The Improbable Journeys of Billy Battles

Foreword: Ted SaylesWhen book 1 ended, my great-grandfather William Fitzroy Raglan Battles was aboard the SS China headed for what in 1894 was considered the Mysterious East. His life had taken a tragic turn for the worst, and his way of dealing with it was to put distance between himself and the past—even if it meant leaving loved ones behind. When I read the tapes, journals, letters, and other records Great-Grandfather Battles left behind for me, the reasons for his impetuous voyage to distant lands seemed to me dubious and ill-conceived. Of course, given the misfortunes that had befallen him, it is not for me (or anyone else, for that matter) to say that he made a wrong decision to escape his past. Who knows how bereavement and torment can influence and occupy another person’s mind and soul and how it can drive one to make disputable decisions? In my great-grandfather’s case, his anguish and grief over losing his wife apparently required relief that could only come from some distant quarter. In his journals, he attempted to explain, if not justify his actions. As I poured through those journals and other materials Great-Grandfather Battles left for me, it was obvious that I was witnessing a boy mature into early manhood and then middle age. I felt a professional kinship with my great-grandfather—we were both journalists, though he was much more of a participant in the events he wrote about than I had ever been. As Billy grew older, he also became more complex, and so did the challenges he faced. His writing reflected this process. As I read through his journals and letters, the torment and regret Great-Grandfather felt was palpable to me in his writing. His mood shifted from the wide-eyed, eager, and naive teenager who left Lawrence, Kansas, in 1878 to that of a man approaching middle age who had both inflicted and suffered significant pain. He had survived attempts on his life and had taken lives. He had lost the woman he loved to a fatal illness, and he essentially abandoned his five-year-old daughter in an imprudent pursuit of solace. Just as Billy did in his journals, I have broken the one hundred years my great-grandfather spent on this earth into three parts. Book 1 dealt with approximately the first third of Billy Battles’s existence in Kansas and other areas of the American West. Book 2 finds Billy in the Far East, Latin America, and Europe and ends with Billy approaching what for many men would be a more sedentary age. But as I discovered in reading his journals and listening to the tapes my great-grandfather left for me, retirement or any notion of retreating into sequestration was never an option for him. Life for Billy Battles never slowed down, and I have a hunch that is why he remained vigorous and healthy for a full century. My only regret is that when I met him and talked with him almost fifty years ago, I was barely an adolescent, and he was already ninety-eight years old. Had I been older and a bit wiser in the ways of men, I am confident that I could have amplified much of what Great-Grandfather wrote and told me with added insight, sensitivity, and depth. As it is, I have done my best to convey Great-Grandfather Battles’s temperament and character in the course of his assorted deeds and exploits with as much truth and passion as possible given the yawning gulf of time and the disparity that inevitably separates age and youth. What follows is Billy’s improbable story in his own words. Ted Sayles, Kansas City, Missouri.