Jerilderie Letter Jerilderie Letter

or ever allow his blood to get cold while such insults as these were unavenged and yet in every paper that is printed I am called the blackest and coldest blooded murderer ever on record But if I hear any more of it I will not exactly show them what cold blooded murder is but wholesale & retail slaughter something different to shooting three troopers in self defence & robbing a bank. I would have been rather hot-blooded to throw down my rifle and let them shoot me and my innocent brother, they were not satisfied with frightening my sisters night and day and destroying their provisions and lagging my mother & infant and those innocent men but should follow me and my brother into the wilds where he had been quietly digging neither molesting or interfering with anyone he was making good wages as the creek is very rich within half a mile from where I shot Kennedy. I was not there long & on the 25th of October I came on Police tracks between Table top and the bogs. I crossed them and returning in the evening I came on a different lot of tracks making for the shingle hut I went to our camp & told my brother & his two mates me & my brother went and found their camp at the shingle hut about a mile from my brothers house saw they carried long firearms & we knew our doom was sealed if we could not beat those before the others would come as I knew the other party of Police would soon join them & if they came on us at our camp they would shoot us down like dogs at our work as we had only two guns. we thought it best to try & bail those up take their fire-arms and ammunition and horses & we could stand a chance with the rest We approached the spring as close as we could get to the camp as the intervening space being clear ground and no battery we saw two men at the logs they got up and one took a double barreled fowling-piece and fetched a horse down and hobbled him at the tents we thought there were more men in the tent asleep those (outside) being on sentry we could have shot those two men without speaking but not wishing to take their lives we waited McIntyre laid the gun against a stump and Lonigan sat on the log I advanced, my brother Dan keeping McIntyre covered which he took to be constable Flood & had he not obeyed my orders, or at-tempted to reach for the gun or draw his revolver he would have been shot dead. but when I called on them to throw up their hands McIntyre obeyed & Lonigan ran some six or seven yards to a battery of logs instead of dropping behind the McIntyre would have been shot dead if he had not obeyed my orders