Bloody Bill Anderson

by Albert Castel

  Adding injury to insult, Baker then formed and led a posse in pursuit of Lee Griffin, a cousin of the Anderson brothers and a member of their gang, whom he rightly suspected of stealing two horses from his future father-in-law, a farmer named Ira Segur. Tracking the pilfered equines eighty miles to the west of Council Grove, Baker found one of them on a ranch, the other in the possession of a Mexican suspected of belonging to the Anderson gang. He took the horses and the Mexican back to Agnes City, then obtained a warrant for the arrest of Griffin.

  For the Andersons, father and sons, this was the ultimate offense. On May 11 they rode to Baker’s house and threatened to kill him unless he withdrew the accusation against Griffin. He refused, and since he had a number of armed friends and employees backing him, the Andersons returned home to await a more favorable opportunity.

  William Anderson Sr. decided not to wait long. The next morning, having primed himself with whiskey, he grabbed a double-barreled shotgun and rode to Baker’s house, where he yelled at him to come outside. When for obvious reasons his quarry stayed put Anderson stormed into the house and, ascertaining that Baker was in a bedroom on the second floor, started up the stairs. Baker stepped out of the bedroom onto the landing and let loose with his own shotgun. Anderson tumbled back down the stairs, a bubbling red hole in his chest. Whether or not Baker was aware that Anderson, prior to entering the house, had stopped off at Baker’s store for another slug of whiskey and that a close friend of Baker’s—to be precise, Eli Sewell, Bill Anderson’s former employer —had removed the caps from his shotgun, rendering it harmless, is unknown.

  Bill and Jim made no immediate attempt to avenge their father. Incredible as it may seem, according to some sources Bill even “made up” with Baker. But if so, then Baker did not trust him and suspected, with good cause, that the Anderson brothers were merely biding their time. Therefore, he obtained a warrant for Bill’s arrest on charges of horse stealing, presumably hoping that this would lead to his getting “short shrift and a long rope,” the fate that had befallen the Mexican found with one of Segur’s horses.

  A posse led by Charles Strieby—whom Bill had tried to recruit for bushwhacking in Missouri—soon located and arrested Bill, then took him before a justice of the peace. But instead of a quick guilty verdict and a legalized lynching, the official, no doubt to Baker’s dismay, released Bill on bond. That night Bill and Jim headed for Missouri and safety. Three weeks later a stranger with a wagon and team showed up at the Anderson homestead and took Mary Ellen, Josephine, and Janie to Missouri as well. They left behind the graves of their mother and father—and possibly that of their infant brother, Charles.13

  The Andersons had not made it in Kansas.

  Hence, Bill and Jim Anderson now stood in the shadows beside Baker’s store on the night of July 3, 1862. They intended to kill Baker and do it in such a way that before he died, he would wish that he never had been born.

  A stranger and at least two other men, one of whom was Lee Griffin, accompanied the Anderson brothers. The stranger was now at Baker’s house, telling him that he was the boss of a wagon train and wanted to buy whiskey for his teamsters so that they could celebrate the Fourth of July in proper style.

  Baker should have been on his guard. In fact, he was on guard, having heard that the Andersons were lurking in the vicinity, and he had therefore taken the precaution of placing extra cartridges on the sills of every window in his stone house. Nevertheless, he responded to the stranger’s request by saying that he would go to the store and get the desired whiskey. Strapping a brace of pistols around his waist, Baker set out for the store, followed by the stranger and George Segur, the sixteen-year-old brother of Baker’s new wife, whom he had married two days after killing William Anderson Sr.

  On reaching the store, Baker unlocked the door and went inside with the stranger and young Segur. While the latter lit a lamp, Baker offered the stranger a drink of whiskey but then saw that the bottle was empty. Taking the lamp, he pulled up a trap door and descended stairs leading to a cellar, where he refilled the whiskey bottle from a barrel. As he closed the gurgling tap, he turned around and saw Bill and Jim Anderson.

  “I was not expecting you here now, Bill,” Baker muttered.

