Baker was then charged with the crime and he confronted one of the witnesses, Wesley Bailey, at his home, shot him in both legs with a shotgun, and left him lying in front of his house. Bailey died a few days later. While he was there he stabbed a man named Wartham to death in an argument about horses in and afterward fled back to Texas.
But he soon returned to Arkansas when he learned he was still wanted to face murder charges in the killing of Bailey. While he was gone, his wife Martha gave birth to a baby girl, Louisa Jane on May 24, The next year, he briefly returned to Texas to retrieve his wife and daughter.
His wife died on July 2, , and Baker took their child to Sulphur County, Texas and left her there with his in-laws. He never saw his daughter again. In July , he married for a second time to Martha Foster, who was unaware that he was wanted for murder.
His name is on the muster roll for September-October , and he received pay through August 31, but he is designated a deserter on January 10, Their objective was to pursue and capture deserters from the Confederate Army, but instead, they took advantage of most of the men being away at war and committed atrocities of intimidation, rape, theft, and violence. Any man who had property was considered an enemy and was declared to be a Union man. The depredations in some areas became so bad that everyone who could, left the area.
Both bands ranged through Arkansas robbing, burning and murdering indiscriminately. In November , a small band of mostly old men, women, and children wished to flee from the turmoil and started west with their teams and valuables. He then assured the rest of the group that he would not kill anyone else if they would agree to return to their homes.
The event became known locally as the Massacre of Saline. Afterward, the local citizens had had enough and began active preparations to annihilate the murderous gang. However, when the ruffians got word of this, they fled with their booty and the many horses and mules they had stolen. At the end of , Baker was in a saloon wearing a Confederate hat in Spanish Bluffs, Arkansas when he was approached by four African American Union soldiers who asked for identification.
Baker turned to face them with his pistol drawn, shooting and killing a sergeant and the three other soldiers. When the war was over, one report tells that as he was making his way home, he came upon a group of travels in Sevier County, Tennessee. In the group was a black woman who he began to verbally harass and then shot and killed her.
He then settled down with his wife Martha near the Sulphur River area in southwestern Arkansas where he became the manager of the Line Ferry. But, it would be short-lived. Martha soon took ill and died on March 1, By many accounts, Baker was said to have deeply grieved her loss.
When his gang disbanded in December , Baker returned to his home in Cass County. There a small group of neighbors led by Orr, whom Baker had earlier attempted to hang, killed him and a companion on January 6, Legend has it that the whiskey Baker drank was laced with strychnine. Orr collected some of the reward offered for Baker. Baker may have had links with the Ku Klux Klan.
Although he began his killing long before that organization appeared, he abetted the Klan's rise to prominence. As an obstacle to federal Reconstruction, he became notorious in the Southwest and even drew the notice of the New York Tribune.
He received the nickname "Swamp Fox of the Sulphur" because of the area where he grew to manhood. Although he was not the legendary quick-draw artist some have maintained, writers have made much of Baker's prowess with a six-gun, his harassment of the United States Army, and his defense of "Southern honor" during and after the Civil War. Others see him as a mean, spiteful, alcoholic murderer. The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style , 15th edition, is the preferred citation for this entry.
In the midst of the Civil War he deserted the Confederate army to become a wanton guerrilla raider. He was clearly mentally disturbed, and his continual drinking deepened his psychosis. Yet despite his reputation as a vicious, homicidal, alcoholic deserter, Baker somehow managed to glean sympathy and even a measure of respect during an era of frontier gunplay.
The hot-tempered youth enjoyed hunting and became a crack shot but was prone to misbehavior, fistfights and heavy drinking. That fall, in a drunken rage, he bullwhipped an orphan boy. When middle-aged neighbor Wesley Baily came forward as a witness, Baker promptly shot him in front of his family and then fled to Arkansas. After his wife fell ill and died in , Baker left their little girl with in-laws and largely forgot her.
With the onset of the war the following spring, he returned to Texas and joined a Confederate cavalry company out of Jefferson. He soon deserted that unit and in February enlisted in another cavalry company at Linden, north of Jefferson. Baker soon headed up a band of fellow criminal mis fits that hid out in the southwest Arkansas bottom lands and swamps of the Sulphur River. Increasingly unbalanced and dissipated, he erected an effigy clad in her clothing.
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