Bloody Bill Anderson

by Albert Castel

  It could have cost Anderson his life then and there. A dozen home guardsmen had been following the bushwhackers’ trail, and it led them to the farmhouse. Leaving one man behind to hold their horses, the guardsmen crept cautiously through a cornfield until within easy range, then opened fire with rifles and shotguns. Bullets and pellets poured through the house’s open door and windows, slightly wounding two of the women and a baby but striking none of the bushwhackers who, although caught by surprise and in several cases literally napping, reacted quickly, scrambling for cover and firing back with their revolvers.

  Terrified by the gunfire, one of the women ran screaming from the house out into the yard. Anderson yelled at her to stop, then dropped her with a bullet in the shoulder when she continued running. One of the captive guides, taking advantage of the turmoil, managed to slip away. The other bolted toward the cornfield. Several guerrillas fired at him but all missed, and it seemed that he, too, would escape. Then one of the home guardsmen, mistaking him for a bushwhacker, shot him dead.

  He was the only man that these amateur soldiers managed to kill, whereas just one bushwhacker suffered a wound—and it a mere scratch. Worse, some of the guardsmen’s horses, unused to the roar of gunshots, broke loose. Seeing this, and by now realizing that they were outmatched when it came to firepower, the attackers scurried back through the cornfield. The bushwhackers sprang out of the house, leaped into their saddles, and thundered off on the hunt. Some of the guardsmen managed to mount their horses; the rest fled on foot into the brush. Several were wounded but all escaped except one rider, a man named John Kirker. His horse stumbled, throwing him to the ground. A bushwhacker named John Maupin galloped up, shot Kirker, then jumped from his mount. Drawing a knife, he first sliced off Kirker’s scalp. Then he plunged the blade deep into the neck and sawed away until the head fell off. Still not content, Maupin stabbed and slashed the body before finally standing up, his hands dripping blood and his clothes splattered with it. Maupin was a recent recruit. Obviously Anderson’s band now had another member who enjoyed using a knife as much as Little Archie.

  Maupin’s grisly deed did not bother the bushwhackers—it would be a salutary warning to other civilians who had the temerity to attack them—but some of them asked Anderson why he had shot the woman. Wasn’t that going a bit far? With a shrug, he answered, “Well, it has to come to that before long, anyway.” In fact, for him, with Josephine’s death and Mary Ellen’s mangling, it had already come.11

  Having thus disposed of the guardsmen, Anderson’s party resumed its march, stopping along the way to pillage and burn two houses, loot a third, and take several men prisoners to serve as guides. Two militia companies gave pursuit, but it soon became dark, they lost the raider’s trail, and so stopped to rest for the night. Anderson pushed on until midnight, then camped at a farm near the Ray County line.

  In the morning he crossed into Ray County near a settlement named Russellville. Here, he and his men, all dressed in Federal uniforms as usual, met Russell himself and his son, a Union officer on leave. For a while Anderson talked in a pleasant manner to the unsuspecting pair; then he suddenly pulled out a revolver and shot the officer dead while another guerrilla, probably Clements, did the same to the father. Other bushwhackers stripped and robbed the corpses, after which they all rode away with, in the words of a local chronicler, “the wailings of the murdered men’s family in their ears.”

  A few miles farther they met a young man riding toward them on a mule. Anderson ordered him to halt and, when he did so, asked him what had now become the most-asked question in all of Missouri: “What are you?” Meaning: Are you Union or Confederate?

  Assuming from their uniforms that the bushwhackers were a Federal patrol, the young man promptly replied: “I am a Union man.”

  “Can you kill bushwhackers?” asked Anderson.

  “Yes, I can.”

  Normally the crack of a revolver shot would have followed these words and be the last thing to be heard by the unlucky young man. But Anderson decided that shooting him would result in too easy a death. Instead, he had his followers strip the man naked and whip him with switches until he was barely alive, his body scored with bleeding lacerations. They then tied the reins of the mule around his neck, attached the saddle to the mule’s tail, and turned the animal loose in the expectation that it would dash off, dragging its owner to death. Much to their frustration, the mule went only a few feet, then stopped. They then yelled at and pushed the mule, but to no avail—it did not budge, much less run. The guerrillas thereupon remounted their horses and rode away, probably assuming that their victim would die in any case. If so, they were mistaken. He survived to tell the tale of how his mule had saved his life by remaining faithful to the stubborn traditions of its breed.

