'Noted Guerrillas,' John N. Edwards, 1877, Pp. 365-367:
"Gen. Bacon Montgomery has been accused by some of the Guerrillas, and unjustly accused, of the murder of Arch Clements. It is true that he was in command of the militia at Lexington at the time he was killed, but he was in no manner responsible for his death, and would have saved him if he could have done so. It was Montgomery's fortune to have to do with a desperate following.
The militia commanded by him were bad men, uncontrollable men, ex-Federals and ex-rebels, and totally without honor or civilized impulses. The bulk of them were the dregs of the civil war-the Thenardiers of a struggle that had its Austerlitz as well as its Waterloo. He was a brave, generous, liberal-minded man, individually, and he strove with might and main to protect private property and save human life. That he was not always successful was because almost unsupported in a band which carried into peace times the very worst of the passions of the strife, he could not in every instance enforce obedience or punish the viciousness of his desperadoes. Yet he did what he could energetically and fearlessly. Others in his place would have been monsters.
Montgomery saved many a life that even the people among whom he was stationed knew nothing of, and many a house from destruction that the owners to this day do not know were ever threatened. Dave Poole had been into Lexington with his Guerrillas and had gone out soberly and in order, Arch Clements marching with him. Outside of the city he met a comrade, Young Hicklin, who was going in, and Clements turned about and returned with him to the City Hotel. While drinking at the bar they were fired upon, and each made a rush for his horse, fighting as they ran. Probably two hundred shots were fired at them, and Clements was killed, Hicklin making his escape by sheer desperate fighting and running. Montgomery knew nothing even of the cause of this firing until the deadly work had been done. He deplored it, but he neither counselled it nor approved of it. A lot of drunken cut-throats did the work upon two isolated men, cut off from their comrades, which- man to man--they would not have attempted for the county of Lafayette.
Montgomery was too brave a man for such devil's doings. He felt that the war was over, and he was anxious that the Guerrillas should come back into peaceful life and become again a part of the peaceful economy of the local administration. In such mood he treated with Poole, and in such mood he would have treated with Clements if it had been permitted for him to have encountered Clements. It was not to be, however, and this young, superb, almost invincible Guerrilla, died as he had lived, one of the most desperate men the country ever produced."