Free Louis S. Warren by Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody, the Wild West Show Page B

Free Kansans longed for vengeance against their tormentors in Missouri. When the Civil War erupted on April 12, 1861, they got their chance. In the absence of a strong occupation by either army, the border of Kansas and Missouri exploded in a vast paramilitary conflagration, as competing bands of Union jayhawkers and secessionist bushwhackers embarked on wars of pillage, rapine, and murder. Jayhawker and bushwhacker alike rousted their enemies from their cabins at night and dispensed beatings, mutilations, hangings, and shootings. They stole, savaged, and ruined. 3
    And they burned homes. George Caleb Bingham, a Unionist, described the devastating progress of a leading anti-slavery regiment, the Seventh Kansas Volunteer Cavalry, better known as Jennison’s Jayhawkers, on their raid from Kansas to Missouri in 1861. Their “entire route from Independence to Westpoint may be traced by the ruins of the dwellings of our citizens, which were first pillaged and then burned without discrimination or mercy. As they were generally constructed of wood, they are now but heaps of ashes, above which the tall chimneys remain in their solitude.” In 1862, Jennison’s regiment fell on the town of Dayton, Missouri, and burned forty-six of forty-seven homes. When they reached the partially burned town of Morristown, they burned the rest. One eyewitness, awed by the horror they inflicted near Kingsville, remembered: “I counted one evening, while standing on Brushy Knob, one hundred and sixty houses on fire.” 4
    The Bleeding Kansas years had seen house burnings, too, but the increasing frequency and scale of home destruction makes it hard to overstate the impact of the Civil War on settlers along the Kansas-Missouri line. Throughout the United States, and more so on the western border, the premier social institution was the family, and the premier economic, educational, and social welfare establishment was the family home. In a society where federal, state, and local governments were weak, where educational institutions were rudimentary, where a multiplicity of churches competed for the attention of minority churchgoers, the family home was the chief organizing unit. The home was where children were conceived and delivered, where much of their education took place, where they and their parents produced most of the family’s wealth, and where they relaxed and enjoyed their lives and one another. As they grew, children would move into homes of their own, and in those homes they would care for aged parents as well as their own progeny. The home thus enfolded the present and future of the family that created it. 5
    All wars destroy families and homes. In the American South, the Civil War would turn on the destruction of cities and the ravaging of rural plantations, and in the process many thousands of homes were damaged or ruined. But the absence of other institutions across much of Kansas made the destruction of homes, and the families they contained, even more poignant and devastating.
    One of the ironies of the guerrilla war in Kansas and Missouri was that in firing the homes of their enemies, and in the most extreme cases killing or driving away their families altogether, partisans removed the one institution which constrained boys and men from extended guerrilla forays. With no families to protect, and no family farms to tend, young men were free— or driven—to pursue revenge. Fierce raids by one band of partisans thus gave rise to more partisans in opposition. “Now,” one guerrilla concluded, “when you find a dozen, twenty-five, fifty, or one hundred men whose lives have come together in this way, you can understand how they come to be terrors.” 6
    Will Cody was fifteen years old in 1861. As far as he and his family were concerned, pro-slavery partisans had murdered Isaac. For years, they had threatened his mother, his sisters, and his little brother, Charlie. And as Kansas jayhawkers