Alton prison. . In 1864 nearly every Federal Military Prison in the state had Confederate women inmates. They had been arrested for feeding guerrillas, giving them Information and assistance, spying upen Union troops, writing letters, smuggling ammunition and even arms, and for other kinds of mischief which certain rebel ladies delighted to perpetrate. Some of these were girls of sixteen and eighteen years, other were women of forty and fifty years. The majority of these ladies were released after short imprisonments, but many were held to the close of the war orbanished from the state. Mrs. Samuels, the mother of the James boys, was sent to Nebraska. . In the latter part of the war so bad had things become that at least fourscore little girls and women in Western and Southwestern Missouri became guerrillas purely and simply, and they were not so very pure or so very simple either. . There was Puss Michaels, a Cass county girl, who was mortally wounded in a fight between a squad of Missouri guerrillas and some Kansas men on the Marais dcs Cygnes in the fallof ISO3, after the Lawrence raid and massacre. She carried two revolvers, was dressed partly inmale attire and died with her boots on. . There were twenty or more girls and women with Quantrell and Bill Anderson at the slaughter of Gen. Blum's escort (sixty-five men at Baxter Springs, the week after) Puss Michaels was killed. I have it from an ex-guerrilla, who was present, that half a dozen of these bushwhacker belles took part in the chase and massacre of Blunts men—fired their pistols as rapidly aud deadly, rode as swiftly and cheered as wildly as their masculine comrades. The most of these amazons were from Jackson, Cass and Bates. Their homes had been destroyed in the execution of Gen. Ewlng's "Order No. 11," and they were accompanying the guerrillas to their winter rendezvous in Texas. . Then there were the Rebel Girls of Vernon. At the close of the war there were not a hundred habitable houses in that county. Nevada City, the county seat, had been burned by the Cedar militia in the spring of 1863, and there were left on the site not more than three or four ilttle huts not bigger than pig pens. Montevallo had been burned and not one stone left on another. More than half of the able-bodied men had been killed and the rest were in one army or the other. The woman and children were refugees on the face of the earth. . In 1864 fully a score of the rebel girls of Vernon were riding with the guerrillas and bushwhackers. The most noted of these were the Mayfield sisters. Their mother was a widow, and they were young widows. Their husbands and two of their brothers, Brlce and "Crack" Mayfield, desperate bushwhackers, had been killed. The Globe-Democrat some years ago narrated the escape of two of these girls from "Castle McClure," the old female military prison at St. Louis, and detailed some ot their adventures. . Sally Mayfield, as she was best known, though nor real name was McCoy, was a pretty woman of twenty-three years in the spring of 1864. She is now a respected matron, a good Christian woman, and not long since lived near her old home, in Southeastern Vernon. In 1887, at her own peaceful home, her children and her present husband about her, she gave me her "war record." She joined the guerrillas in the spring of 1864, becoming the wife of Dave Majors, the leader of a small band that operated in Southwestern Missouri and Northwestern Arkansas. She rode with Her husband for hundreds of miles, shared all his perils, hardships and privations, and was by his side when he got his doath-wound. She had many a narrow escape from death. Her dress was often Pierced by Bullets and she knows what It is to ride hard, to fight hard, to be hungry and tired and cold, to bivouac on the wet ground and to undergo all the vicissitudes of guerrilla life. On one occasion she and her husband and his band were going into camp for the night on Cynthia creek, in the southern part of Vernon county. The horses had been unsaddled; Sally was spreading the blankets for her and her husband's bed; the other members of the band were dressing a foraged pig and preparing supper. . Suddenly a company of Kansas cavalry dashed upon the camp, shouting and firing. Taken unawares, the guerrillas fled, every man for himself. The Kansans pursued them, hardly stopping to loot the camp. Sally was back in the brush and was not seen. In a few minutes all was quiet in the camp. The horses were all gone, the men all gone. Faint shouts came from the distance, aud sundry pistol shots not louder than the tapping of a woodpecker. When darkness came good and black, Sally stole out of her covert,taking with her, her blankets and her husband's pistols and saddle, and improvised a shelter out of some fence rails, for rain was coming. It would not do to stir up the fire and cook supper, and she lay down to rest, hungry and anxious for the safety of her husband and comrades. . Later in the night, attracted by the smell of fresh meat, wild vermin came to feed upon the carcass of the pig, and skunks and opossums snarled and fought over it until a wildcat came and drove them all away. Not fifty feet away lay Sally, a keen bowie knife in her plump little hand, To Settle the Wildcat if he should attack her. She feared to fire her revolver at him, lest the report should bring back the Kansas men, who were as fierce as wildcats, and for other reasons more to be dreaded. All the next day she hid in the brush, from where she would watch the camp, hoping some of the boys would return, but toward evening, half-famished from hunger and thirst, she hid her weapons and equipments and made her way to a house two miles distant, where the remnant of a family lived. Here, the next day, she was joined by her husband and three or four of his men, who. somehow, had picked up a horse apiece and soon they were on the warpath again. . That night, as Sally and her husband were