AiRMail 7/16/24

I think this qualifies as Historical Fiction.
I read that the term “glittering bait” is attributable to William Tecumseh Sherman, who referred to the appeal of war in this way.
 
                                           The Glittering Bait of War
‘These people they’d risk anything for you. We can get you safely to Canada sure enough.’
          The young man’s voice was soft and low, but clarion-clear as it passed between the bars. He was steady on his haunches. No sign of the intoxication that had landed him in the Jefferson County jail the night before. He’d lowered himself to a stoop in order to draw himself level to the old man on the other side who rested awkwardly on the stone floor, back to the wall.
            ‘Your plan is well intentioned, son,’ John Brown said. ‘I don’t know as it would meet with success. But no matter. God has other plans for me.’
            ‘All respect, Sir, but God helps them as helps themselves.’
Brown closed his eyes momentarily. ‘I’m old. I’m badly injured,’ he said. Then he opened his eyes again and turned their feverish intensity on his visitor. ‘I can do more for God’s children by dying at the end of a rope than ever I could do by living, even if it were for a hundred years.’
            Silas Soule knew that look, but he wanted to press his contention. Brown sensed it. He’d already noticed how, in the few years since they first became acquainted, Silas had affected an Irishman’s manner, even claiming to be of Irish – not Dutch – stock. Fast talking. Usually slow and deliberate in his own speech, Brown cut Soule off before the boy could muster his charm.
            ‘You’d honor me if you’d get the word out,’ Brown said. ‘Talk to the ministers, to the reporters, the politicians. Speak to the people. They know the time is coming. Speak the truth. Tell them to be strong. will you do that, Sile?’
            Soule lowered his chin in a gesture like a nod. He knew the discussion was over, John Brown would not allow himself to be rescued, he’d go to the gallows a martyr. But Soule wasn’t making any promises either. He said his good-byes and called for the deputy to escort him from Brown’s cell.
            John Brown never asked Silas Soule how he’d managed to get in to see him. Few were being given that privilege. But Brown knew Soule from his days in Kansas, knew his family. The Soules had come to Kansas as part of the Emigrant Aid Society, hell-bent on ensuring Kansas did not become a slave state. Their home was a way station on the Underground Railroad and as a teen-ager Silas actively engaged in conducting the hunted to freedom.
            Of course Brown had heard about the now twenty-one year-old’s daring exploits in Missouri earlier that year, when he executed a jailbreak for abolitionist John Doy. Doy had been convicted of jayhawking following a failed attempt to aid a group of enslaved people escape from bondage, an attempt that Soule had also been a part of. So neither was Brown surprised to learn the day after they said their adieux that Soule had beguiled his way back into the Jefferson County jail and made the same offer of rescue to several of Brown’s confederates.
            They, too, declined Soule’s offer to spring them.   
            Temporarily stymied in his efforts to turn the world on its head, and wanted or under suspicion in every state south and west of Maryland, Soule went in search of a new adventure. The Texas Rangers offered one possibility. Fighting Indians had some appeal, but Texas, a slave state, held no charms. He heard the slavery sympathizer James brothers, Frank and Jesse, were making a name for themselves with their robbing and gunslinging. Soule could cut and run with the best of them and could outshoot most, so taking it to the James gang and others of like ilk was tempting. But that would require organizing a gang of his own, and as he was fresh out of funds, and of a mind to gamble, Soule decided instead to try his luck with gold prospecting in Colorado.
            It wasn’t the adventure he’d hoped for, and he soon grew weary of storytelling and practical jokes as the sole form of entertainment. He wanted for cash but prospects were tumbleweeds. In the habit of spending money as fast as he made it, even if he’d struck it rich, which he didn’t, Soule would not likely have succeeded at Pike’s Peak. To support himself, he hired himself out as a blacksmith. Soon he began scheming how to marry a rich widow.
            Before he could work out the logistics of finding marital bliss, Fortune took another turn. War broke out between factions of the United States, just as John Brown had prophesied. Friend of the family Kit Carson recruited Silas to be one of his western scouts for the Union army. Anxious to be released from the drudgery of a laborer’s existence, Soule took what Tecumseh Sherman called “the glittering bait” of battle and joined a Colorado infantry regiment. Shortly after halting a confederate incursion into New Mexico, the regiment was officially converted to cavalry.
            Late in 1864, Sherman was crossing the state of Georgia with federal troops on his march to the sea. With the southern Rebs out of the way, troops out west turned their attention to the Arapaho and Cheyenne, confined since the mid-century gold rush to a hardscrabble corner of the Colorado Territory. Native warriors, unwilling to succumb to the deadly future predestined by every dubious treaty, were agitating and targeting encroaching settlers. Soule participated in the fighting and played a part in negotiations purported to bring a peaceful accommodation. When the accommodation resulted in a planned massacre of peaceful tribal members at Sand Creek, Soule refused orders to attack and instead wrote a lengthy letter to Army brass justifying his insubordination with a detailed account of the events that unfolded. Two months later he was a star witness at the Army’s investigatory hearing and celebrated as a hero. Allegations that Soule himself had profited from the massacre, walking off with a large stash of Indian blankets, were never taken seriously.
            The Civil War was coming to a close. On April 1, 1865, still haloed with the afterglow of his Sand Creek testimony, Silas Soule wed nineteen-year-old Hersa Coberly, daughter of a widowed innkeeper, in Denver. Not the rich widow he’d planned on, but love was its own adventure. Just over a week later, on April 9, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox. Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth on April 14 and died the following morning. On April 23, on the streets of Denver, Silas Soule, too, was gunned down. No one really knows whether he was a martyr to the truth or just another hustler killed in a street fight.