Bloody Bill Anderson Read online

  Figure 5.1 Thomas Morton Goodman.

  COURTESY OF THE BETTY PIERCE COLLECTION.

  The train reached Chattanooga without incident or accident, then proceeded on to Nashville, arriving the following day. Here the soldiers had a long layover, and they made the most of it. That meant starting out with restaurants, where one could eat real food instead of army rations, and ending up, if one was so inclined, on Spring, Front, and other streets lined solidly with saloons, brothels, and similar places that combined the two, as most did.4

  In eighteen hundred and sixty-four

  Hurrah! Hurrah!

  We’ll all go home and fight no more,

  Hurrah! Hurrah!

  In eighteen hundred and sixty-four,

  We’ll all go home and fight no more,

  And we’ll all drink stone blind.

  Johnny come fill the bowl.

  If there was one place and one time in their lives to celebrate and “drink stone blind,” it was here and now. And celebrate they did, exploding in a single moment all the emotional black powder pent up from months of hardship and toil. When their train pulled away from the Nashville depot, every man somehow succeeded in getting aboard bodily—but not so much as a spark of their former spirit and enthusiasm remained. Half asleep and half awake, Jim Hilly, Ed Pace, Cass Rose, giant Valentine Peters, and the other members of the First Missouri Engineers lay scattered about the coach. Reaching their homes in Missouri and Iowa was the one and only thing on their minds. Each hour on the train was an hour less sitting around the supper table, an hour less horsing with the boys, an hour less sparking with their girls. Lost in their own worlds of clacking wheels, memories, and passing night-time landscapes, one by one those in the train car quietly dropped away until all were mantled in sleep. All, that is, save Sgt. Tom Goodman.

  The big man pulled himself up and walked to a window. There was worry on his otherwise calm face, lines where normally none existed. What was it that he was feeling? What did it mean? Why couldn’t he shake it? Was it the whiskey? Was it that hollow “high lonesome” one suffers after a losing bout with liquor? Or was it simply human nature—the cautious, doubting side of man which raises its guard against anything that seems too good and beautiful to quite be true—such as, in his case, returning home? Whatever it was, whatever it meant, he had never felt it before. . . .

  He lowered the window of the stuffy coach and sucked in the cool night air. Up ahead the lantern on the big engine burned through the blackness. The train now was far north into Kentucky. Perhaps at this very moment it was passing through Hardin County, where he had been born on February 22, 1829, almost exactly twenty years after another, far more prominent native of that county. If so, then in a sense he had already come home.

  But no, his real home was Hawleyville, Iowa. There were his friends, his neighbors, his little ones, and their mother, his wife, Mary, sweet Mary. He would think of her. That would drive the shadows from his mind that would not let him sleep.

  Mary. He could almost see her smiling face, could almost hear her soft voice, feel her warm, loving arms. She was a good woman, a kind woman, always looking on the bright side and never turning her back on those in need. The year before their marriage in 1849, he had taken over the rearing of his five-year-old brother after their mother had died. And although little more than a child herself at sixteen, Mary had accepted the boy and raised him as her own. Several years later they had their own children, Willie and Jim, followed by the little one, Danny. Soon after Danny’s birth in 1862, Tom Goodman had gone off to the war, determined to do his part to preserve the Union.

  The two years since had passed quickly, yet it all seemed so very long ago, almost in a different lifetime. Now, he was on his way back home. In a few more days he would be there.

  The dark feeling in his mind now gone, Goodman went back to his seat and soon fell asleep.5

  Paris, Missouri: 10:00 P.M., September 26, 1864

  The column of Federal troops cleared the village, a little place with the grandiose name of Paris, and rode into the darkness. A pale crescent moon shone dimly over the shadowed prairie. The only sound came from the soldier’s slow-moving mounts and the creaking wheels of a couple wagons following in the rear. Earlier that evening, guerrillas—reportedly about eighty in number—had passed to the south of Paris. Now Companies A, G, and H of the Thirty-ninth Missouri were setting forth to track them down and, pursuant to Gen. Clinton Fisk’s oft-repeated exhortations, “exterminate” them. The hunt was on.

