Guardian Guerrillas

This is the fascinating story of Frank James, Jesse James older brother, as a bushwhacker in Quantrill's Partisan Rangers during the Civil War. The actions of this brash, Shakespeare quoting young man represents the best and worst of guerrilla warfare in those turbulent and violent times.

After fighting as a Confederate soldier at Wilson's Creek, captured and paroled, he returned home as a cocky nineteen-year-old barely staying out of jail. He joins Quantrill's bushwhackers with escapades that are full of daring and bravery, sometimes cruelty, but also with humour.

We follow him through the many skirmishes and battles including the raids on Lawrence Kansas and Centralia Missouri and the critical events that precipitated them, the women's prison collapse where several bushwhacker relatives were killed or injured and the infamous "General Order Number 11" that forcibly drove out all residents of an area over 2,200 square miles, twice the size of Rhode Island.

The characters in this work include soldiers, generals, politicians, crooks, thieves, farmers, bankers, lovers, wives, and sisters that suffered or caused suffering in this oft untold American history and their post bellum lives that were fraught with danger, excitement, success for some, failure for many, with ironic, karmic twists.

What drove these young men to become Jayhawkers and Bushwhackers? Were they blood thirsty cutthroats or Guardian Guerrillas?