  “But you do see me, Ingrham Baker,” Bill replied, “and I am the last man you will ever see, God damn your soul!”

  Faced with death, Baker did not blink. He whipped out a pistol and fired, striking Jim Anderson in the fleshy part of a thigh. Even as Baker pulled the trigger, Bill Anderson’s revolver roared, and a bullet left Baker moaning on the cellar floor. Bill and Jim then went back up the stairs, shot and wounded young Segur, and dumped him down into the cellar with Baker. Next they closed the trap door, piled boxes and barrels atop it, and set them afire. For a while they watched, their faces glowing crimson in the light of the crackling, leaping flames. When sure that Baker and the boy were doomed, they left the now-burning store and proceeded to torch Baker’s house, from which his wife and several other occupants had fled on hearing the gunshots and seeing the store burn. After setting fire to Baker’s barn for good measure, the Andersons and their companions rode rapidly through the night back toward Missouri, stopping at each stage station to obtain fresh mounts, thereby easily outdistancing a pursuing posse led by Charles Strieby. As the sun began to rise, they reached Missouri, their mission of retribution accomplished.14

  In the morning the men searching the smoldering remnants of Baker’s store found his body in the cellar. The head, arms, and legs had been reduced to ashes. Yet flames had not killed him. Instead he had shot himself in the head so as to avoid being burned alive. Young Segur, by crawling through a small window, had managed to escape from the cellar—but not from death. That afternoon he died after telling the tale, between gasps of pain, of how Bill Anderson, assisted by brother Jim, had claimed his first victims.15

  They would be far from his last.

  Chapter Two

  I’m Here for Revenge

  Western Missouri: July 1862–April 1863

  On returning to Missouri, Bill and Jim Anderson became, if not so already, full-time bushwhackers. At first they operated in Jackson County, to the south and east of Kansas City. But not for long. Early in the fall William Clarke Quantrill, chieftain of the largest and most successful partisan band in western Missouri, received complaints that the Andersons were robbing pro-Southern as well as Unionist civilians. At once he sent forth a detachment that apprehended Bill and Jim, took away their horses, and warned them to be more discriminating henceforth in their depredations or else they would be killed.1

  Following this humiliation—for which they never forgave Quantrill—Bill and Jim shifted their operations to other sections of western Missouri, in particular the area between Lexington and Warrensburg. They belonged, declared an editorial in the Lexington Weekly Union of February 7, 1863, to a guerrilla gang composed mainly of men from Kansas, one of whom had been Lee Griffin prior to his being killed “a short time since.” The captain of the band, also a Kansan, was a man named Reed, and “they all claim[ed] to be southern men,” thereby securing the “sympathy and protection . . . of the disloyal” wherever they went. In fact, though,

  They are the basest robbers ever left at large in a civilized community. They are the men who killed Gaston, Barker, Iddings, Phelps, King, Myres, and McFaddin—who have robbed every loyal man in that whole country [between Lexington and Warrensburg], of money, silver plate, blankets, horses, and everything else which could be turned into money. They boast of their deeds of daring and murder, their robbery of the mail and express at various times, and there is no act of villainy or cold blooded murder, where a dollar could be made, which they will not do.

  The editorial continued, “we confidently expected to overtake them,” but “winter has nearly passed” and “summer soon will be here again, and our troubles will be upon us, unless they are captured.”

  In spite of the Weekly Union’s warning, not only did the winter pass witho
ut the Andersons or any of the other Kansans-turned-bushwhackers being captured, but even before the official arrival of summer they participated in one of the most spectacular raids of the entire war.

  The Santa Fe Trail: May 1863

  No one in Council Grove had expected bushwhackers to show up there, 120 miles from the Missouri line by way of the Santa Fe Trail. Yet on the afternoon of May 4, 1863, there they were, two or three dozen strong, sitting on their horses outside the town and gazing at it like wolves contemplating their prey.

  Among them were Bill and Jim Anderson. Quite literally they had come home. The previous night the band had camped at Bluff Creek, and their faces must have been grim as they beheld what was left of the family cabin: nothing. Like the dwellings of many other Missourians who had resided along the Santa Fe Trail and were known or suspected of being pro-Confederate, it had been destroyed by Kansans determined to eradicate all traces of treason from their land (and in the process perhaps acquire some useful plunder).

