Chapter 11

Over the next four days, we visited two other outlaw camps and had the same kind of result that we had with the Jenkins gang. By the end of the week, we had 62 fighters who agreed to join us in the fight with the militia. Hank was the instructor for one group and Michael instructed at the other gang. Toward the end, I had to scramble to provide enough rifles for the last group, and that involved giving up some of our rifles. Fortunately, I had the raw material available and some help, so I was able to bring us back to having a rifle for everybody before we had to leave for the first battle.

We had so little experience working together that I assigned Henry, Thomas, and Michael to lead the three companies. There was some confusion and unhappiness at first because some men had to move to an unfamiliar gang to even out the number of men in each company, but the gravity of our situation was sufficient to smooth over that problem in about half a day.

I did something unheard of by assigning three women with a wagon to act as nurses for each of the companies. I did have to make a point that there was to be no sex until everyone had returned home, and that did piss some people off, but I said that they did it my way or they went home.

The three leaders of the gangs and I were to be the leaders of the battle, but we planned to stay out of actual combat so that we would not get in the way of the company leaders. That resulted in some heated arguments on strategy, but I managed to carry the day in every argument, mostly because I had a demonstrable history of being successful in combat against the militia.

We had our first battle with the militia just across the northern border of Dougherty County, but nobody was counting. This was almost identical to our last battle with the militia. The militia was strung out in a long column because we were in a thickly wooded area and the road was somewhat narrow along here.

All three of our companies were taking part in this fight, more for our education than for any other reason, and we had 94 fighters strung out along the road. They were all excellent shots with the conventional Enfield rifle, and the transition to the air gun was so easy that we were confident that the men would comport themselves well. Our line was approximately 930 feet long with a spacing of 10 feet between men.

Our plan was to start shooting when the head of the column reached the front end of our line. That meant that we could not be sure that the whole complement of militia men would be directly across from us, but that was not especially important. Each man was going to fire three or four aimed shots at the column and run like hell. All we were doing here was wetting our feet in battle and not actually trying to destroy the militia brigade in one stroke. Frankly, we were not sure of all of our men, and we wanted a chance to evaluate their performance without putting too much of a burden on them.

Our main point at this stage was to kill as many officers and sergeants as we could along with as many common soldiers as possible and get out before we were hit with organized fire from men who were supposed to be professionals. We expected our repeating rifles to give us a vast advantage over the other guys, but accidents could happen.

Anyway, Michael was leading the first company, and he gave out with a mighty shout of “FIRE!” at the appropriate time, and there was a loud and prolonged WHOOSH as the men fired. Of course there was no smoke emitted by our rifles to give away our location, and the WHOOSH was so unfamiliar that it was of no help in pinpointing where the bullets came from. All anyone could see was that officers, sergeants, and militia men dropped more or less together.

They knew that they were being shot at, but they could not pinpoint the location of any shooter. The militia was completely demoralized, and they tried to run. They threw down their rifles and took off toward the sides of the road. Only one side was available to them, and about 25% of the men escaped by running to the side opposite to us. Those who ran toward us were shot, of course.

When it looked appropriate, Michael shouted “RETREAT! RETREAT!” and our men dashed for their horses. It was not the most organized retreat in military history, but it did get the job done. Everybody assembled at a specified location, and we checked for wounded men. One man had a badly sprained ankle, and five men had minor scratches, none of them bullet wounds, and we were all amazed at how well we had gotten away with our first battle.

David went back to the road to estimate the militia losses, and he said that he thought that we had killed over 150 men, including all of the officers and most of the sergeants. This brigade had been eliminated as an effective fighting force, and we had to decide what to do next.

It appeared that all of the men who could do so were running as fast as they could go back home, and we had run out of people to fight. Hell, what else could we do: we canceled all further offensive operations and went home! The leaders did agree to join in if we had more militia to fight, and I could tell that they were very happy with the results of this battle. We just left the dead lying in the road as an example of what could happen to militia who tried to push us around, and we went home.

Just like at the other three camps, we had a major celebration when we got home, and I had no doubt that even more babies were started that night. It was over a week before some people came in to clean up the road. By that time, it stank to high heaven from rotting bodies, and everybody for several counties knew what had happened.

One interesting sidelight of the battle was that seven families asked to join us. They were from very small outlaw gangs, and they could now see the advantage of becoming a part of a large and effective community. Naturally, we accepted them, but we were somewhat hard pressed to find them lodging. Initially, they were housed in the unfinished fort, but cabins were built for them as soon as we could manage it.

Maudville had some long and loud debates about how many more people we should accept. I was of two minds: I wanted to take in anybody who asked, but I was worried that we would not be able to process as many people as might want to join us. I finally decided on the former option and figured that we would find a way to handle the latter problem.

Though I did not know it at the time, our greatest problem was soon going to be having enough drinking water. So far, that artesian spring was keeping us all supplied with drinking water, but we were already making an obvious dent in the supply. We needed to find additional water, but I was not sure where to look.

As soon as it became known that we would accept recently escaped serfs and slaves and we were not discriminating against anybody because of the color of his skin, we started getting people to show up asking for asylum. These were usually single men, but we did occasionally get families. I was glad to see them because every one of the males, and some of the females, were more than ready to join our fighting forces.

When these new people started to come to us in a steady stream, we were forced to set about enlarging our fort. The best solution that we could come up with was to put a second story on it. That second story was used to provide housing for the unmarried adults who came to us, and it was also used as temporary housing for the families until we could get cabins built.

We had standardized on two-room cabins with a loft for all of our new homes. We were running out of room, and it was not possible to expand all of our cabins into multi-room homes as we had originally intended. The one room cabin was no problem for Martha, Jacob, and me, but some of the families were really cramped. The new design for cabins alleviated most of that problem, and that was what we were forced to live with.