NOWHERE IN YOUNG ADULT FICTION HAVE I EVER COME across the story about the Southern girls who were kin to Quantrill’s Raiders in the Civil War being sent to a Yankee prison in Kansas City, Kansas, where the building collapsed and most of the girls were killed. The fact that most of them were teenagers gravitated me to the story. Why had nobody written about this for young adults?
I plunged right in and started my research. The result is this book, which deals not only with the prison collapse, but with William Clarke Quantrill’s bushwhackers, as fascinating a group of beloved scoundrels as ever graced the pages of any novel. Of course they were Confederates, but that did not give them the right to burn, loot, and kill the way they did, unless you discover that they were only doing it in the way the Yankees burned, looted, and killed. It was war.
Along the way I invented as good a group of characters as I ever had with the Bradshaw family. And I developed a whole plotline with the introduction of Sue Mundy, the “girl” who disguised herself as a man and fought with Quantrill, the “girl” who was really a man to begin with and whom my twelve-year-old protagonist adored. Sue Mundy was a cult figure of her time. In today’s world she’d be on the front page of all the supermarket tabloids.
As to whether Sue Mundy was really a double agent for the Yankees is speculation, invented by me to make her even more interesting. Remember, this is a novel based on the Grand Avenue prison collapse and the Quantrill bushwhackers. In that same mode the names of the Anderson girls (all of whom really lived) are as close as I can discern them to be. Every research book I read gave the girls different names and ages. Some had a Josephine in the group, some did not. I do not have a Josephine. So, if I am incorrect in my interpretation, please forgive me.
All the main characters in the book are real with the exception of the Bradshaws; Maxine; the Yankee, Heffinger, whom Juliet shoots; and Mr. Addison, from whom she buys her cow. Jesse James started his outlaw career in Quantrill’s Raiders, and after the war his brother Frank asked for a pardon but Jesse never did. He became, instead, a noted and infamous cult-figure outlaw of the times.
“Bloody Bill” Anderson really was nicknamed that, because after the Grand Avenue prison collapsed and he lost three of his sisters (Mary eventually died, too), he went crazy, literally. He really did keep a ribbon on his horse, with one notch in it for every man he killed. He kept, also, a collection of scalps. He killed and maimed unnecessarily. After his death, people came to stare at his body and cut off locks of his hair.
This was a violent, dramatic, romantic, and flowery time as far as people’s actions and speech and emotions went. They held nothing back but gave vent freely to their feelings, as I have tried to have my characters do in this book.