Margin Notes: Four Bullets at Baler Bay
An inside look at my approach and processes, and some of the challenges faced
| Margin Notes| Start from the Beginning|
Release date: December 2, 2025
Hi, and welcome to the Margin Notes on Four Bullets at Baler Bay:The Story of Arthur Venville
Today, I’ll be sharing a little about where I found this lost & found story, my over all approach to the story, some of the challenges I faced in piecing it together, and a bit of historical context that didn’t make it into the finished story.
So let’s, see what we find!
Honoring a hero and his mother
I came across the article that became this story on page 10 of the July 22, 1900 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle.
As I later learned, there were a few errors in this piece, including the fact that Arthur was a Californian, which made my early research efforts a bit more difficult than they should have been. But the story was definitely compelling – a young sailor, wounded and left behind when his shipmates are trotted off into the Philippine jungles, his whereabouts more than a year later, still unknown.
Although the article in my teaser file didn’t include the term “POW,” it was pretty clear to me that’s what Arthur was.
I was two when the first American service member was captured and taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese in 1964, and I was just months shy of 12 when they were released during Operation Homecoming in the early spring of 1973. I remember sitting on the living room floor in front of our console TV and watching those men make their way down the gangway in jumpsuits. I remember my dad cried.
I didn’t know what to expect when it came to researching and retelling Arthur’s Prisoner of War story, but those images still live in my head.
A little bit of history
I knew diddly-squat about the Philippine-American War (1889-1902) when I started this project, and I bet I’m not alone. Often called an insurrection instead of a war – even though is lasted more than three years and resulted in an estimated 4,200 American dead, including Arthur Venville – the Philippine-American War is one of those forgotten wars in American history. It lives in the shadow of the Spanish-American War (1898), which lasted just three months, but resulted in Puerto Rico and Guam becoming U.S. territories, and – of special interest to this story – the sale of the Philippines to the U.S. for $20 million dollars.
Although the Spanish felt they had the right to sell their former colony to the Americans, the Filipino people had other thoughts. In January 1899, they constituted a new nation, the First Philippine Republic, named Emilio Aguinaldo as their new president, and set about establishing independence. For the first nine months, February through November of 1899, Aguinaldo and his forces fought a conventional fight. As a reminder, Arthur was captured April 12, 1899.
By late November, however, Aguinaldo realized he was outmanned and outgunned. His only advantage was intimate familiarity with the battlefields, and so he pivoted to guerilla warfare, which continued until U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt declared the “insurrection” over on the Fourth of July 1902.
That word, “insurrection” is important.
The U.S. government didn’t recognize the legitimacy of the First Philippine Republic. After all, they’d just purchased the Islands from Spain for $20 million, so, they saw Aguinaldo and his forces not as members of an enemy army, but as armed criminals, insurrectionists and rebels who needed to be put down to maintain American sovereignty. During the course of the war, an estimated 150,000 Filipino “insurgents” were taken prisoner by American forces.
On the other side, Arthur was one of just a dozen or so Americans held captive by the rebels, and one of two who died in captivity, the other being MacDonald, who was injured in the same attack as Arthur and, it was later revealed, buried alive.
I always think it’s important for me to understand the context of the stories I retell here, and Arthur’s story was no exception. My pre-writing reading list included books, websites, newsletters and publications. Here are a few of note:
An early decision
In the retelling of Arthur’s story, I made the early decision to tell it in the way it was revealed to his mother – sort of an irregular drip of information, misinformation, clarifications and retractions with the occasional gusher. It must have been agonizing for Emily and all of Arthur’s loved ones, and I really wanted to give the reader a taste of the anxiety they must have felt.
The first thing I did was create a timeline from April 12, 1899 through July 18, 1902. Then I populated it with details I’d taken from newspapers, letters, official documents and various publications. Easy peasy. The trick, however, was to make sure I only included those pieces of information that corresponded with the correct date.
Here’s one example around the events of April 12, 1899.
In March of 1900, Arthur’s commanding officer, Lieut. James Gillmore filed his official statement on the attack and subsequent capture of he and his fellow sailors. That statement appeared in newspapers including the Oregonian:
“Venville, apprentice, first class, for his bravery and coolness under fire, endeavoring to get a clip out of a Lee rifle for me, and, although wounded seriously four times, still persisting. He is a young man of exemplary habits, only seventeen or eighteen years of age, and showed remarkable coolness and bravery.”