  Although Carroll County militiamen sighted the bushwhackers several times, and although they numbered 124 as opposed to a mere dozen, they stayed far behind and were quite happy to turn over the chase to a contingent of Ray County militia. As a Carroll County historian later admitted, “It is but the truth to say that, while among the militia there were many men of undoubted great personal courage, the most of them did not court an encounter with the ferocious guerrillas, of whose fighting qualities they had heard such wonderful accounts, and whose horrible work some of them had seen.”12

  Anderson continued through Ray County into Clay County from where, after teaming up with a gang headed by Fletch Taylor and being rejoined by brother Jim’s outfit, he swept into Platte County, looting, burning, and killing, sometimes with a bullet, other times with a blade, and occasionally with both. Once he personally tortured a victim “in all manner of ways,” to quote the St. Joseph Herald, then cut off his ears and nose before putting him out of his agony with .36-caliber lead slugs.13

  Perhaps this atrocity temporarily sated Anderson. Possibly, too, even he now felt a need for a vacation from murder and mayhem. In any event, he returned to Clay County and spent most of the second week of August in a camp ten miles north of Liberty. For the time being his march of death ceased.14

  There never had been anything like it—over three hundred miles, across the breadth of Missouri, a railroad had been broken, telegraph lines cut, depots destroyed, towns captured and sacked, steamboats attacked, troops routed and slaughtered, civilians robbed and shot down, perhaps a million dollars in property gone up in flames—and all by a handful of bushwhackers. Worse, they had made it look easy. For years Union officers had argued that the main reason they were unable to stamp out the guerrillas was because the cowards lurked in their inaccessible hideouts and rarely risked their skins in a fight unless they held all the advantages. But now a tiny band of them had ridden with impunity by daylight through the very heart of Missouri. And emboldened by their success, they and other bushwhackers were sure to go forth and do the same again.

  But there was more to this Bill Anderson than his spectacular success. With him, something new had entered the picture, something that reached out with an iron fist and grabbed one’s throat. It was savagery—sheer, terrifying savagery. His killings were accompanied by acts so monstrous, so vicious, so depraved, it was hard to believe that he was human.

  So what was he? “Bandit” and “desperado” were utterly inadequate. “Monster” or “fiend” came closer to the mark but not close enough. Finally the editor of the St. Joseph Herald found the words that best conveyed what Anderson was to Missouri Unionists. Writing in the August 10 issue of his paper, the editor declared Anderson to be

  the most heartless, cold-blooded bushwhacking scoundrel that has operated in Missouri since the outbreak of the war. . . . His acts are characterized by a fiendishness and diabolism of the devil incarnate. Quantrell [sic], Todd . . . and others we might name have written their names high upon the pages of infamy, but Bill Anderson overtops them all in crime. His appearance in North Missouri is of a recent date, but in the few weeks since he commenced operation he has been guilty of more outrages than all others. Indiscriminate pl
under and murder seem to be his mission, and as we trace his career it is impossible to find where he has exhibited the least trait of humanity.15

  At the outset of July, Anderson had still been so little known that the Federals in their reports referred to him as “one Anderson” or “the guerrilla Anderson.” Now he had become “the devil incarnate,” the most ferocious and feared bushwhacker of all—and for Federal troops, the one they wished most and tried hardest to kill. Scarcely a day passed without the commander of the Union District of North Missouri, Brig. Gen. Clinton B. Fisk, telegraphing one or more of his officers to “exterminate” Anderson. But his soldiers rarely so much as engaged him, or if they did, usually it was they, not he, who got the worst of it.