sleeping on a broad, open prairie, in Barton county, she suddenly awoke with an unaccountable sense of impending danger. She had a task to induce her husband to move camp, but they had not gotten half a mile away when a body of Union cavalry rode over the ground they had just quitted. At another time Sally and Dave Majors and two other couples were quartered in a cabin in the timber in the eastern part of Vernon. Dave had mounted his horse, a large, fine claybank, and was about setting forth on a scout. Sally was standing by the horse, stroking its mane and chatting with her big bushwhacker husband. Two other horses were near by, saddled and bridled, but haltered to saplings. All at once a squad of Cedar county militia burst upon them. Dave Majors' big claybank sprang away with him. One of the other guerrillas sprang upon the back of a fastened horse and sought to untie the halter by leaning forward over the saddle. stung by a bullet, the horse drew the halter taut, and Sally ran to untie it herself. While her fngers were busy the Bushwhacker severed the rein with his knife and the animal sprang fairly over the woman, knocking her down. She arose, her face covered with blood aud the bullets flying around her, and went into the cabin, to the great terror of the other women, who thought she must be mortally wounded. One of the guerrillas was killed; l do not remember his name, but I know that Sally and the other women buried him, and his grave may yet be seen. Sally was a splendid horsewoman, and to save a man's life at Fort Scott she once rode 120 miles in twelve hours, across country, leaping ravines, skurrying through woodlands and half-swimming creeks, without an hour's rest or a wink of sleep. . Eliza McGovern, a Newton county girl, tall and finely formed, was another girl guerrilla. Her husband belonged to Livingston's band for a time, but was killed in the fall of 1863, on the "Wire road," between Springfield and Cassville. She was captured the next day in male attire, from hat to spurs, and armed cap-a-pie. She was taken to Springfield, but in a few days somehow contrived to escape, and, mounting a sore-backed cavalry horse which had been turned loose to die, she made her way over the spurs of the Ozarks to her old haunts. A few weeks later, with half a dozen male companions, she captured two furloughed Kansas soldiers on their way home and shot Them to death on the banks of Spring river, in Jasper county. She died in the summer, of 1864, in a guerrilla camp, near Mount Vernon, with none but men about her, at a time when she most needed the ministrations of her own sex. . Ben Broomfield, a tall, bronze-visaged guerrilla, one of Bill Anderson's best—or worst—men, threw his life away because his sweetheart, a Lexington girl, beautiful as "Edith of the swan's neck," had played him false for another bushwhacker. It was after the Huntsville and Shelbina raid, and Anderson was retreating westward through Charlton, pursued and harrassed by Reeves Leonard, with the Howard county company of the Niuth M.S.M. The guerrillas had halted at a farmhouse for dinner, and to allow the horses' backs to cool. But before the meal could be prepared the picket gave warning that Leonard and his men were insight, and Anderson commanded "Saddle up!" Broomtield had been brooding over the perfidy of his enchantress for some days, and was moody and wolfish. Now, as his comrades were riding away, he suddenly faced about in the road toward the Federals, reined up his horse and drew his revolvers. "Come on, Beu! What's the matter with you ? Don't you see that the Feds will kill you?" shouted Anderson. "Let'em kill and be___d ," sullenly replied Ben. Sure enough, the Federals came galloping; up, and, one man to sixty. Broomfield was no match for them. He tried to Sell His life dearly, but was shot dead from his saddle before he had done much harm. He told Jessie Hamlet, and Jessie told me, that he could not live without his sweetheart, and that if the "Feds" did not kill him he would take his own life. Old Chaucer asks: "What - "w*ill not a mon do gyf thot he bin in luve?" . Bill Anderson's sisters were not guerrillas outright, but they did what they could to help their brothers, Bill and Jim, after they "started out," In the spring of 1863. The girls were forced to leave their homes in Lyon county, Kan., and took refuse in Jackson county. Mo., after their brothers killed Capt. Beatty and burned his store. On a very common charge against rebel women in those days, "aiding bushwhackers," they were arrested and put in the female prison at Kansas City. The building in which they and others were confined fell, and one of the Anderson girls was so badly injured that she ultimately died; Mrs. McCullough, another of the sisters, who a few years since was living in Jackson county, some miles back of Wellington, was in the prison when it fell and was severely hurt. The building stood on Fifteenth street in Kansas City, on a level tract, and Mrs. McCullough stated to your correspondent that she believed its fall was due to its' faulty construction, and not to anybody's design. . The names of other Missouri girls who rode with the rebel knights of the black flag might be mentioned if there were any good reasons why they should be. Many a guerrilla of the war, and many a "red leg" and jayhawker, too, is now a useful and respected member of society. Many a woman who at one period, intoxicated by the smell of gunpowder and crazed by the sight of blood and the other dreadful sights about her, did unwomanly and even inhuman deeds, is now an exemplary matron and a loving wife and mother. The carnage grounds of Missouri have been converted into fruitful fields. Missourians, men and women, are daily performing more heroic deeds in the battle of life than were performed during the reign of terror, and are effecting grander, nobler results. . |
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