  The Thirty-ninth Missouri was a new regiment—so new that it still was being organized. Most of its men were recruits so raw that they barely knew how to aim, fire, and reload their Enfield single-shot rifles, and when they drilled, any veterans who happened to be around laughed at their clumsy revolutions. But with Sterling Price’s army coming up out of Arkansas and the guerrillas running rampant through central Missouri, every available unit had to be put in the field, ready for battle or not. Companies A, G, and H totaled only about 160 men, little more than half of their authorized strength, but soldiers were needed now. Later might be too late.

  Officially the Thirty-ninth was an infantry outfit, which is why it had the Enfields plus bayonets. Yet, except for a dozen or so men trudging along on foot beside the wagons, all the soldiers were riding as they marched out of Paris. To be sure, most of their mounts were mules, brood mares, and plow horses and thus no match for the fast steeds of the bushwhackers. But they at least gave them a chance to catch up with those thieving, murdering prairie wolves. And if they did catch up with them, they would give them a good thrashing. That is, if the raiders didn’t run away like the band encountered on the way to Paris. As everyone knew, bushwhackers fought only when they could attack by surprise from ambush and in overwhelming force. They never took on a stronger or equal foe, especially out in the open where they could not get in close with their revolvers. Since the Enfield had an effective killing range of three hundred yards, there was little chance of guerrillas being able to use their pistols against the soldiers of Companies A, G, and H of the Thirty-ninth Missouri. If they tried, they would be slaughtered.6

  St. Charles, Missouri: Pre-dawn, September 27, 1864

  Except for the puffing of the big engine as it built up steam, the train sat silently by the depot. Thick morning fog rising from the Missouri River closed in from all sides, and the station workers moved through the gray vapors like phantoms. A group of Iowa soldiers, Tom Goodman among them, stood by a coach, waiting to board. Yesterday afternoon they had arrived in St. Louis, just two more train rides from their homes, families, and friends. Many of their Missouri comrades, loath to waste any more precious leave time, promptly crossed the Missouri by ferry to St. Charles and took an evening train on the North Missouri Railroad, which connected with the Hannibal & St. Joseph at Macon City. The Iowans, on the other hand, saw no point in pushing it and so decided to remain in St. Louis and get a fresh start in the morning.

  While they were at the North Missouri Railroad ticket office in St. Louis, a worried-looking man had approached the soldiers and said that he had just come down from Macon City and that at every stop he had heard reports of guerrillas lurking about Sturgeon, Centralia, and other villages along the line. The government, he declared, was wrong to allow mail and passenger trains to travel the line without guards. So, too, were the directors of the North Missouri, who ignored warnings of danger.

  The soldiers noted the man’s tone of voice and studied his eyes. He was, they concluded, sincere, not merely an idle wag trying to put a scare into them. To be sure, what he said was hearsay—nothing really solid. Yet, rumor or not, conditions along the North Missouri were obviously unsettled. Indeed, earlier that day a report had circulated through St. Louis that guerrillas had captured one hundred troops at a place on that line called Centralia. Although this had soon proved false, it was nevertheless worrisome, and along with what the traveler from Macon City had related, it confirmed for Tom Goodman the belief that he
and his fellow Iowans were doing the right thing by waiting for the morning train. If there were bushwhackers prowling the prairies to the northwest of St. Charles and they did attack a passenger train, in all probability they would do so at night rather than in the daytime.

  To catch the 4:15 in the morning meant Goodman needed rest, so despite the attractions of the big city, he headed for a hotel. After four long nights on railroad cars and weeks and months of sleeping most of the time in tents with nothing but a rubber ground sheet beneath him, how marvelous, how wonderful, it would be to sleep in a real bed!

  But he didn’t sleep. The words of the stranger kept echoing through his mind. Why hadn’t the Missourians waited just one more night? By light of day, all could have traveled home in safety. Of course, all the talk about guerrillas might be and probably was just that—talk. And yet. . . .