  On the other hand, when Bill and Jim crossed Rock Creek, they no doubt broke into satisfied grins. Agnes City, like Arthur Inghram Baker, also was no more. All that remained were the stone foundations of Baker’s house and store and some fire-charred timbers. They had done a thorough and permanent job some ten months prior.

  Word that bushwhackers were approaching on the trail had reached Council Grove the night before, with the result that the authorities had sent a message to Fort Riley asking for military help, and a “few determined men” had made ready to defend the place. But instead of a horde of yelling, revolver-firing guerrillas charging into the town, only two of them quietly trotted their horses up the main street. One was Dick Yager, subsequently described by the Council Grove Press as “one of the worst guerrillas in Missouri, equaled only by Quantrel [sic] himself.” Yager, however, came not to rob, burn, and kill. What he wanted was a dentist for his bad toothache. Knowing Council Grove from prewar days as a teamster on the Santa Fe Trail, he rode to the office of Dr. J. H. Bradford, dismounted, and went inside while his companion remained outside to keep an eye on things.

  “Take out this tooth,” he told Bradford. “It hurts like hell!”

  “All right,” Bradford replied, “but if I take care of the tooth, will you leave the town alone?”

  “Yes,” Yager agreed. “Just get this damned tooth out!”

  Figure 2.1 William Clarke Quantrill.

  COURTESY OF CARL BREIHAN.

  Bradford thereupon extracted the tooth, and Yeager and the other bushwhacker then rode out of the town; whether or not he paid Bradford is unknown, but it is doubtful that the dentist pressed him on the matter. One did not do that with a patient armed with four revolvers and a reputation for knowing how to use them.

  The bushwhackers passed the night in a camp near Council Grove, drinking and visiting with acquaintances from the town. In the morning they marched west about fifteen miles to Diamond Springs, where they sacked a store, murdered its owner, and shot his wife in the arm. Surely this last was unintentional. Killers though they were, the bushwhackers were Victorians, brought up to respect women—at least, those who were white and respectable. Besides, they knew, as did the Federals, that violence directed against the enemy’s womenfolk would expose their own to the same. It was a line that no one on either side wished to cross—not yet, anyway.

  From Diamond Springs the raiders continued west on the Santa Fe Trail until they reached the crossing of Cottonwood River, where they set up camp. On May 6, a sixty-man posse led by James L. McDowell, U.S. marshal at Leavenworth, surprised the guerrillas and scattered them in every direction. Yager and the Andersons escaped, but ten others were captured. These men, along with seven “secesh” later arrested at Council Grove, were turned over to Federal soldiers, who soon shot the prisoners as they were “attempting to escape.”

  With his posse’s horses being too exhausted to pursue the remaining guerrillas, McDowell dispatched a courier to Emporia with instructions to form a force there and use it to intercept them at another point on the Cottonwood. Anticipating such a move, Yager evaded it by swinging farther south to the Neosho River, crossing it, then returning north to the Santa Fe Trail. There his band resumed its rampage, killing two men, looting stores and houses, holding up another stage, and stealing fresh mounts at every opportunity before disappearing back into Missouri on the morning of May 9. Although they had suffered heavy losses (five more guerrillas were captured and killed after fording the Neosho) the raiders had penetrated nearly 150 miles into Kansas and exposed the vulnerability of that state’s defenses—something that was not lost on Quantrill, who began mulling over plans for a far more ambitious raid, one that would teach the Kansans a lesson they never would forget.2

  Other than that Bill Anderson participated in Yager’s foray and survived it, as did brother Jim, nothing is known of his role, although it can be safely assumed that he did his share of plundering and killing. So far since fleeing Kansas, he had done nothing to set himself apart from scores of other bushwhackers. Except for the brief period he headed a small gang in Jackson County, he had not become one of the numerous and petty guerrilla “captains.” There is no mention of him whatsoever in the Federal military reports covering the period from May 1862 to May 1863, and the sole extant newspaper reference to him (and Jim) is the one in the Lexington Weekly Union previously quoted. Obviously, while he had become a “known” bushwhacker by the spring of 1863, he was far from famous or, to use the common expression of the day, “notorious.”

