Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

The sheriff had gone down. But then he crawled to the wagon, and to our surprise, the Free-Soil prisoners from Lawrence helped him aboard and laid him out and appeared to be tending to him, while the soldiers got off their horses and drew close around the wagon and waited to be fired upon. “Did you kill him?” Father asked in a tense whisper. “Did you kill the man?” He was at my ear and had a hand on each of my shoulders. The others, Fred and Salmon, had come forward and were crouched behind us.

“No.”

“You bloodied him, though,” Salmon said. “They’re ripping off his shirt.”

“But why are they helping him and not escaping?” Father asked. “All they’ve got to do is run, right?”

No one answered.

“I think we should go down there and I should address them,” Father announced.

“No;’ I said. “Better they don’t know who has shot at them or from where. Make them think we’re everywhere. A single, well-aimed shot can be more terrifying than a fusillade.”

The Old Man pondered that for a second, and then he smiled. “Yes. Good. That’s good, Owen. Very good. Come on, boys,”he said, suddenly in charge again, although I detected a new note of apprehension in his voice. Certainly, Father understood the implications of this act as well as I did. “Let’s ride on to Lawrence. And we’ll say nothing of this to anyone. Nothing. All either side needs to know is that there are some abolitionists who are not afraid to shoot, and that such men are everywhere — nowhere and anywhere. They don’t need to know the names of the shooters. Not yet anyhow. You look down there, boys, look,” he ordered, and pointed into the arroyo below at the sight of Free-Soil prisoners and federal troopers scrambling to protect and aid a fallen proslavery sheriff. “See how little we can trust even our own kind. Traitors;’ he pronounced them. “There below, children, there are the Israelites who betrayed Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, gone to worship the golden calves of Jeroboam. Look at them, boys. Let us, from here on out, keep completely to ourselves,” he said. “Completely.”

And so we did. There were, of course, immediate and serious consequences to my shooting the sheriff, but they were not by us particularly unwanted. Although we were widely suspected, by both sides, to have been the hotheads who wounded Sheriff Jones, Father neither admitted nor denied the charge and said only that he himself had not fired on the man but it was a shame he hadn’t been killed. The pro-slavery newspapers went wild, and rumors of imminent war flew across the territory, exciting and frightening everyone on all sides. Missourians and other Southerners gathered together in packs along the border, as if ready to invade. Mobs in Atchison and Leavenworth captured a pair of prominent Free-State men there on business and tarred them and stuck tufts of cotton all over their bodies, tied the men to their horses, and sent them down the Santa Fe Trail, where they were found the next day a few miles north of Lawrence.

It was around this time that, with John and Jason spending so much time up in Lawrence with the Osawatomie Rifles and the Free-State legislature, Father decided that we had better send the women and Tonny over to Uncle Sam Adair’s place in the village of Osawatomie. He also decided to abandon Browns Station and move to a temporary camp in the trackless brushland along the Mosquito Creek, a camp that every few days we could shift to a new location. We were free as the wind off the plains now, able to appear and disappear almost at will. Everything we owned we carried in one wagon, and most of what we owned was weaponry. We were all of us on horseback by now, thanks to stock we had liberated from the hands of the slavers, although we had not saddles for everyone, and Fred and Oliver, when he wasn’t driving the wagon, rode bareback. Roaming the rolling, treeless hillcountry and slipping along the dark river-bottoms where black walnut, oak, and cottonwood trees grew in lush groves, we were more like a roving Indian band than a company of white guerillas. Our chieftain, who was Father, of course, always Father, set policy, but I decided day-to-day on how best to implement that policy.

Then, on the second of May, when we were encamped in the woods just south of the old French trading post on the Marais des Cygnes, a rich Missouri planter named Jefferson Buford, who had rounded up close to four hundred men from all over the South, led his mob straight across the border into the territory. Not ten miles from us, men were flying banners that cried, The Supremacy of the White Race! and Alabama for Kansas. A day later, we heard from a local Free-State settler that, out on the Peoria Indian lands, fifteen miles from our old camp at Browns Station, a company of some thirty or so Georgians loosely attached to Buford’s force had pitched their tents and were carousing, working up their courage with whiskey and insults. It was country that we knew firsthand and well, so on a cold, overcast day, Father and I rode out there in the wagon to reconnoiter and see what we could learn of the character of Colonel Buford’s force. We pretended to be government surveyors running a line that happened to lie in the middle of their squat. Calling ourselves Ruben Shiloh and his son Owen from Indiana and pretending to have no opinions on the struggle over Kansas, Father and I stopped for a while by the Georgians’ cook wagon, where most of the men had assembled to drink corn whiskey and lounge idly by the fire, two of their favorite activities, it seemed. We secretly counted the number of their horses and weapons, sidearms mostly and old, single-shot hunting rifles, and we talked a little and listened a lot, as they loudly cursed the abolitionists and swore to kill every last one. They loved their leader, Jefferson Buford, and called him Colonel Buford, although, when Father asked, they could not say in which army or militia he had been commissioned.

They were a staggering, loutish bunch of poor, ignorant, landless Southerners, men who bragged that they had come over to Kansas to help themselves first, by seizing abolitionists’ land-claims, and the South second, by killing as many Yankee nigger-lovers as they could find. “Especially those damned Browns,” whom they’d been hearing about from the Shermans and Doyles down on the Pottawatomie. “Them Browns’re goin’ first!” they declared. We tipped our hats and rode on.

Later, in the wagon on the way back to our camp, for a long time Father and I were silent, each of us lost in his own thoughts. Finally, when we were four or five miles from the Georgians’, Father turned to me and said, “You know, Owen, the real problem here isn’t what it seems. It’s not our differences from those fellows. The real problem is that those men truly don’t understand us.”

“How’s that a problem?”

“It just came to me, so I’ll have to say it as I think it. But the pro-slavers, all these Border Ruffians coming over from the South — fact is, they think we’re just like them except that we’re Northerners, that’s all. They think that, like them, we’ve come out here at the behest and in the pay of a gang of rich men and politicians. In their minds, we’re out here following some Yankee version of their Colonel Buford, and, like them, all we want out of this for ourselves is a piece of free land. Strange. But that is the problem.”

“What’s the solution, then?”

“I’m not sure. I think we have to show them somehow that they’re wrong about us. We should figure out how to show these Southerners the true nature and extremity of our principles. We have to show them the difference between them and us. Mainly, they have to see that we are willing to die for this. For they are not. And more to the point, because they are not willing to die for their cause, they have to see that we are willing to kill for ours. There it is! That’s our secret strength, Owen. All those poor, drunken fools and thieves, they really do believe that we are cowards, no different than they, and that Kansas, since they presently outnumber us, is easy pickings. And if they cry bloody murder and threaten to burn down our houses, it’s only because they think that as soon as the battle starts, we’ll pack up and run north and leave them our land.”