This is a
review of two books: Wildwood Boys: A Novel by James
Carlos Blake and Bloody Bill Anderson: The Short, Savage Life of a Civil War Guerrilla
by Albert Castel and Thomas Goodrich.
Here we
have a novel and a biography that cover the same historical territory. Assuming that the reader is interested in the
subject, which should he/she read first?
For someone
who is not very familiar with the history surrounding William T. Anderson, it
probably would be more enjoyable to read the novel and then follow-up with the
biography. Since the biography goes into
more detail and provides more historical context, it could serve as a reality
check to see how far the novelist departed from the historical record by
interjecting his imagination into the story.
Of course, it is his right and his duty as a novelist to do just
that. Otherwise, we would just set his
novel aside and read the biography, because it shouldn’t stray from the
historical record. And this one doesn’t. Despite its short length (144 pages), it is
thoroughly researched and well written.
After all, as the subtitle indicates Anderson did not live a long life.
It has been
argued that geography is destiny, that where we are born and where we live
shapes our fate more than we can ever imagine.
Today, greater mobility and mass communication has lessened the impact
of geography on our lives, but have not removed it entirely. However, in the 19th century (and
earlier) it was a powerful influence on where and how people lived.
Geography
certainly played its role in the lives of the Anderson brothers, William and
Jim, as it did in the lives of two other sets of brothers, the Youngers and the
Jameses. They found their lives and those
of their respective families enmeshed in conflict in the border war between
Missouri and Kansas six years before the firing on Ft. Sumter officially
touched off the beginning of the Civil War.
After the war began, all three sets of brothers eventually became
members of irregular Confederate guerrilla bands, which the Unionists referred
to as “bushwhackers.” The war continued along the border and spilled over into
the area north of the Missouri River in the state of Missouri.
All of the brothers, except for Jesse, fought
in the band commanded by the most famous of the Missouri guerrilla leaders,
William Clarke Quantrill.
When William
Anderson, who had been one of the chief lieutenants in the band, quarreled with
Quantrill, he and his followers broke away and formed their own band. Frank James and Cole Younger elected to
follow Anderson.
Jesse, who became a
guerrilla fighter at age sixteen, may have later joined Anderson’s band, or
maybe not. That he became a guerrilla
fighter is documented, but he never fought under Quantrill, despite what some
novelists have written and what Hollywood has produced, and the evidence is
sketchy regarding whether or not he was ever a member of Anderson’s band.
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| William Clarke Quantrill |
Anderson
earned the nickname “Bloody Bill” after his rampaging depredations became even
more violent and more deadly after the death of his favorite sister. I will leave the details to the reader as to
the cause of death, but whether or not it was their fault, Federal authorities
were blamed.
To this point Anderson was
not all that well-known by the Federal and state forces that were attempting to
control the guerrilla bands. However,
the murderous rampage that followed his sister’s death made him and his band
the most feared guerrilla fighters in Missouri and Kansas, even eclipsing
Quantrill’s reputation.
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| William T. Anderson |
As Castel
and Goodrich write, “[n]ow he had become the ‘devil incarnate,’ the most
ferocious and feared bushwhacker of all – and for Federal troops, the one they
wished most and tried hardest to kill.
Scarcely a day passed without the commander of the Union District of
North Missouri, Brig. Gen. Clinton B. Fisk, telegraphing one or more of his
officers to ‘exterminate’ Anderson. But
his soldiers rarely so much as engaged him, or if they did, usually it was
they, not he, who got the worst of it.
“To begin
with, they had trouble locating him. He
knew where he was going; they didn’t. He
had plenty of sympathetic civilians willing to shelter and feed his men and
provide information about the ‘bluebellies’ – where and how many. The Federals had their sources of aid and
intelligence also, but not as many or as reliable. Consequently, in this particular chase the
fox enjoyed an advantage over the hounds.
“And this
fox, if brought to bay, turned into a wolf – with deadlier fangs.”