  To begin with, they had trouble locating him. He knew where he was going; they didn’t. He had plenty of sympathetic civilians willing to shelter and feed his men and provide information about the “bluebellies”—where and how many. The Federals had their sources of aid and intelligence also, but not as many or as reliable. Consequently, in this particular chase the fox enjoyed an advantage over the hounds.16

  And this fox, if brought to bay, turned into a wolf—with deadlier fangs. Most of the Federals were militiamen, ill-trained, ill-mounted (if mounted at all), and worst of all ill-equipped. Maj. Lucius Matlock, commanding the garrison at Glasgow, spoke for the majority of militia officers when on July 31 he pointed out to General Fisk that “our muskets”—single-shot muzzle loaders—were “poor arms to fight bushwhackers,” who typically possessed four revolvers, whereas his men were “without one revolver.” Could “we not,” he plaintively asked Fisk, “be better armed?”17

  Last, but not at all least, some of the militia consisted of “Paw Paws,” Southern sympathizers who had been pressed into military service, and others who simply were afraid of the bushwhackers—above all, Anderson’s—because of what they did to any living, or for that matter dead, soldier who fell into their hands. As a consequence, whole companies of militia occasionally surrendered to guerrillas without firing a shot or else fled in wild panic at their approach—or what was thought to be their approach. In one case, a single Union officer put to flight fifty militiamen who mistook him for a bushwhacker!18

  Because Missouri had been stripped of troops during 1863 to bolster Ulysses S. Grant’s campaign against Vicksburg, only four regiments of regular Union cavalry operated in what the bushwhackers called their stomping grounds. Of these, the Second Colorado and First Iowa achieved at least some limited success, even though they, too, were handicapped by inferior weapons. The other two, the Seventeenth Illinois and the Fifteenth Kansas, were virtually worthless, if not worse. Their men, especially the Kansans, tended to consider all Missourians rebels and acted accordingly, plundering whenever and wherever they had the opportunity. On one occasion, for example, a company of the Fifteenth Kansas, whose commander was the notorious jayhawker Charles Jennison, ignored the thrice-repeated warning of the pickets of the Missouri militia garrisoning Harrisonville to halt and identify itself, and when told that he had barely escaped being fired on, the company commander answered that if that had happened, his men would have burned the town and killed every person in it. Such units and their conduct lent credibility to the bushwhackers’ claim that they were protecting and retaliating against Union depredations and so engendered civilian support that they might have otherwise not received.19

  Little wonder, then, that Bill Anderson and his gang felt utter contempt for their Federal foes and believed that they could whip them in any “fair fight”—defined as one in which the Federals did not enjoy the advantage of fortifications or overwhelming numbers. Up to a point, this attitude was an asset in that it gave the bushwhackers a sense of superiority, even invincibility, making them all the more formidable in battle. Beyond that point, however, it could turn into a liability by causing them to become overconfident and thus careless and reckless, as witness Anderson’s failure to be on guard against the assault by the Carroll County home guardsmen. Furthermore, most of the militiamen were staunch Unionists, they often had personal scores to settle, they were learning experientially how best to fight guerrillas, and a growing number of them were obtaining better weapons—specifically, revolvers. The time was coming when victory over their better units would not come easily or, if it came at all, tend to be so costly as to be hardly worth it.

  But that time had not come yet. For now, Anderson was the king of the bushwhacking hill, and, attracted by his reputation, dozens of recruits flocked to his camp north of Liberty. Among them was Alexander Franklin James, a lanky, blond, twenty-one-year-old who went by the name of Frank and who had followed Quantrill to Lawrence. With him came his sixteen-year-old brother, Jesse. The James boys, as they would be known to millions someday, lived with their family on a farm near the Clay County town of Kearney, so they did not have to travel far to join Anderson. Frank had served in Sterling Price’s army in 1861 and turned guerrilla the following year. Jesse no doubt would have followed his example in any case, but having been lashed by the whips of Union militiamen when they “visited” the James farm in 1863 gave him an extra incentive.20

  Anderson’s band, which hitherto had never numbered more than fifty, quickly increased to more than a hundred men. Most of the newcomers were, like Frank James, veterans of other bushwhacker gangs, notably that of Yager, who had been killed in July during a fight at Arrow Rock. But whatever their background, Anderson wanted and took only those whom he believed could be relied on to kill Unionists, Yankees, and Kansans—especially the ones in blue uniforms—with utter ruthlessness and who were willing to risk death themselves while killing. Thus, when a man described as a “desperado” asked to join up, Anderson turned him down, saying that he had heard the man was “a coward” and so didn’t want anything to do with him.

