[The following is in regards to Newton Knight, a Confederate deserter in the American Civil War who returned to Jones County in Mississippi and fought a guerrilla war against the Confederacy.]
One afternoon a yeoman wife was working on her farmstead when a squad of Confederates rode up to her porch and demanded to know the whereabouts of her son, a member of the company.
”I don’t know where he is,” she told them.
”Yes you know. Now, tell us where he is.”
”Well,” said she, “I told you the truth. I don’t know where he is. But I can find out.”
She unhooked a large drive horn from the wall, stood up on the gallery, and blew a long note. After a moment, a distant blast answered. It was followed by another from a hillside and yet another from the brush. Soon the hills rang with a dozen answers.
The Confederate leader looked at his men. “Boys I guess we’d better get out of here,” he said.
One old man named Reeves was picking pears on Sally Parker’s property when rebel horsemen surrounded him and demanded to know if he had seen any of the guerrillas. Reeves decided to tease them. He replied, “Do you see that fence down yonder? Well there is two men in every corner of that fence ready to shoot.”
In his later years, Newton boasted of how he and his men taunted Lowry’s men, stealing up on them and scattering them with horn blasts and shotgun fire. On one such raid, a Confederate had trouble unhitching his horse and had been abandoned by his fellow troopers. As the rebel struggled with the tether, the Scouts teased him with gunfire, shooting to scare him but not to hit him, from different directions. When the rebel finally got his tether loose, horse and rider bolted down the road at a full gallop. “You could almost have rolled marbles on his coat tail behind him, he ran so fast,” Newton joked.
Source:
Jenkins, Sally, and John Stauffer. “Banners Raised and Lowered.” The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded from the Confederacy. Anchor Books, 2010. 201-2. Print.
Further Reading:
I've read that historians don't agree on how much of an impact he made and it seems like his legacy has passed into an almost mythical state. I know one family member wrote unfavorably about him while his son of course wrote favorably about him. Do you think his story has become part myth and part truth?