Enemy Women (2 page)

12. When Adair finally returns home, she finds a family of traveling players has occupied her empty house. What purpose does this serve in the narrative? Is the author being lightly satiric through the player’s explanation of the roles of the “aristocratic girl” and the “saucy girl”?

13. At the end of the book, when the Major stands before the empty Colley homestead and calls out to Adair, saying he has kept his promise, what famous early-twentieth-century poem do these lines evoke?

14. At the beginning of the book, Adair seems dubious about marriage, and reluctant to give up her freedom. By the end of the book, though, she has apparently changed her mind. How do we know that Adair has fallen in love with the Major, despite her doubts and confusions?

15. At the end of the story, Adair is weak, in many ways as faded and ragged as the Confederacy itself. What small, sneaky symbol at the very end gives the reader hope that Adair may recover and flesh out to become her old self again? (Hint, hint: It’s up in the sky.)

Prologue

There will be trouble in Missouri until the Secesh are subjugated and made to know that they are not only powerless, but that any attempts to make trouble here will bring upon them certain destruction and this . . .must not be confined to soldiers and fighting men, but must be extended to non-combatant men
and women
. [Emphasis in the original]

—B
ARTON
B
ATES TO
E
DWARD
B
ATES,
S
T.
L
OUIS,
O
CTOBER
10, 1861, E
DWARD
B
ATES
C
OLLECTION,
M
ISSOURI
H
ISTORICAL
S
OCIETY,
S
T.
L
OUIS

November 15, 1864: Last night there were ninety more arrivals [prisoners] from St. Louis. One lady also with them; she is a Mrs. Martin, formerly a Miss Blanerhassett, they tell us that in St. Louis one of their female prisoners is wearing a ball and chain, “and still they come.” The wonders of this progressive age still continue to announce to an astonished world similar brave feats. We are in the full blaze of the nineteenth century. Women wearing balls and chains, as political offenders.

—G
RIFFIN
F
ROST,
C
ONFEDERATE
P
RISONER IN
S
T.
L
OUIS,
Camp and Prison Journal,
P
RESS OF THE
C
AMP
P
OPE
B
OOKSHOP,
I
OWA
C
ITY,
I
OWA,
1994,
ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN
1867, Q
UINCY
H
ERALD
B
OOK AND
J
OB
O
FFICE,
Q
UINCY,
I
LLINOIS

Y
OUNG MEN JOINED
up by the thousands in their eagerness to go to war for the state of Missouri; they would go to war and come home with stories to tell as their fathers had come home from the Mexican
War with tales of faraway places and cannon fire and the bold charge the Missourians had made at Saltillo. At Doniphan Courthouse, down in the Ozark mountains, a rally and fish-fry was held in the early summer of 1861, with crowds coming into town in wagons and on horseback. The Missouri State Guard officers sat behind a plank table and signed them up one after the other, yelling,
No, man, you can’t join the cavalry if you don’t have a horse! Here, here, you want to be a cannoneer!
It was in May 1861 after the Federals in St. Louis had fired into a hostile crowd and killed thirty people, including several women and a year-old baby, that young men from the southern part of the state joined the Missouri State Guard in droves. The rally at Doniphan Courthouse drew a large crowd from the Ozark hills and settlements
nearby. A long fire pit glowed under fifty skillets of frying fish. There was a brass band and a large banner painted by the Misses Parmalee and Newnan depicting a plump Greek woman in a robe holding out a laurel wreath with one hand and in the other hand an object that was either a skewer of some kind or an infantry sword. The legend stated
O for Thee Missouri to the Tyrant I Shall Never Yield.

The Misses Parmalee and Newnan had got into fierce arguments about how much of her breasts should show. Lucinda Newnan wanted one breast escaping entirely from her toga or whatever it was she was wearing and said that was how they dressed in those days, and Amanda Parmalee said that their mothers would kill them if she was exposed in that manner and it didn’t matter how they dressed in those days. They probably dressed all kinds of ways in those days. So they painted her robes over the offending flesh. Adair Colley’s father would not let her go to help paint the banner at all because, he said, they would be going to the fish-fry and rally and two trips into Doniphan Courthouse in three days was too much. So Adair and her sisters made small State Guard flags from a worn sheet, and painted on Missouri’s bears and the state motto,
Salus Populi Suprema Lex Esto,
and waved them from the carriage in the stream of people going into town.

The band played “Maryland, My Maryland” commendably well.
The ladies of Doniphan brought fresh bunches of quill pens to the recruiters. They seemed to bear in their hands bouquets of goose feathers like formal presentations, and an urchin was employed to sit on the ground at the boots of the cavalry recruiter to cut the quills and hand them up. Ink flew.

The men of the Missouri State Guard soon found themselves attached to the Confederate army and sent to the east to fight. The newly elected officers stared in dismay at their orders, but orders were orders. All locally raised units, one after another, were loaded on steamers and ferries to cross the Mississippi and the new soldiers marched on into Virginia and Tennessee, and the only people at home in the southeastern Ozarks were the women and the children. In the meantime the Federal forces moved thousands of troops into the Ozarks, other state troops from Illinois, Indiana, Colorado, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and Kansas.