  The same dark presence he had felt two nights before stirred in the depths of his soul once again. It had not gone away after all. Goodman finally slept, but only for a few fitful hours during which his dreams were filled with such frightful scenes that he could not help but wonder, after awakening, if they portended the future.

  To Goodman’s surprise, in St. Charles, on the coach assigned to soldiers, he found Josh Comer, Jim Robinson, big Val Peters, and all the other Missourians who had gone ahead. On reaching St. Charles the evening before, the same rumors about guerrillas on the railroad that circulated through St. Louis had caused them to wait for the greater safety that daylight and added numbers would bring. They greeted the newcomers warmly, and, Goodman noted, everybody felt better and braver.

  Overhearing the soldiers and sensing their change of mood, some of the Irish station hands could not resist having a little sport. The guerrillas, they taunted, would have the last laugh. By sundown the scalp of every man aboard would be hanging from a bridle. As they had five days before in north Georgia, the veterans responded with jibes and jeers of their own, accompanying them with contemptuous comments about bushwhackers being too cowardly to take on real soldiers.

  “Ye are brave now ain’t you?” shouted back one worker. “Begorra and ye need to be, for the guerrillas will be after ye, sure!”

  The soldiers merely laughed. When the train pulled out of the station, it seemed to Goodman that during the entire trip they had never been in higher spirits. Yet at the same time he saw on their faces the same anxious expression as that of troops about to go into battle—the expression of men who hoped to live but who knew that they might soon die.7

  Young’s Creek: Dawn, September 27, 1864

  As sunlight began filtering through the leaves of the trees along Young’s Creek, some three miles southeast of the village of Centralia, Bill Anderson’s men—and boys—began awakening from their slumber or, in many cases, drunken stupors. If anything, they were in a fouler mood than they had been right after the Fayette fiasco, for since then affairs had continued to go badly. First, on September 25, they and the other guerrilla bands, Todd’s included, had swung northward from the Glasgow area to the outskirts of Huntsville. There Anderson proposed paying his hometown another visit. To that end, he had sent a farmer into the town with a message stating that unless the garrison surrendered, it would be wiped out. He could not have picked a worse place to make such a threat. The Union commander in Huntsville was still Lieutenant Colonel Denny—whose father Anderson’s men had tortured by hanging back in August. Denny’s reply had been quick and to the point, instructing the farmer: “Tell them that if they want us to come in and get us.” Hearing this, Anderson still wanted to attack. Not so Todd. He and his followers had no desire to repeat what they had experienced at Fayette. Consequently, the bushwhackers had resumed their march, heading east to the North Missouri Railroad, where they vented some of their frustration by tearing down several miles of telegraph wire between Allen and Renick. That night they had bivouacked near Middle Grove in Monroe County.

  The next day they had continued northeastward in the direction of Paris. But on learning that it, too, contained a large Federal force, they had abandoned any notion of raiding it and swerved off to the south until they reached their present camp along Young’s Creek.8 After three days, the largest guerrilla force assembled since Lawrence had accomplished nothing except to yank down some telegraph wire and kill some poor devil of a sentry while suffering at least twenty casualties, a large portion of whom either were dead or likely to die. Still unavenged were the six members of Anderson’s band shot and scalped on the twenty-third and the five comrades whose bodies had been left behind to be trampled into the dirt at Fayette. It seemed that every town worth taking had a strong garrison in it and that Union detachments swarmed all about, hunting them—they who were accustomed to being the hunters. They had assembled their full strength and moved into this region so as to prepare the way for Sterling Price. But was he coming? And if so, where and when could he be expected to arrive?

  After the men had breakfasted and taken care of their horses, Todd went to Anderson and asked him—he could not order him—to go to Centralia and obtain what news he could of Price. Anderson promptly agreed.9 He did not particularly care about Price—his was a different war both in purpose and kind—but Centralia had stores, and those stores had money, plunder, and whiskey. Also, Centralia was a stop on the North Missouri Railroad, and maybe a train would come along. A freight train would be best but a passenger train would do since there would be plenty of people aboard with jewelry, greenbacks, and real money in the form of gold and silver. In any case, a visit to Centralia could prove profitable as well as enjoyable. And it would help make up for what had happened at Fayette and had not happened at Huntsville and Paris.

