John R. Kelso’s Civil Wars:
A Graphic History - Episode 19
More on the text
Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy, 209-11. Known for executing their prisoners, in March, 1863 Livingston’s Cherokee Spikes had captured two men in Kelso’s regiment who were outside the stockade at Granby, tending to a sick family. The guerrillas shot the soldiers as they begged for mercy. Kansas troops tried to track the Spikes into Indian Territory, but Livingston and his men disappeared.
On May 18 Livingston launched a surprise attack on 60 soldiers from two Kansas regiments, one being the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry. The Cherokee Spikes chased and cut down fleeing soldiers for eight miles, killing thirty and wounding twenty-eight. Nine days later Livingston was writing to Gen. Sterling Price at Little Rock, complaining about Black regiments “who have all the hellish passions belonging to their race” and pleading for reinforcements.
A few weeks after his aborted attack on Kelso’s men, Livingston was killed charging a small group of Union militiamen holed up in a courthouse.
More on the Illustration
The hands here echo other illustrations. The panicked soldier in the background with his hand on his head resembles Kelso among the horses’ hooves in “The Battle of Neosho,” and Kelso’s forehand on the gun appears again in “The Final Shot.” I had the other soldiers at portholes. I imagined them preparing to shoot and then trading places as they reloaded. An earlier sketch had Kelso at a porthole, too—you know, a space between the logs where they’d pushed out the mud. But it just didn’t feel right to me. I decided to give Kelso a small window to get more light coming in and to show a bit of the landscape outside. Still, the window is small enough to suggest, with the low ceiling, the claustrophobia that they all must've been feeling.