Bloody Bill Anderson

by Albert Castel

  Becoming the number-two leader under Quantrill in no way pleased or placated Anderson. He did not like serving under him—or, for that matter, Todd—and was ready to assert his independence at the first opportunity. That came soon enough when a member of Anderson’s gang named Morgan stole a bolt of cloth from one of Quantrill’s Jackson County followers. Quantrill, who tried to maintain a modicum of discipline, had Morgan disarmed and escorted across the Red River into Indian Territory with a warning that if he returned to Texas, he would be shot. Unimpressed, Morgan came back, then robbed and murdered a farmer. On learning of this crime, Quantrill dispatched a squad to capture and execute Morgan.

  News of Morgan’s death enraged Anderson. His initial impulse was to kill Quantrill; then he calmed down. Not only was Quantrill a fast draw and dead shot, there was a better way of getting back at him. Declaring that he no longer would remain in “such a damn outfit,” Anderson left the Mineral Creek camp, taking with him about twenty men, most of them from his own gang, and went to McCulloch’s headquarters in Bonham. There he told the general that Quantrill was responsible for the various robberies and murders that had occurred in recent months. This was exactly what McCulloch had been waiting for. He summoned Quantrill to Bonham at once.

  Quantrill came—accompanied by all of his bushwhackers except a dozen under Todd, who stayed behind to guard the camp. Arriving at noon, he dismounted and entered McCulloch’s headquarters while his men waited outside. McCulloch promptly placed him under arrest and had him lay his gun belt on a bed. He then invited him to dinner, after which they would discuss matters. Quantrill refused, exclaiming, “By God! I don’t give a goddamn if I never eat another bite in Texas!” With a shrug, McCulloch went off to eat, leaving Quantrill guarded by two soldiers. Presumably he thought that Quantrill’s followers would not dare attempt to rescue him.

  They did not have to. A few minutes after McCulloch left, Quantrill pretended to go over to a watercooler, then grabbed his revolvers, disarmed the guards, did the same to two sentinels at the outside door, and ran onto the street, shouting, “Boys! The outfit is under arrest! Let’s get out of here!” Seconds later he and his bushwhackers were galloping full tilt back to their camp.

  Figure 3.2 Bush Anderson.

  PRIVATE COLLECTION.

  Infuriated and embarrassed by Quantrill’s escape, McCulloch sent a mounted regiment of Texas militia in pursuit, with orders to bring Quantrill back alive or dead. Anderson’s gang joined the chase and during the afternoon exchanged harmless shots several times with Quantrill’s party. At sundown the militia halted and bivouacked for the night. Quantrill, on reaching the camp, told Todd what had happened, and Todd set out with nine men on a scout. First he came upon the bivouacked militia, who fled in panic when one of the guerrilla’s pistols accidentally discharged.

  Satisfied that the militia represented no threat, Todd headed back to the camp, only to encounter Anderson’s gang. Neither Todd nor Anderson, reckless as they were, was so rash as to make what almost surely would be a suicidal attack on the other.

  In the morning Todd, with a small force, again conducted a reconnaissance. This time he met the militia approaching the camp.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he asked.

  “We have been sent down by General McCulloch’s orders to get Quantrill,” came the reply.

  “Well, don’t you know that you are not going to get him?” Todd sneered, advising the militia to go back to Bonham and tell McCulloch that if Quantrill was bothered any more, “he will turn his bushwhackers loose in Texas.”

  Todd and his men then rode away. The militia did likewise, returning to Bonham, where they delivered Todd’s warning to McCulloch. Utterly disgusted, the general wrote his department commander that he could do nothing about the depredations of the “Captain Quantrill command” because his troops lacked the “physical and moral courage to arrest and disarm them.”5 Obviously they were not the bravest soldiers in the world, yet in fairness to them it should be observed that ill-trained cavalry armed with single-shot, muzzle-loading rifles were no match in an open fight with the bushwhackers and their individual arsenals of revolvers. This had been demonstrated at Baxter Springs, and it would be demonstrated again on an even bloodier scale some months later near a place in Missouri called Centralia.

  Several days after their bloodless confrontations with the militia and fellow bushwhackers, Quantrill’s men crossed over the Red River into Indian Territory, beyond McCulloch’s jurisdiction. About April 10 they began marching north toward Missouri, where the grass was turning green and the leaves sprouting. Anderson and his followers headed back around the same time. He left behind in Sherman a woman with whom he had spent much time during the winter. She went by the interesting name of Bush Smith and “worked” at a Sherman saloon operated by Jim Crow Chiles, a transplanted Missourian. Although presumably her favors were available without that formality, Anderson married her.6 Maybe the jilting of Mary Ellen by Baker had something to do with it; perhaps he did it as a joke or during a drunken spree—or, conceivably, he loved her. In any case, if any of his men worried that marriage would have a softening effect on him, they soon would be reassured. During the next six months Anderson did things that made what he hitherto had done look like a mere rehearsal—which in a sense it was.

