“Bloody Bill” Anderson: During the winter of 1863–1864, Bill Anderson took twenty of Quantrill’s men and left Quantrill’s command. He went to join Brigadier General Henry E. McCulloch at his headquarters at Bonham, Texas. Anderson usurped Quantrill’s place as commander and continued with his raids and atrocities. In late October 1864, in Kansas, he and his men were burning houses, barns, crops, and murdering male citizens when he and a man named Rains charged through a militia line. Anderson sustained two bullets in his head and fell from his horse, dead.
His body was searched. Found was a “likeness” (photo) of himself and wife, Bush Smith, a lock of her hair, and letters she had sent him from Texas; orders from General Price; six hundred dollars in gold and greenbacks; six revolvers; a gold watch; a Confederate flag; and, lastly, a buckskin pouch containing a silk ribbon with fifty-three knots in it, one for each man he had killed in vengeance for his sisters.
Sue Mundy (Marcellus Jerome Clark): On March 3, 1865, Sue Mundy, Henry Magruder, and Sam Jones were holed up in a mud-chinked tobacco barn on the Cox place, forty miles southwest of Louisville, Kentucky. A retired federal infantry major by the name of Cyrus J. Wilson and fifty soldiers of Company B, Thirtieth Wisconsin Infantry, were dispatched and soon surrounded the barn. They threw rocks against the door. Sue Mundy blasted away and wounded four of them before they managed to arrest her and her two companions.
They were all taken by river steamer to Louisville, Kentucky, where Sue Mundy (Jerome Clark) stood trial, which was not a very fair court-martial, and she was hanged on March 15, 1865. An enormous crowd gathered as the gallows was built, and before the hanging Sue Mundy said, “I am a regular Confederate soldier and have served in the Confederate army for four years. I hope in, and die for, the Confederate cause.”
ON MAY 10, 1865, William Clarke Quantrill, with twenty-one men, was riding down a road that led to the Wakefield Farm five miles south of Taylorsville, Kentucky. It was raining, so they took refuge in the barn and carriage house. Quantrill and some of his men climbed into the hayloft to sleep. The others played cards.
Out back, over the hill, came twenty-year-old Captain Edwin Terrell of the Secret Service, who had orders from the military commander of Kentucky to kill or capture Quantrill.
A fight ensued. Quantrill was riding a borrowed horse, since his “Old Charley,” who had seen him through the whole war, had pulled a hamstring. The horse he now had was not accustomed to the sound of battle or gunfire, and so became frightened and reared, and he could not control it. The animal was shot in the hip. A bullet struck Quantrill in the back of his left shoulder blade and lodged in his spine. He fell into the mud. He was paralyzed below the shoulders. His own men tried to save him but were killed. Men from the Secret Service rolled him in a blanket and carried him into the house. He lied, saying he was Captain Clarke of the Fourth Missouri Confederate Cavalry. Then he asked to be allowed to stay on the farm to die. Terrell said yes, then rode off to try to find Quantrill.
The next morning, having learned who his prisoner really was, Terrell returned with a Conestoga wagon. He threw straw and pillows in the back and put Quantrill on top of it and headed for Louisville.
There, doctors examined him and said his back was broken. He was put in the military prison’s infirmary. As he lay dying, Quantrill was converted to Catholicism and given the last rites by a Catholic priest. He made arrangements that all his money be given to Kate King, his wife. He remained in a good mood to the end.
Legend has it that four women came to see him as he lay dying. One shed bitter tears as she left.
He died at 4:00 P.M. on June 6, 1865. He was twenty-seven years old.
AND—what I imagine happened to the characters that I made up.
Martha Anderson Bradshaw: After the war when Confederate soldiers were on the roads, some wounded, some lost, all trying to find their way home, she cared for them. She fed them, clothed them, and nursed them if necessary. Since President Abraham Lincoln had emancipated the slaves in January 1863, she and Seth had kept theirs on and paid them wages. All stayed, including Maxine, who still just about ran the place.
