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Come all you bold robbers and open your ears,
Of Quantrell [sic] the lion heart you quickly shall hear.
With his band of bold raiders in double quick time,
He came to lay Lawrence low, over the line.
Oh, Quantrell's a fighter, a bold-hearted boy.
A brave man or woman he'd never annoy.
He'd take from the wealthy and give to the poor
For brave men there's never a bolt to his door.
Ang Lee's new film, Ride with the Devil, to be released in the late fall of 1999, is based on a remarkable, but relatively unknown book, Woe to Live On (1987), by Missouri author Daniel Woodrell. This grim tale of the Kansas-Missouri Border Wars in the early 1860s, culminating in the infamous Quantrill raid against Lawrence, Kansas in 1863, had first appeared in short story form in The Missouri Review in 1983.
The original short story is divided into three sections. In the first, "Coleman Younger, The Last Is Gone-1916," narrator Jakob Roedel. a second-generation German-American, is an old man who lives with his son, Jefferson, and grandson, Karl, in Saint Bruno, Missouri. Jake has just learned that his old friend and comrade in arms, Coleman Younger, has passed away.
In the second section, "I Have Been Found in History Books," the demise of Younger triggers Jake's memories of those bloody, violent days of the early 1860s when conflicts between Missouri pro-southern bushwhackers and Kansas free-state Jayhawkers led to the slaughter of thousands of citizens and soldiers and divided the loyalties of many families. As young men, Jake and Younger rode with William Clarke Quantrill's notorious Missouri border ruff ans. Disguised in Yankee blue uniforms, they wreaked havoc in Missouri and Kansas, raiding Federal camps and ambushing hapless citizens suspected of Union sympathies. In one particularly gruesome episode, they surround a German immigrant and his family. Despite his protests that he is taking his family to Utah Territory, they hang him, and Jake shoots one of his sons in the back. Jake is praised afterward by Younger and feels proud that he has proven his loyalty to the guerilla band: "It was for this that I searched, communion and levelness with people who were not mine by birth, but mine by the...