  Soon, though, this would change.

  Western Missouri and Eastern Kansas: May–July 1863

  As the editor of the Lexington Weekly Union had predicted, the advent of summer brought “troubles.” In fact, the war along the border rapidly attained a ferocity that equaled, if not surpassed, that of 1862. Bushwhacker incursions into Kansas became so frequent and devastating that late in May, Kansas newspapers reported that all of the state’s border counties from the Kansas River south to Fort Scott were virtually depopulated. At the same time, Kansas “Red Legs”—so-called because of the red leather leggings they wore—ravaged Missouri’s western counties, robbing and killing with little or no attempt to distinguish between Unionists and secessionists.

  Federal troops seemed incapable of protecting Kansas against the guerrilla raids. Likewise, the bushwhackers failed to deter the Red Legs; nowhere is there a documented instance of their engaging their Kansas counterparts in combat or even attempting to do so. Perhaps, as some charged, a tacit, secret understanding existed between the two whereby they would “live and let live”—or, to be more exact, steal and let steal. Certainly such an understanding would have been logical in view of the fact that since both parties were well-armed, well-mounted, and skilled in partisan tactics, they would have had little to gain and much to lose by fighting one another.3

  But if the bushwhackers stayed clear of the Red Legs, they showed no such restraint when it came to harassing Union troops and terrorizing Unionist civilians. By July a series of deadly ambushes, climaxed by the rout of a 150-man detachment of the Ninth Kansas Cavalry near Westport on June 17, in which fourteen of the soldiers were killed, had so cowed Federal forces in Jackson County that they rarely dared to venture forth from the fortified towns that they garrisoned. This gave the bushwhackers almost total domination of the countryside, and they used it to plunder, burn out, and often torture and/or murder pro-Union civilians. Scores of Unionists either sought refuge in the towns or fled into Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska. Like the border counties of Kansas, much of Jackson County became nearly depopulated, and many of the few farmers who remained did not bother to plant crops.4

  Conditions in adjoining Lafayette County were better, yet bad enough. There, reported the garrison commander at Lexington on July 15, bushwhacker bands led by “Poole and Anderson” swept through a German settlement fifteen miles from that town, murdered five people, one of them a girl, and wounded nine others. They also strung up a prominent l
ocal Unionist but spared him when friends intervened on his behalf (that is, they gave the raiders sufficient money). Finally Anderson captured and then paroled a militiaman to be exchanged for “one notorious William Ogden,” a guerrilla being held prisoner in Kansas (perhaps a member of Yager’s raiding party who for some reason had not been shot while “attempting to escape”). If Ogden was not released, Anderson had warned, then the militiaman’s “life is to be forfeited.”5

  This is the first reference to Anderson to be found in all 128 volumes of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. It tells us two things: first, that Anderson, following the Yager raid, returned to the Lexington–Warrensburg area; second, and more important, that he now headed his own band and thus had finally become a guerrilla “captain,” recognized as such by both Federals and other bushwhackers.

  Moreover, Anderson’s was a comparatively large gang, with between thirty and forty members, many of them from Kansas. As to its character, what it did in the attack on the German settlement tells us much, but more can be surmised from a look at the young man who would become Anderson’s top lieutenant: Archie Clements.

  Only eighteen in 1863 and from near Kingsville in Johnson County, where Union militia had burned his home and killed his brother, Clements was called “Little Archie” because of his diminutive stature—barely five feet. But what he lacked in size he more than made up for in ferocity. None of the bushwhackers had compunctions about killing enemies; it went with being a bushwhacker and was simply a matter of doing unto others what they would do unto you. Little Archie, though, liked to kill and to kill just for the sake of killing. After awhile not even that contented him, so he started working his victims over with a knife, sometimes after they were dead, sometimes while they still lived. He enjoyed that, too.6