  The Prairie, Ten Miles South of Paris, Missouri: Dawn, September 27, 1864

  Maj. Andrew Vern Emen Johnston, commanding Companies A, G, and H of the Thirty-ninth Missouri Infantry, slowly adjusted his field glasses. Sunshine sliced through the morning mist, casting long, blue shadows over the prairie. At a distance of two miles the view was dim and uncertain. Johnston carefully adjusted the glasses, making the sighting as good as it ever would be—and it was enough. Though difficult to discern through the vapor, he was now sure it was the bushwhackers. Their horses, tiny specks in the distance, moved about in various directions, obviously grazing. The raiders numbered between fifty and eighty, certainly not more than a hundred. That was the size of the force that had passed south of Paris the evening before. Now it was in sight. The bushwhackers had been found!

  Throughout the night the three companies had moved slowly in the dark, hindered by the unfamiliar terrain as much as by lagging foot soldiers. In the end, however, the pace had proved a godsend. Had the march been pressed, they might have passed the fresh tracks they stumbled on at dawn. Those men without mounts had been promptly sent back to Paris, and the pace of the excited column increased. By sunup, with both men and beasts hungry, the troop had halted to rest and eat. That was when the scouts had come racing back with word that those making the tracks were just ahead—the soldiers had located their quarry. The Thirty-ninth was in luck.10

  Major Johnston continued to gaze through his glasses, scanning the southern horizon. At last he lowered them and ordered pickets posted to the south. He would allow the men to finish their breakfasts and, as some were doing, take a short snooze. Before the day was over they would need all of their energy and endurance. He then raised his field glasses and resumed the watch.

  Standing in the crisp early-morning air, the brass buttons on his uniform aglow in the golden sun, the major presented a striking figure: tall and erect in his bold blue coat, a long saber dangling in its scabbard by his side, rich, full beard framing a rugged, handsome face that was at once youthful yet mature, strong yet sensitive. He looked as a military leader should.

  This was, in fact, paradoxical, for prior to the war he had been a teacher and sometime preacher in Ralls County near Hannibal, where he was known and respected as a kind and courteous “Christian gentleman” who never dran
k, swore, or whored. Furthermore, he had followed a strange and, in the eyes of some, suspicious route to become a Union Army officer. In the summer of 1861 he had been a lieutenant in the Missouri State Guard, whose commander was Sterling Price and which would provide the nucleus for that general’s army when he went over to the Confederacy. Johnston, though, had remained loyal to the Union, which he proved by joining the pro-Federal state militia in September 1861. During the ensuing three years he had risen to the rank he now held and gained the praise of a fellow officer who served under him as being a leader who “follows the bushwhackers to fight them on their own ground”—something he had done with notable success in the Hannibal area. How fortunate they were, his young, neophyte soldiers, to have such a capable and experienced commander.11

  Like most other Missouri Unionists, Johnston was no abolitionist. When Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation the major had denounced it as unconstitutional and declared he would no longer “follow Old Abe.” But he had soon realized, like most other Missouri Unionists, that slavery was doomed no matter what, and nothing could be done to change that fact. Besides, the main thing was to put down the rebellion, which in Missouri meant putting down the bushwhackers. They were the worst kind of Rebels, and Johnston had come to despise them. They boasted about how tough, brave, and skilled they were, but in truth they were nothing but skulking scum good only at murdering defenseless men and stealing from helpless women. Whenever faced with a real fight against real soldiers, and without the advantage of surprise and overwhelming numbers, they always ran like the cowards they were. All Johnston asked was a chance to get at them in a regular, straight-out battle. Then he, Andrew Vern Emen “Ave” Johnston, would teach them a lesson they never would forget—that is, those who survived, which he hoped would be few, very few.