But, in August and September of 1900, Gillmore’s vivid first-hand account of his experiences was published in McClure’s Magazine under the title, A Prisoner Among Filipinos, and it included a powerful description of Arthur’s heroism under fire during the initial attack:
“Venville, one of our apprentice boys, attempted to fix it. A bullet went through the flesh of his neck. “Mr. Gillmore, I’m hit!” he said; but continued to work on the rifle. A second shot plowed through the boy’s breast and came out at his armpit. “I’m hit again, Mr. Gillmore.” He was still trying to pull out the jammed clip, when a ball cut a furrow in the side of his head. “Mr. Gillmore, they’ve hit me again!” He wiped the blood from his brow and eyes with his coat sleeve and the returned to his task as calmly as if it were only a mosquito that had stung him. It was not three minutes till a ball crashed into his ankle, inflicting a painful hurt. There was a slight quiver in the lad’s voice as he looked up to me and said, “Mr. Gilmore, I’m hit once more, but I’be fixed the gun, Sir.” This beardless boy of 17 had never been under fire before.”
Because of my early decision in how I was going to tell the story, none of the above information could be included in my retelling of the attack. How could I? It wasn’t publicly known at the time, and in fact, it wouldn’t be known by anyone outside the captives themselves for nearly a year. Sharing it with readers ahead of time would have changed the entire story experience, not to mention the empathy for the mother generated through our shared sense of doom and tension.
BTW If you’re interested in reading Gillmore’s complete story as it appeared in McClure’s Magazine – and you might, it is compelling, here are those links:
August 1900 the story begins on page 291.
September 1900 the story begins on page 399
A local paper steps up in a big way
Arthur wasn’t a Portlander by birth, but by the time of his capture on April 12, 1899, he’d been living there for most of his life, and to the people of Portland, he was one of them. The local paper, The Oregonian, published nearly 50 unique articles pertaining to Arthur’s story between April 23, 1900, and July 18, 1902, often publishing multiple articles in each issue.
They were my go-to source for information for this piece and offered a remarkably personal POV on which to ground the story.
As a former small-town reporter, I’ve covered heartbreaking stories before, and I could totally relate to the fine line walked between keeping a concerned community informed, tamping down rumors and honoring the privacy of an anxious and grieving family. There’s humanity in telling the stories of people you see at church and at the local grocery store and school pickup line every day, and when smalltown reporters get it right, it brings people together in incredible ways. Kudos to The Oregonian.
Arthur wasn’t around to tell his story, so it fell to me to find folks who could – the surviving members of the Gillmore party. I found many of their voices in The Oregonian, but also in their own local papers – both during their captivity and upon their release. Every man’s experience was a little different, but again, when knit together, they provided a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the fierceness of that initial fire fight, the forced march through the jungle and the eventual rescue and return which filtered down into the story.
Later, of course, many of those same men write private letters to Emily Mash, Arthur’s mother, and a number of those were shared, in whole or in parts, in the local papers, and some of those first-hand accounts were used in my retelling.
The chilling details
Lieut. Gillmore wasn’t the only survivor of the Yorktown ambush to write about their experiences. Chief Quartermaster of the Yorktown, William Walton also shared his story of captivity, and the details were, at times, overwhelming. 1
On his injured companions:
All of the 500 shots were fired from that ambush, yet the bullets got but seven of us. Two men were instantly killed, two others mortally wounded, and three seriously injured. One of the injured sailors – McDonald – was helped ashore by me. His hurts were mortal, and death was in his eyes when we said goodbye to him. Two bullets lodged in his right leg. The first entered at the knee as he sat on the thwart and tore its way to the right thigh, shattering the bone. The second struck below the knee and ripped flesh and bone downward in a terrible fashion. Young Woodbury, who is still a boy, was shot in the right side. A bullet struck his cartridge belt, causing the ammunition to explode, and the shock toppled him overboard. One of the shots pierced his side, but he had strength enough to hang on and save himself from being swept away by the tide.
On his Filipino captors:
Our captors were a band of wild guerrillas, with no one to command them, and they did as they pleased. First off they stripped every man to his underclothes, even taking away our hats and shoes. To those who wore no undergarments, the Filipinos considerately left a pair of trousers. The fierce bolo men circled about with their long knives, jabbing and making passes at us as if to chop our heads off. I thought my cruise was up, and so did the other fellows.
On the forced marches he endured:
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