Introduction
1141 Words
Introduction
William F. R. Battles
Kansas City, Missouri, 1949I spent most of my life as a newspaper scribbler,
what they call a journalist today. So I appreciate how important it
is to seize your readers early on so they will keep reading.
However, there are some things that I need to explain before I get
to this next very turbulent time in my life.
As I am writing this, it is early 1949; and
even though I consider myself blessed to have so far avoided my
second childhood, the filaments of my ripe old brain sometimes get
about as limp as worn out fiddle strings when I exercise them too
much. Nevertheless, I have recorded to the best of my memory and
ability the incidents that transpired as I made my way to French
Indochina aboard the SS China in 1894.
Readers may conclude that my reasons for
leaving the United States for the Orient were self-centered and
vague. If you read the initial installment of my tale, then you
know the first thirty-three years of my life were fraught with
tragedy of one kind or another—some of it of my own making but much
of it the result of what others did. As I said in that first book,
I need to acknowledge the corn about some pretty terrible things I
did during my life.
I have killed people. And people have tried
to kill me. I never wanted such a life, but it was thrust on me,
and I had to make the best of it. Even though most of those violent
altercations occurred early in my life, their repercussions were
relentless and unwelcome companions as I grew older. They still
are, even now at my advanced age. I wanted to let you know all of
that so you can make up your mind right now if you want to read
further.
I had my share of tragedy and misfortune
too. If you read the first part of my story, then you know I lost
my wife to a cruel disease after only eight years of marriage. You
will also recall that my response to that tragedy was to fog it out
of the country. In doing so, I left everybody I loved behind. Those
included my five-year-old daughter, Anna Marie; my mother,
Hannelore Battles; my in-laws Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius McNab; my
cousin Charlie Higgins; and a lot of other people whom I considered
good friends.
Some folks may think my flight to the Orient
a craven act—one that any man worth his salt would never
contemplate, let alone carry out. I cannot disagree with that
condemnation. I felt that way often as the SS China made its
way to the Far East. Even later on, after I had settled in places
like Manila and Saigon, I would reproach myself for what I had
done.
Had I been indicted and put on trial for my
actions, and were I the judge and jury, I certainly would have
found myself guilty of appalling judgment, capriciousness, and even
child abandonment. As it was, there was no trial and no conviction,
but I was a guilty prisoner of my impropriety nevertheless. Never a
day went by when I didn’t regret leaving my little daughter behind
in Denver for others to rear. As my mother pointed out to me more
than once when she attempted to dissuade me from my journey to the
Orient, I was raised without a father. Now my daughter was about to
suffer the same fate. It was a brutally compelling argument, but I
was not to be deterred.
And so
here I was aboard the SS China en route from San Francisco
to our first port of call—Honolulu, the Republic of Hawaii. Back
then, Hawaii was an independent republic, not the annexed territory
it is today.[1] As I would learn, Americans in
1894 were considered unwelcome interlopers by many native
Hawaiians. They were seen as greedy exploiters who were interested
only in manipulating and profiting from the sugar and pineapple
industries.
The first day aboard the SS China had
been eventful, to say the least. I had been questioned by a surly
Pinkerton detective who was trying to locate Nate Bledsoe—the man I
had killed five years earlier in a gunfight at Battles Gap, my
family’s homestead in western Kansas.
Ten years before that, I had killed Nate
Bledsoe’s mother, a malevolent woman who had imprisoned Horace
Hawes, the owner of the Dodge City Union; Ben Minot, a printer; and
me in a barn at the same place. Her death was an accident. Her
sons, Nate and Matthew, began shooting at me and my two companions
as we were escaping. As I returned fire with my Winchester rifle, a
single bullet hit Mrs. Bledsoe in the throat just as she stepped
out of the house and onto the porch where her sons were shooting at
us. She died instantly.
Later in this scrap, Matthew Bledsoe was
killed by Ben Minot, a friend and coworker of the Dodge City Union.
The Bledsoe clan was influential in Kansas in those days and had
considerable pull in Topeka, the state capital. They were not about
to let the shooting deaths of two of their kin go unpunished even
if this particular branch was known to live outside the law. For
the next several years, they hunted me down and, on two occasions,
came damned close to killing me.
Now five years after I and several members
of a wildcat U.S. marshal’s posse had shot it out with Bledsoe and
eight of his companions at Battles Gap, I was under investigation
by the Pinkerton Detective Agency. It had been hired to determine
if Nate Bledsoe was dead or alive and, if the former was the case,
where his bones were buried. Of course, I knew exactly where Nate
Bledsoe was—or what remained of him—and I sensed that the Pinkerton
man knew that I knew. But I would be damned if I were going to
admit it. Let’s just say I was “economical with the truth,” as my
cousin Charley Higgins used to say.
My ongoing trouble with the Bledsoe clan
could have been another reason for my voyage to the Orient had I
wished to rationalize it that way. But of course, I was not running
away from the Bledsoe clan or the ghosts of the two Bledsoe’s I had
eradicated or even the Pinkerton Detective Agency.
I was running away from myself, though at
the time I didn’t know it. Nor did I realize what I was moving
toward and how my travels and trials would transform me in ways I
could not have imagined.
Of course, those thoughts were furthest from
my mind that first evening aboard the SS China. I had, after
all, been invited to have dinner at the captain’s table in the
first-class dining saloon with a few other passengers, among them,
the mysterious and stunning widow Schreiber.
- Writer