  “Try me, Captain,” the man pleaded.

  “It is no use,” Anderson replied.

  But the man persisted. Finally, losing patience, Anderson spit in his face. A second later “Bloody Bill,” as some had started calling him, lay sprawled on the ground, knocked there by a blow to his face.

  He stood up, but instead of reaching for a revolver, he rubbed his jaw and said, “Swear him in boys; any man that will knock down Bill Anderson surrounded by his men will do as a member of our band.”21

  All of the recruits knew full well what kind of war Anderson waged—which was another reason why they joined him. As one of them, Jim Cummins, later explained, “Having looked the situation over I determined to join the worst devil in the bunch [and] so I decided it was Anderson for me as I wanted to see the blood flow.”22

  And flow it did. Sending out word that the time had come to go on the warpath again, Anderson and his enlarged guerrilla gang headed east into Ray County. There, on the night of August 12, he routed a militia company at Fredericksburg, killing its captain and four soldiers. The next day Fisk, in his customary style, telegraphed the post commander at Chillicothe to “form an Anderson extermination party” and “follow him until he is dead,” adding in a second message that “Anderson is the worst of all, and he must be killed, or he will cause the death of every Union man he can find.”23

  Figure 4.1 Frank James.

  COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY.

  The following day 150 mounted militia picked up Anderson’s trail in Ray County. They had no trouble following it. South of Knoxville in Carroll County they came upon the corpses of two soldiers. One had been trampled to mush by horses’ hooves, the other had been scalped after having his throat cut. Further on they found a man sprawled dead in a wagon. There could be no doubt that Anderson was up ahead.

  At midmorning on August 14, the pursuers reached the Wakenda River. Here the advance, about fifty men, paused to water their horses and wait for the rest of the column to close up. Suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, bushwhackers charged into the shallow stream, their revolvers spewing a hail of lead. Several soldiers tumbled from their saddles, the remainder
scurried back up onto the west bank—only to be greeted with a shower of bullets from the main body of the militia, who mistook them for bushwhackers. The actual bushwhackers followed close behind, still firing. Some of the militiamen fought back, but on seeing most of their comrades fleeing, they had no choice if they wanted to live but do the same. Fisk’s “extermination party” lost at least eight and perhaps as many as fifteen, killed outright or mortally wounded.

  In contrast, only one guerrilla died in the clash, and although a large number suffered wounds, including Clements and Anderson himself, the sole seriously wounded raider was Jesse James, shot by a pistol through the right chest. His slightly wounded brother, Frank, left him with the family of a Confederate soldier to be sheltered and nursed back to health.24

  Figure 4.2 Jesse James.

  COURTESY OF THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF MISSOURI.

  Anderson pushed on eastward and crossed the Grand River that night. The next day he veered south and led his band through Chariton into Howard County. During the ensuing two weeks he operated in this general region, swinging northward to the vicinity of Huntsville and swooping south to around Columbia and Rocheport, leaving mutilated corpses and plundered farms in his wake. As before, Federal detachments scoured the countryside attempting to intercept or catch him. As before, they rarely succeeded; even when successful, the results were minimal, if not discouraging. Thus, in an August 21 (anniversary of the Lawrence massacre) dispatch to Fisk, a civilian scout reported: “The Seventeenth Illinois . . . yesterday had a fight in the Perche Hills with Anderson. . . . There were several wounded on both sides. The rebels scattered in every direction in such small numbers they could not be pursued by our forces. They go home to the old sympathizers, where they are quietly fed and protected until it suits for them to turn out again.”25