Researched and transcribed by Thomas Rose.

Jefferson City People’s Tribune

Jefferson City, Cole County, MO., Wednesday, January 6, 1874, pg. 1 col. 3

TERRIBLE M’WATERS

The Story of Daring Border Deeds

A Record of Dare Devil’ry

Which Reads Like a Romance.

Nebraska City Correspondent of the Chicago Times.

            Our district Court has just adjourned, and the notorious desperado, William McWaters has been sentenced to a term of twenty-one years at hard labor in the Lincoln Penitentiary.

            The ponderous gates have hidden the criminal from the world in which he regarded human life no more than a sportsman does a prairie chicken.  He was young in years, but graduated early among the bushwackers of Missouri, and is known from Nebraska to Oregon as the terrible McWaters – a living personification of just such characters as figures in dime novels and fill up the measure of glory in saloon literature.  His history will be written and do gown to posterity with that of John A. Murrill and other disturbers of society, and the long night of prison penance will only throw a deeper interest around his fate.

            William M. McWaters was born in Platte County, Missouri, the year after the great flood, 1844.  His mother was a Kentucky woman of superior character.  But we know nothing of his early days till at the moulding age of about twelve years he followed the proslavery raiders over in Kansas and then

LEARNED TO LOVE BLOOD

and hate the abolitionists at Osawatomie and other skirmishes.  In those pursuits he was a kind of free rover for two years.

            Soon after the rebellion broke out he joined a company of the boys who burnt the Platte bridge and precipitated a Hannibal & St. Jo. Railroad train into an awful chasm, killing many of the passengers, because Federal soldiers were among them.  Then he enlisted with Jim Giddon’s band and fought under General Price for six months.  On coming back home to Bee Creek he found the family residence burnt, his father and brother killed by the militia, and the rest of the family driven off in banishment.  So he associated himself with Bill Anderson, John and Fletch Taylor and other desperate bushwhackers, who resolved to sacrifice

A HUNDRED LIVES FOR ONE, 

in revenge; and did pick off Capt. Chesseman and thirty or forty of his men who were quartered in the neighborhood.  But the rising glory of Quantrell drew them over to Kansas again, where McWaters found congenial work in the sacking and burning of Lawrence.

            Quantrell afterwards carried his freebooters into Arkansas and there they fell out among themselves over a woman, and the sanguinary Bill Anderson drew away from Quantrell and raided back through Northern Missouri like a flame of fire over the prairies, carrying young McWaters in his train, who had many adventures more strange than fiction, and was assisted out of many hair-breadth escapes by

A FAIR HEROINE 

named Jennie Mayfield.

            At the close of the war we find McWaters keeping a saloon in Platte City, where he shot a man, and his friend, John Taylor was shot by the police.  He then escaped to St. Joe, which was seething with desperadoes from all parties, where his other friend, Fletch Taylor was shot dead by the police, and McWaters in return shot the policeman.

            By the aid of confederates, he got out of Missouri, and came to Wyoming, in this county, whereas a romantic attachment sprung up between him and a beautiful young lady, who was to have married his friend, Fletch Taylor, and he was the groomsman, and they were on the way up when the affray took place in St. Joe which ended the career of Fletch Taylor.  Miss Susie Davis wedded McWaters, and through thick and thin has idolized her husband – the one bright picture in this narrative.

            Two years ago, McWaters shot Dr. Wolfe dead in a row in Wyoming; and soon after, his brother-in-law, Woolson, shot Barlow dead, and is now serving a term in the penitentiary for it.  McWaters was cleared.  But about a year afterward, John Cook and he shot and killed an innocent man in Dold’s saloon in this city.  They were caught and sent up in an iron cage where it seemed they were very safe for trial.  But one evening, when the guards were shifting them, they managed to steal the arms and

AT THE PISTOL’S MOUTH, 

drove the guards into the cage, locked them in, and escaped on horses which had been placed outside by friends.

            In the Indian Nation the men separated in bad blood; and McWaters for whom a large reward was offered, was again caught at Hays City, Kas.  But while the sheriff’s posse was making the prison safe for him, he executed the old maneuver and suddenly shut about six of them inside while he escaped on the sheriff’s horse.

            He then made his way northward among the Black Foot Indians, and shot one of them dead over a bottle of whisky, and has his blankets yet, with the bullet holes by running the gauntlet of the whole tribe.

            We next hear of McWaters at the little town of Sparta in Baker county, Oregon, where he visited a relative and had

A FAMOUS NEEDLE-GUN, 

with which he murdered a man named Geo. Weed, with whom he had a quarrel in a gambling house.  The man had gone off some distance, but had on a soldier’s bluecoat; and McWaters could not resist the temptation of letting fly a charge at his brass buttons, shooting him in the back, and escaping to Sacramento City with a new reward of a thousand dollars offered for his arrest.

            But all this time sheriff Farbar, of Nebraska City, who smarted for his official honors, had detectives on his track; and Tom Tippet, who once lived here in the Seymour house with McWaters, spotted his lurking places; and he was suddenly

PINIONED BY THE OFFICERS OF THE LAW

and brought back to Nebraska City.

            The result has been told.  He has a dozen scars on his persons and bullet holes in body, and a dozen times has escaped from prison; and his rollicking stories would fill a book.  He is thoroughly educated in deeds of violence, and never talks about anything else with relish but “getting the drop” on some one.  He rides like a Comanche, and is as cool and wily as Modoc Jack.  His clear, steel eye never glows except with the excitement from an affray.  He has a fine figure and might have been a gentleman – an Aubrey or a Kit Carson.  But a man who always goes around with pistols to hunt up a fight is no longer desirable in Nebraska society and Judge Gantt has the praise of all parties in banishing him to a living grave.

THE SCENE

when his devoted wife and two pretty children were torn away from him, and he was ironed for the penitentiary, was such as the hardest hearts could not contemplate; and the officers of the court shed tears.  McWaters himself completely broke down; and the spirits of his many gory victims must have tortured his memory like “the worm that never dies,” and the voice of condemnation thundered in his ears, “The way of the transgressor is hard.”

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The above was written in 1874. In 1875, he made two daring escape attempts. On the first one he held the Warden and his wife hostage, but he didn't get away.

On the second attempt, he was stopped by two guards. He started to throw a rock at one of the guards, and the guard shot him and killed him.