Federal and
state forces attempting to control the guerrillas also committed their share of
atrocities. Moreover, bands of marauders
from Kansas, known as “Jayhawkers,” crossed the border to engage in the burning
and pillaging of the property of Missourians and did so without making much if
any distinction between the property of Unionists and that of secessionists.
The losers in this internecine conflict, as
always in civil conflicts, were the civilians that were caught in the
middle. Guerrillas had to have the
support of the rural inhabitants in order to survive and the Union forces had
to neutralize that support in order to prevail.
Therefore, both sides were guilty of using violence and intimidation in
an effort to win support for their cause.
In the process, the citizens of the area feared both sides, but
neutrality wasn’t an option. It was a dirty,
violent, uncivilized conflict in which all the rules of war were ignored.
If it is
true that the Civil War began on the Kansas-Missouri border six years before
the rest of the country entered the conflict, it could also be said that in
some respects that it did not end with Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in
1865. For after the war many of the
ex-guerrillas took the tactics they had learned during the Civil War and
applied them to the art of robbing trains and banks.
The most notorious gang was that led by the
Jameses and the Youngers. There is no doubt
that had William Anderson survived the war he too would have become one of the
prominent outlaws. In fact, his brother
Jim did become an outlaw. Therefore, in some ways the war did not end until Frank James was tried and acquitted almost
two decades after the war officially ended.
Castel and
Goodrich, both natives of Kansas, have written a fair and objective account of
the man who became the “devil incarnate” in a civil struggle that in many cases
destroyed the cohesion that had united families, communities, and the society
at large. Both historians are considered
the leading authorities on the Kansas-Missouri border war and the guerrilla
conflict that plagued both states during the Civil War.
Castel’s
other books include: Civil War in Kansas: Reaping the Whirlwind;
General
Sterling Price and the Civil War in the West; and William Clarke Quantrill: Terror
of the Border.
Among
Goodrich’s books are Black Flag: Guerrilla Warfare on the Western
Border, 1861-1865 and Bloody Dawn: The Story of the Lawrence
Massacre
James
Carlos Blake is a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Mexico. When he was six-years old, his family moved
to Brownsville, Texas. As a novelist
Blake is, much like Cormac McCarthy, drawn to the subject of evil. He is fascinated with the lives of outlaws
and, as one reviewer noted, he “explores human nature at its worst.” Obviously then, one of the common threads
running through his novels is violence, whether the subjects are historical
figures such as John Wesley Hardin, Pancho Villa, 1930’s gangster Harry
Pierpont, “Bloody Bill” Anderson or fictional characters such as the Wolfe
brothers.
In an
interview in GQ, Blake said that he was interested in [historical] outlaws,
but that his real interest is in their private lives. He went on to say, “These guys all had
childhoods, families, lovers, interests other than crime and where there is no
historical record of those things, I enjoyed inventing their interior lives
without violating any of the factual evidence.”
In fact, Blake
found himself, intentionally or unintentionally, humanizing Anderson. Many people believe that Anderson was a
violent, cold-hearted murderer, an example of “human nature at its worst,” whose
character was totally devoid of human compassion and therefore beyond
redemption – even at the hands of a skilled novelist. Ironically, Anderson’s behavior was even more
brutal in real life than in Blake’s portrayal.
It is a classic case of truth being stranger than fiction.
Blake also said
in the GQ interview, “Violence is the most elemental truth of
life. It’s the central shaper of
history, the ultimate determiner of whether A or B is going to get his way…. At
its core, history is a story of violence at work.”
I must
confess that although it was hard for me to accept some of the sections of the
book where he invented “interior lives without violating any of the factual
evidence,” overall Blake does generally stick to the known historical record and
in the process of writing a gritty, brutally realistic novel he also passes
along a lot of interesting history about a very unfortunate period in the life
of our nation.
After all,
as Oakley Hall wrote in the introduction of his best-known novel, Warlock,
a thinly disguised treatment of the Wyatt Earp-Doc Holliday friendship, “By
combining what did happen with what might have happened I have tried to show
what should have happened….The pursuit of truth,
not of facts, is the business of fiction.”
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| James Carlos Blake |
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