Enemy Women (3 page)

In the heat of September 1864 the Confederate General Price came up from Arkansas with an army of twelve thousand men to retake Missouri for the Confederacy. These men in gray also passed through in the thousands. General Price came with infantry and artillery and medical corps and commissary wagons and a brass band.

The Union Militia fled the southeastern counties as Price swept through, but they burnt down the town of Doniphan Courthouse on their way out. Reeves’s men caught the arsonists at Ponder’s Steam Mill on the Little Black River. Adair Colley and her sisters could hear the firing from the farmhouse; it went on for hours. Later the people of that neighborhood came to bury the Confederate dead and the Union dead both, and there they lie to this day. The graves have no names carved upon them. Stone slabs piled one upon the other mark their places deep in the oak forest like nameless and forsaken Iron Age monuments.

Reeves and his men followed Price’s Confederate Army all the way through the Ozarks and up to Iron Mountain. It was the first time the Fifteenth had left its home ground, but they were after Major Wilson, and nothing could stay them. Price’s army attacked the Union garrison at Iron Mountain and drove them out. It was later told that on the night of the retreat Major Wilson gave his watch to his sergeant, saying, Take this for my son, for I will not see the dawn of another day. Thus it proved to be. On the road to St. Louis the Union forces were scattered and retreating, and it was there that Colonel Reeves caught him. He read Wilson and six of his cohorts the charges of the murder of sixty civilians. He lined up his men and called fire. They left Wilson’s body for the hogs, lying to one side of the road to St. Louis.

Then it was with the Confederate general Price as it had been with the Union general Davidson. They paid themselves through the Ozarks as whey through muslin. The great Confederate Army went up the Military Road singing, never to be seen again.

Afterward the Union Militia came back and built their fort at Iron Mountain all over again. Then they came down raiding with an even greater fury than before.

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Oct. 29, 1864

Dear Wife and Children; I take my pen with trembling hand to inform you that I have to be shot between 2 & 4 o’clock this evening. I have but few hours to remain in this unfriendly world. There are 6 of us sentenced to die in retaliation of 6 Union soldiers that was shot by Reeves men. My dear wife don’t grieve after me. I want you to meet me in Heaven. I want you to teach the children piety, so that they may meet me at the right hand of God. . . .I don’t want you to let this bear on your mind any more than you can help, for you are now left to take care of my dear children. Tell them to remember their dear father. I want you to tell all my friends that I have gone home to rest. I want you to go to Mr. Conner and tell him to assist you in winding up your business. If he is not there then get Mr. Cleveland. If you don’t get this letter before the St. Francis River gets up you had better stay there until you can make a crop, and you can go in the dry season.

It is now half past 4 a.m. I must bring my letter to a close, leaving you in the hands of God. I send you my best love and respect in this hour of death. Kiss all the children for me. You need have no uneasiness about my future state, for my faith is well founded and I fear no evil. God is my refuge and my hiding place.

Good-bye Amy

Asey Ladd
—
ASA LADD, A CONFEDERATE PRISONER OF WAR IN GRATIOT STREET PRISON, ST. LOUIS, WHO WAS SELECTED ALONG WITH FIVE OTHERS BY THE UNION COMMAND OF THAT CITY TO BE EXECUTED IN RETALIATION FOR REEVES’S EXECUTION OF MAJOR JAMES WILSON OF THE UNION MILITIA. LADD WAS FROM SOUTHEASTERN MISSOURI.

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T WAS THE
third year of the war and by now there was hardly anybody left in the country except the women and the children. The men were gone with Colonel Reeves to live in the forests, and many families had fled to Texas or St. Louis. Abandoned house places looked out with blank windows from every hollow and valley in the Ozark mountains so that at night the wind sang through the disintegrating chinking as if through a bone flute.

Adair Colley had just turned eighteen in early November of 1864 when the Union Militia arrested her father and tried to set the house on fire. Her sister Savannah saw them first; a long line of riders in blue trotting in double column as they turned into the road that led to the Colley farm.

All through the last three years of the war Adair’s father had tried to keep his children close to home. Because he was a justice of the peace, he was called Squire, and the newspapers he subscribed to came addressed to Squire M. L. Colley. Her father had determined to stay out of the war and keep his children out of the reach of soldiers of either army and he had succeeded in this for three years. He read in the Little Rock paper that the Missouri Union Militia was being thrown together out of troops dredged up from the riverfronts of St. Louis and Alton, from the muddy Missouri River towns. Men who joined up for a keg of whiskey and five dollars a month.

