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Their father was Henry W. Younger, who settled in Jackson county, Missouri, in 1825, and was known as a man of ability and worth. For eight years he was county judge, and was twice elected to the state legislature. He had fourteen children, of whom five certainly were bad. At one time he owned large bodies of land, and he was a prosperous merchant in Harrisonville for some time.
After Lexington, Quantrell went with the command as far as the Osage river, and then, with the consent of his officers, came up the Kansas line again to settle some old scores with the Jayhawkers. I was only seventeen when Col. Mockbee gave a dancing party for his daughter at his home in Harrisonville which was to terminate seriously for some of us who were there.
They were there bright and early to see that she carried out her agreement, so, leaving her burning walls behind her, she and the four youngest children and “Suse” began their eight mile trudge through the snow to Harrisonville. I have always felt that the exposure to which she was subjected on this cruel journey, too hard even for a man to take, was the direct cause of her death.
In one of Jennison’s first raids, the Younger stable at Harrisonville was raided and $20,000 worth of horses and vehicles taken. The experiment became a habit with the Jayhawkers, and such visits were frequent until the following fall, when the worst of all the indignities heaped upon my family was to be charged against them—the murder of my father.
When my father returned from Washington and learned of these outrages he went to Kansas City, Mo., headquarters of the State Militia, to see if anything could be done. He had started back to Harrisonville in a buggy, but was waylaid one mile south of Westport, a suburb of Kansas City, and brutally murdered; falling out of his buggy into the road with three mortal bullet wounds.
All this was cruelty, indeed, and enough to harden and embitter the softest of hearts, but it was mild compared with the continuous suffering and torture imposed upon my mother during the years from 1862 to 1870. After the murder of my father she was so annoyed at her home in Harrisonville that she sought peace at her country residence eight and a half miles north of town.
As Quantrell and his men rode away in the direction of Dave Daily’s neighborhood, I told Elkins to hit out West until he came to the Kansas City and Harrisonville road, and then, under cover of night, he could go either way. I shook his hand goodbye, slapped him on the shoulder, and have never seen him since.
Though a slave-owner, father had never been in sympathy with secession, believing, as it turned out, that it meant the death of slavery. He was for the Union, in spite of his natural inclinations to sympathy with the South. A demand that I surrender was conveyed to my father by Col. Neugent, who was in charge of the militia at Harrisonville, again charging that I was a spy.
In proportion to the number of men engaged, Lone Jack was one of the hardest fights of the war. That night there were 136 dead and 550 wounded on the battlefield. With two big farms in Jackson county, besides money-making stores and a livery stable at Harrisonville, my father at the outbreak of the war was wealthy beyond the average of the people in northwestern Missouri.
From Harrisonville she went to Waverly, where she was hounded continually. One of the conditions upon which her life was spared was that she would report at Lexington weekly. It was during one of her absences there that our enemies went to the house where she had left her family and demanded that they turn over the $2,200 which had been overlooked when my father was murdered.
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