Clint Roberts took off his Union Cavalry hat, wiped his brow with his shirtsleeve, and then put the hat back on. He pulled the hat brim down to shield his eyes from the setting sun, and then gently touched his heels to Rowdy, the bay gelding he was riding.
As the horse walked through an unending ocean of green grass punctuated here and there by a few trees, Clint thought back over the past four years.
He'd been looking for something other than the Missouri farm with its unchanging routine of rise before daylight, milk the cow, feed and harness the team, eat breakfast and then at daylight, head the team to the field for the rest of the day. From April through late July, life on a Missouri farm was bearable. Between plowing, leveling the fields, planting the crops and then weeding those crops by hand, the fields had enough variation and the occasional moments of excitement to at least keep his mind occupied.
Between July and October there wasn't much farm work to do. Weeding the crops would have lost more grain than the weeds would have taken. Those months were the time the crops fruited and then dried enough to harvest. It wasn't a time for relaxing though. I was the time to cut, saw, and spit the wood that would feed the fireplace in the house during the winter. That time was a boring time for Clint. He still got out of bed at the same time, milked the cow at the same time, fed and harnessed the horses at the same time, and then ate the breakfast his father fixed at the same time.
After breakfast, he'd hitch the horses to the wagon, put a two-man crosscut saw and two axes in the wagon, and then he and his father would take the wagon to the small field in the bend of the river that marked their property line. After a half a day of cutting down an oak tree and sawing it into logs about a foot long, they'd load those logs in the wagon and take them to the woodpile beside the barn.
The next day, Clint and his father would spit those logs into quarters and stack the quarters beside the front door of the house. By the end of July, that stack would be eight feet high, four feet wide, and sixteen feet long. That would be about four cords of firewood but wouldn't last them all winter. Clint's father always figured they'd burn a cord of wood every four weeks until winter set in. Then they'd burn a cord every two weeks. That meant that from October until May of the next year, they'd need a total of about ten cords. They'd always cut enough logs for twelve though, in case the winter was unusually cold or long.
August and September doubled the size of the woodpile, plus another six wagonloads of logs that would be spit over the winter.
Clint had a little respite in October and November. October was when the corn was ready to pick and the oats were ready to cut and thrash. Those months were a lot of hard work, but at least they occupied Clint's days.
It was the winters that were so bad. Winters meant cold weather, even colder rain and once in a while a little snow, and the boredom of spending the day feeding livestock, cleaning out the barn, mending harness, or just sitting by the fire and wondering if this was going to be how he lived out his days. He thought that was likely because it was just him and his father, and his father was getting old enough he was turning more and more of the work over to Clint.
The only thing that made farm life more than just bearable for Clint was the horses. Clint couldn't remember the first time he'd seen a horse, but he remembered the first time he'd been on one. He was just five when his father sat him on Jake's broad back and let him ride there while his father drove Jake and Bill as they pulled the harrow over what would be that year's corn field.
He remembered holding on tight to the hames as the horses plodded along over the plowed dirt of the field. He remembered the feeling of the heavy muscles moving under him. Most of all he remembered feeling happier than he'd ever felt before.
As he grew older his father taught him about horses -- what they liked and didn't like, how to use a firm but gentle hand on the lines, and how to keep the horses in pulling shape. When Clint turned thirteen, his father traded three steers for two year-old geldings. They were to be Clint's horses, his father said, and it was up to Clint to take care of them and to train them to pull.
Clint had accomplished that with a lot of help from his father and more than a few tears when Jack stepped on his foot once. He'd been ready to start beating Jack, but his father stopped him.
"Clint, Jack just put his foot down after you finished cleaning his hoof. He doesn't know he did anything wrong and if you start beating him, you'll just make him afraid of you. Never ever beat a horse. A few words will remind him of what he's supposed to do if he needs reminding. Beating a horse will just turn him into a horse you can never trust, and since Jack will end up weighing a little over fifteen hundred pounds, he could kill you and not even know he'd done it. You need to be able to trust him with your life. The only way to get him that way is to teach him to trust you with his life."
Clint had taken that advice to heart and a year later, he was driving Jack and Jess with the harrow and following his father's team pulling the plow.
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The horses kept Clint on the farm, but he still wasn't all that happy with the rest of his life. Like all boys of eighteen, he wanted more. He wanted to be able to make decisions about his life, not just follow what his father said was right. He wanted a place of his own, a place where he could raise what he wanted to raise instead of what his father thought would bring in the most cash money.
It didn't look like any of that was going to happen anytime soon. He'd probably just stay on the farm, marry one of the local farmer's daughters, and eventually take his final rest in the family cemetery under the big maple tree beside the house. His mother was already there. She'd caught the grippe three years before and had died a week later.
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It was one of those harvest days in October of 1861 when Clint's life changed. There was about half an acre of corn yet to be picked and Clint told his father there was no need for both of them to make the half-mile trip through the trees to the small field. Clint harnessed Jack and Jess, hitched them to the wagon, and drove to the field.
Picking that field was slow going like doing anything in that field always was. The field wasn't very big, so Clint spent as much time turning the wagon into the next pair of corn rows as he did pulling the ears from the stalks and tossing them into the wagon. He planned to clear another acre around that field over the winter. That would give him something to do and would also make that field big enough to warrant planting in corn again. Every other year that field had been planted in grass for hay and because it was so small, haying took twice as long as on any other field.
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The shadows on the ground told Clint it was almost noon when he made the last turn. He looked up to see if the sun was overhead. He saw the sun, but also saw smoke coming from where the house and barn sat. At first, Clint thought his father had just tossed another couple logs into the fireplace. The morning was chilly and his father didn't take the cold like he used to. He said cold weather always set his knees to hurting.
As Clint watched, the cloud of smoke got bigger and then was joined by another. That couldn't be just smoke coming from the chimney in the house. Clint unhooked the heel chains from Jack and Jess' harness, hooked them on the rings on the breeching, unsnapped the reins and jockey stick, and then climbed on Jack's back and took the bit rings in his index fingers. He dug his heels into Jack's sides and started riding back to the house with Jess following.
Clint saw the fire in the barn and house just as he left the trees. He didn't see his father lying on the ground in front of the house until he rode around the barn.
When Clint ran up to his father, he didn't need to see if he was still alive or not. There were three holes in the center of his father's chest, his shirt was soaked with blood, and there was still blood seeping from the wounds to mingle with the puddle on the ground.
Clint sat down in grief, and stayed there until the tears stopped flowing. He looked around then and almost started to cry again.
The house was just a pile of smoldering ashes and the barn was nearly gone as well. The chicken coop gate was wide open and here and there a few hens scratched in the dirt. They were the remainders of what had been his mother's flock of fifty hens and six roosters, and they were oblivious to what had just happened.
Clint's heart pounded with rage when he went to the barn. There, lying in their stalls were Jake and Bill, each with a bullet hole in his forehead. He started toward them, but was stopped when the floor of the haymow above them collapsed in a flaming heap of bone-dry hay and burning timbers.
Clint understood all too well what had happened. The nearest town, Booneville, was about in the center of Missouri. North of Booneville, most people were anti-slave. South of Booneville, there were many large farms that used slaves to work the crops. Over the past five years, the area around Booneville had been subjected to raids, sometimes by the Bushwackers who, in theory, were trying to turn Missouri into a slave state. Sometimes the raids were by the Jayhawkers out of Kansas who, in theory, were trying to keep Missouri a free state.