Martha had a second baby boy on June 9, 1865, two months after General Robert E. Lee surrendered to the North and the war ended. They named him William Clarke, after Quantrill. In the years that followed, she and Seth had four children, three boys and one girl, whom they named Sue Mundy Bradshaw. Juliet was her godmother. They raised their children successfully in the log cabin version of the house in the holler and remained a contented happy family and pillars of the community. Martha accompanied Seth to all the reunions of the Quantrill Raiders.
Seth Bradshaw: Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865. The war was over, although in the West many did not know it for weeks and weeks. On May 11, Seth led his men to a place a mile and a half outside Lexington, Missouri. At 1:00 P.M. he sent a messenger into town under a flag of truce to offer the surrender of his band. A colonel went to meet them. Seth had forty-eight men and they marched, on horseback, into town to the provost marshal’s office, where they were ordered to dismount and turn over their arms. Then they took an oath of allegiance to the United States and all were permitted to go home—all but Seth. He was given the job of helping the military bring in the rest of the guerrillas. He took it to make up for the men he had killed in the war, going home occasionally to make sure his family was all right. By the end of May he had brought in two hundred to surrender. The last group he brought in surrendered on July 26, 1865. One guerrilla who never surrendered or took the oath was Jesse James.
Seth then went home to his family for good. Slavery had ended in Missouri by early 1865, by state enactments, and he had to hire some workers for the slaves who eventually left and check on the ones he had already hired. He had to see to his new baby and wife and his little sister, his crops, and the horses he had taken to raising.
At home for good now, he became, with Martha, a force in the community and, though public office was denied to all who had fought for the Confederacy, he became the “point man” for all those who had been driven out of Missouri by Order Number 11 and whose property was now in the infamous “burnt district.” He helped them get their property back and start to rebuild. He also became unofficial historian of Quantrill’s band, kept in touch with the ex-bushwhackers, and attended all the reunions. He lived until 1913.
Juliet Bradshaw: After the war, Juliet went back to school as her brother wished, in the local schoolhouse, then attended Miss Fishburn’s Academy for Young Ladies, comparable to todays high school for girls, in the local area. Juliet felt that she had seen and learned more than Miss Fishburn could ever teach her, and that she’d poured enough tea for sick soldiers, on their way home, to teach Miss Fishburn a thing or two, but Seth made her go. She hated it.
She was thirteen when she fell in love with one soldier her sister-in-law Martha took in on his way home. He needed nursing and feeding and Juliet was hopelessly smitten with the young man, who was all of twenty. He was from Virginia. And if Seth hadn’t been home, she would have eloped with him, but he was, so she didn’t.
She had turned into a beautiful young teenager, with experience beyond her years. She loved her nieces and nephews, took piano lessons, and went with Seth and Martha to all the Quantrill reunions, where she flirted with Jesse James. She even followed his career in crime, the way she used to follow the career of Sue Mundy.
But the Yankee she had killed still haunted her and was the real underlying reason for her wildness. (She once rode one of Seth’s prized Thoroughbred horses without permission and almost killed herself.) And this was when the haunting of the Yankee came to the fore.
When she told Seth and Martha that she wanted to go to Pennsylvania to meet Heffinger’s family and apologize to them, they were horrified and said no. “You’re a Confederate,” Seth said. “You’re hated up there. Besides, you’re only fourteen.”
Juliet went anyway. She literally ran away with Heidi, the daughter of one of the hired help, a German girl from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, who offered to go with her. They found the Heffinger home and were welcomed by a surprised and saddened family. Jeffrey Heffinger was the oldest son. His brother, Caleb, was home and took the girls on a tour of the still raw and ugly Gettysburg grounds.
He was twenty. Juliet fell for him. Before two days were up, an angry Seth arrived, ready to tear Juliet to pieces, but Caleb and his parents calmed him down, saying, “Her gesture was so beautiful, coming here to apologize for killing Jeffrey. It mended things so well. If all of us on both sides did this, it would help heal the nation.”
When Juliet returned home, Seth kept her under lockup (she was grounded for a year), but she and Caleb started a written correspondence that, years later, led to marriage.