The Union command also sent down from St. Louis the newly created Missouri Union Militia, and so these forces came down upon the southern counties unopposed. The Militia was made up in the main of dubious characters from the St. Louis riverfront, and their officers knew where to send stolen goods and stolen horses and they began to enrich themselves and also to fight among themselves. With all the young men gone, the Missouri Union Militia began to take what they wanted from the people of the southeastern counties.

Many of the young men who had joined up with the Missouri State Guard returned home after their six-month enlistment and were determined never again to leave. They had had enough of war and somebody was needed to protect their homes against the Union Militia and the other troops from the midwestern states. They began to organize other veterans to counter the raids of the Federals.

One of these units was Reeves’s Independent Scouts, which attached itself to the CSA in order not to be regarded as guerillas and therefore not under the protection of the rules of war. They determined to keep some semblance of order in the southeastern counties. Instead they
were once again sent off to fight with the Confederate Army at the battle of Perryville, Kentucky, in 1862, and there is evidence that the entire unit mutinied, threatened to shoot their officers, and then returned to the Ozarks en masse.

At home, Timothy Reeves once again organized a unit of volunteers and called it the Fifteenth Missouri Cavalry, CSA, having extracted a promise from the Confederate command that they would never again be sent out of southeastern Missouri. He got that promise and it was kept.

Throughout 1861 and 1862, small units of the Union Militia and Reeves’s men clashed at the rivers and the crossing places, they fought among the rocky bluffs and the dense pines. The Militia made forays and then retreated to the Union garrison at Iron Mountain, shut the doors of the fort behind them and barred it. Reeves’s men dispersed to their homes in the hills. The railroad came south from St. Louis as far as Iron Mountain so that the Union Militia could be supplied with all they needed from the city’s army depots. Reeves’s men were supplied by the women. They wore homespun uniforms and ate what they could shoot or grow.

The Misses Parmalee took the plump Greek lady with her laurel wreath and her skewer and her brave motto and buried her beneath the manure pile, for if the Federal soldiers found the banner in their possession they would set the house on fire. Adair Colley took the homemade State Guard flags and burned them in the fireplace.

Then the regular Union Army came at the Christmas season of 1862 and at that time the Federal troops numbered ten thousand men. This was an army with infantry, artillery, and cavalry, a medical corps and commissary wagons, and a brass band.

They came down from the garrison at the railhead at Iron Mountain, which was 120 miles to the north. The rattling, clanking column fed itself uneasily southward into the hills to dispense with the Confederates of the Ozarks once and for all. They were disciplined men with responsible officers, but around them at the edges of the column the irregular Union Militia floated and canted and harried the people like hawks.

This army of ten thousand men under General Davidson camped at Doniphan Courthouse and stayed for two weeks and ate up and burnt up everything in the country. Some were regular U.S. Army and some were state troops from Iowa or Illinois or Wisconsin. The people of the southeastern Ozarks were astonished at this great army and the irrefutable power of the Union. Adair Colley, who was then seventeen, rode out to see them passing along the Military Trace and knew then that the Northern armies were more powerful than anyone had imagined.

Her father and her brother buried their supplies under the house; casks of honey and lard and cornmeal.

The Fifteenth Missouri Cavalry waited for the lines of this great army at the river crossings. They fired on the Union Army as it crossed in the hard, glassy currents, so that men and horses snared and tangled with one another. The snorting mule teams floundered as their drivers were shot out of their wagon seats to sink beneath the surface, and when Union cavalrymen came to rescue the wagons they too became targets of Reeves’s old Mexican War smoothbores.

As soon as the dense gunpowder smoke drifted away, Reeves and his men drifted too, back into the mountains. The great Union Army bogged down at the river crossings and the men slept in tents in the hard, cold rains, and by January 1863 the soldiers wondered why they had come, and so did the officers. In late January an eight-foot rise in the Black River swept away everything in the main camp but a barrel of medicinal whiskey which was emptied by troops of the Thirty-third Illinois Infantry who then began to fight among themselves. As they marched down the muddy roads an Iowa soldier wrote home that the local people were but weeds in the garden of humanity. The army became lost, finally, and wandered through the mountains without direction. This great army of Union troops and machinery paid themselves through the Ozarks like whey through muslin, and when they were gone it was as if they had never been.

So they straggled back to Iron Mountain, and the Regular U.S. Army
troops were sent elsewhere. And then the Militia went out raiding again. On Christmas Day, 1863, Major James Wilson, of the Union Militia, went out looking for Reeves. He was exhausted and furious and stung by an enemy that did not show itself, by men who ambushed and then melted away, by women and children who knew nothing about the Fifteenth Missouri Cavalry, had never heard of Timothy Reeves, whose men weren’t here right now but were all out looking for strayed cattle.

Timothy Reeves and the men of the Fifteenth Missouri were having Christmas dinner with their families at Pulliam Springs. Major Wilson caught them with their turkey lifted on their forks. He wanted Reeves so badly he did not care that there were civilians in the way. He lined up his men and called fire. Reeves escaped with his life, but Wilson killed sixty civilians—men, women, and children—and an unknown number of the men of the Fifteenth. He took 150 prisoners. Colonel Reeves, who at one time had been a man of the cloth, said there was no hole deep enough to hide Major Wilson, nor any far wasteland wherein he might conceal himself, that he was marked for death with the mark of the Beast.