The trained and disciplined Union troops had long ago been sent to the battlefields of the East, to Virginia and Tennessee, while the hastily recruited Militia had been sent down into the Ozarks to chastise the families whose men had gone to the Southern Army, to catch and arrest them when they returned from their six-month enlistments, and to punish those who might be suspected of harboring Southern sympathies.

Adair’s father did not know what the law was on this matter, concerning men who had been in the Southern Army and had returned home and were soldiers no longer, or those who had never joined up at all but had no means of proving it. But it was no matter, for the Union
Militia knew no law. After they burnt down the courthouses they then began to ambush the mail carriers, so the southeastern Ozarks seemed a place cut off from the entire world.

Adair’s father read to them in the evenings out of the rare newspaper he managed to acquire, the Memphis
Appeal
and the St. Louis
Democrat.
Adair sat on the clothes trunk to stare at the fire and listen to the inflamed prose of the
Democrat.
She would rather he read the racing news from the Nashville paper, for she wanted to hear if Copperbottom’s sons were running but the war consumed everything, even human thoughts and horse races.

There are four main rivers coming down out of the southeastern Missouri Ozarks into the Mississippi. They are the Eleven-Point, the Current, the Black, and the Saint Francis. For three years Adair had seen at a distance soldiers of both armies riding up these river valleys in search of one another. Her brother, John Lee, rode to the ridges to stand watch for them every morning, for the Fifteenth Missouri Cavalry under Colonel Reeves would take your horses as quick as would any Militia. He watched for their smoke, at dawn when the soldiers would be lighting their breakfast fires. He did not go to war himself for he had a withered arm. So the Union Militia raided and set fire to the outlying places all around the Colley farm but continued somehow to miss them.

All through this time Adair’s father remained absorbed in his books of law, his newspapers passed from hand to hand down the Wire Road or the Nachitoches Trace by neighbors or one of the few travelers. The light fell from the twelve-paned windowlights onto the harvest table as he wrote, arguing to editors the causes and the Constitutional points of the war in letters that became harder and harder to mail.

As the war dragged on, Adair began to hear from her cousins and from what neighbors remained to them that women were being taken by the Union Militia and sent to prison for disloyalty, that the women were accused of supplying clothing and food to their brothers, their fathers, husbands, sons, or cousins who rode with Timothy Reeves.
That the Union had arrested and sent away the Blakely sisters and the Sutton girls and old Mrs. Holland from Jack’s Fork. Nobody seemed to know where it was that the women were being held in that far city, but after a while word came back that it was in places called Gratiot and the St. Charles Street Prison for Women.

In stained coats of Federal blue the Militia came upon the towns of Doniphan Courthouse and Alton, the Crites homestead and all the house places down Pike Creek and the Current River, carrying away jewelry and horses, quilts and silver, to be sold on the black market in St. Louis. They burned houses and shot whoever got in their way. They beat Adair’s father in the face with such force Adair thought they had put his eye out. They used a wagon spoke and afterward they threw it away stained with his blood and hair.

The Militia got the horses and then broke their way inside the house. One soldier started shoveling the coals from the fireplace out over the floors and onto the big harvest table, while another tipped over the china cabinet and started dancing up and down in the dish fragments, singing,
Oh sinner, come view the ground, where you shall shortly lie.
 . . .

There was a thin November snow coming down at that time from behind the Courtois Hills, light skeins of snow unwinding themselves over the valley of Beaverdam Creek. Then it turned to a hard rain. It was this that saved the house. The cold rain came down driving like hail, and steam blossomed hot out of the fireplace where water was streaming down the chimney. A strong wind came up out of the southwest and blew off Adair’s bonnet and tore at her bonnet strings until she thought they would cut her throat.

While the girls fought the fire the Militia carried out everything from the house in the way of food or valuables that they found. They came out of the house with their coat collars turned up against the rain, their arms loaded, and between the door and their wagon was a trail of spoons and bobbins and trodden paper. Then they went on, taking her father away in their commissary wagon with his arms tied behind him
and without a hat. The rain beat into his face, and the blood ran draining down in thin streams. Then the tilting wagon and the soldiers went off into a world of hammering water and the iron tires were surrounded by a thin halo of spraying mud. By evening the Little Black River had risen to flood stage.

So it was in the third year of the Civil War in the Ozark mountains of southeastern Missouri, when Virginia creeper and poison ivy wrapped scarlet, smoky scarves around the throats of trees, and there was hardly anybody left in the country but the women and the children.

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