John R. Kelso’s Civil Wars:
A Graphic History - Episode 22
More on the text
Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy, 255-6. Pinning notes to corpses was a practice the bushwhackers themselves had started. “Bloody Bill” Anderson had pinned a note to one of his victims the previous summer, proudly attributing the scalping and corpse mutilation to his right-hand man Archie Clements. Jim Jackson’s guerrilla band in the northeast made this a common practice, leaving notes pinned to the black men they murdered in the spring of 1865.
More on the Illustration
We had talked about maybe portraying the rebel eating the woman’s stolen bacon as the first shot blows up dirt at his feet. But I went in a different direction. I had been watching the film “The Revenant.” Nineteenth-century guys struggling to survive in the wilderness, out in the cold, fighting fur trappers and Indians. In one scene, Leonardo DiCaprio grabs his gun and aims to take a shot. So that’s where I got the idea.
The intensity of his eye—his whole pose—the careful aim and concentration. There’s closure here. The final shot.