Running With The Barbarians

   A Happy Friday to You from Joe McDonnell


On this day in 1865 the Confederate guerilla leader William Quantrill was caught in an ambush and shot in the back. He lingered until June 6, when he died in a hospital in Louisville, Kentucky. He was 27. This event is ironic in that Quantrill had perfected guerilla techniques such as the ambush and he ended up being caught in one himself. He normally would have escaped, but his horse was skittish that day, which gave the Union soldiers time to pour in the lead. 
   The war was pretty much over by this time, Lee having surrendered to Grant back on April 9th. But Quantrill was not one to go peacefully back to teaching school in Ohio, which he had started doing at the age of sixteen to support his widowed mother and his seven siblings. Quantrill was always restless and at age 17 he moved over to Illinois and got a job unloading lumber for the railroad. One night he killed a man. He told the police it was self-defense. There were no witnesses and since the man was a stranger, the police told Quantrill to move on.
   Quantrill moved on to Kansas which was engaged  in a bloody border war with Missouri. This was shortly before the Civil War. The Civil War was fought over slavery, but there were three or four "last straws" that led the South to secede. One of those straws was the fight over whether Kansas would enter the Union as a slave or a free state. Quantrill, being a northerner, was initially anti-slavery, but in Kansas his friends were southerners and there was money to be made returning runaway slaves to their masters.
   One of Quantrill's friends was half-Cherokee, and when the war broke out Quantrill joined a Cherokee regiment in the Confederate Army. It was there he learned his Indian fighting techniques. 
 After a couple of battles, Quantrill deserted the army and returned to Kansas where he formed his own guerilla army called Quantrill's Raiders. His most infamous exploit was his attack on the Unionist stronghold of Lawrence, Kansas in 1863. He executed all the males in the town old enough to carry a rifle then burned the town to the ground. The Union guerilla group opposing Quantrill was known as the Jayhawkers  They were just as brutal as Quantrill's group. Both these groups fought for a Cause, but murder and mayhem were also on their agendas.
   During the winter of 1863-4, Quantrill and his followers went down to Texas to regroup. He fell out with his chief lieutenant, "Bloody Bill" Anderson, and his force of over 400 men split up. By the time of the ambush in Kentucky, Quantrill's Raiders was down to a few dozen men. On the same day Quantrill was shot, Jefferson Davis was captured by Union troops in Georgia.
   Quantrill's legacy was carried on by some of his men. Frank and Jesse James and Cole Younger applied his hit and run tactics to bank and train robberies. The William Clarke Quantrill Society exists to keeps his memory alive. Its website has several articles justifying his actions. Other articles fulminate against liberals, the Jayhawkers of our day.
   Quantrill was buried in Louisville. Twenty years later, at his mother's request, a friend dug up the body for removal to Ohio. There were rumors that the friend sold some or all of the body so it's unclear who's in the Ohio gave. In  1992 a Confederate cemetery in Missouri was given a few of Quantrill's bones for its collection.
   As often happens with notorious dead people, Quantrill was discovered many years later and far from his grave. A former Union soldier who had fought Quantrill during the war claimed to have found him in 1907 on Vancouver Island. He was back in the lumber business after a long stay in Chile. When other investigators looked him up, the Quantrill look alike was found severely beaten. He died a few hours later without giving further testimony. 

Grave one of three. Everybody wanted a piece of him.