  Jackson County, Missouri: April–May 1864

  “Lonely and weary, with continual watching,” wrote Julia Lovejoy of Baldwin City, Kansas, to her family in Massachusetts on May 10, 1864, “we are looking every hour for ‘Quantrill,’ with his horde of fiends, to sweep through this entire region, and murder indiscriminately and burn every house, in his march of death! We are told he is VERY NEAR us and about to make another raid . . . and he says ‘he will make clean work this time.’ . . .”7

  Julia Lovejoy need not have feared. Quantrill had neither the intention nor the means to carry out another Lawrence-style raid. On arriving back in his “stomping grounds” late in April, he found that although many of the people expelled by Ewing’s Order No. 11 had been allowed to return by a new Union commander, the area had been so thoroughly devastated during the past fall and winter by Union troops and bands of Kansas Red Legs that it offered little in the way of sustenance. Worse, at least from a military standpoint, the Federals had stationed in Jackson County the Second Colorado Cavalry—twelve hundred “hardy mountaineer boys”—for the specific purpose of combating the bushwhackers. Consequently, Quantrill sent word to his men, who had dispersed into small squads, to reassemble in Lafayette County, where conditions were less “squally” and the prospects of profitable operations accordingly more promising.8

  It was the last order that he ever would issue to most of them. Back in March, at about the time Quantrill reduced and reorganized his band, Thomas C. Reynolds, the Confederate claimant to the governorship of Missouri, wrote to him urging him to join the regular military service. “The history of every guerrilla chieftain,” stated the highly educated Reynolds, “is the same. He either becomes the slave of his men, or if he attempts to control them, some officer or private rises up, disputes his authority, gains the men, and puts him down.”9

  Reynold’s warning proved prophetic. For some time George Todd had in many respects been exercising de facto leadership, as witness his giving the order to charge at Baxter Springs and his role in scaring off McCulloch’s militia. Now he decided to make it overt and total. Soon after the issuance of the order to rendezvous in Lafayette County, Todd flagrantly cheated during a card game with Quantrill. Finally Quantrill threw down his cards and declared that he would play no more unless Todd played fair. Todd then made a threatening remark, whereupon Quantrill said he was afraid of no man. Instantly, Todd yanked out a pistol and, aiming it point-blank at Quantrill, said, “You are afraid of me, aren’t you, Bill?” Faced with sure death, Quantrill answered, “Yes—I’m afraid of you.”

  Todd lowered his revolver, Quantrill stood up, walked over to his horse, mounted, and rode away. Not one of the
guerrillas present moved to back him.10 They knew that he was no coward and that he was smarter and more clever than the crude, illiterate Todd. But they were no longer fighting for a cause—or if they were, they sensed that it was a lost cause and the war was in its last stages. What the bushwhackers wanted now was to kill as many Unionists, get as much plunder, and have a good time doing it while it still could be done. For this, what better leader than Todd? He was as fearless as he was ruthless, and so long as his men obeyed orders and fought well during a raid or fight, he did not give a damn what was done—or to whom.

  Early in June, Quantrill—with his teenage mistress (or wife), Kate King, and a few still-loyal followers—headed across the Missouri and established a hideout in the rugged Perche Hills of Howard County.11 No doubt he felt bitter and resentful; it would have been strange if he did not. In raiding Lawrence had he not conceived, planned, and executed the most brilliant exploit of its kind during the entire war up to that time? Only John Hunt Morgan’s foray into Indiana and Ohio surpassed it in scale, and that had ended in disaster. Yet what had been Quantrill’s reward for Lawrence and for Baxter Springs, the sole successes achieved by Southern arms in the Trans-Mississippi throughout all of 1863? Ingratitude and an attempt to arrest him by the Confederate authorities, betrayal by his own men. Well, he would lay low, bide his time, and wait. Sooner or later the traitorous George Todd would be killed, as would that son-of-a-bitch Bill Anderson—the reckless way that they fought guaranteed this—and then those who had turned against him would turn back to him. It was only a question of when.

  Western Missouri: June–July 1864

  With Quantrill no longer performing on the bloody stage of the guerrilla war in Missouri, Todd and Anderson became the prime candidates for his starring role. For a while it seemed that Todd would claim it, and in fact had it. Acting on Quantrill’s plan to shift operations to Lafayette County, his band carried out a series of successful hit-and-run attacks on Federal posts and patrols, waylaid stagecoaches, cut telegraph wires, and spread destruction and death among Unionists, with the climax coming on June 13, when they ambushed and burned a wagon train near Lexington, slaying eight of the soldiers guarding it. In response, the Second Colorado launched a counteroffensive, scouring the countryside with mounted patrols and employing “foot scouts” to lie in wait for the bushwhackers, thereby “meeting them at their own game.” The latter tactic proved so successful—the Second Colorado’s commander claimed to have “mustered out” thirteen guerrillas by using it—that Todd ordered his men to scatter while he considered the situation.

  Characteristically, his solution was to attack: If the Coloradans wanted to fight bushwhacker style, he would show them how really to do it. Declaring, “It’s time to go out and bushwhack a few Feds,” he assembled sixty men, then made a rapid night march deep into Jackson County, where on the morning of July 6 he set up an ambush on the Glasgow Road south of Independence. Hours passed, but apart from a stagecoach, which was duly robbed and placed out of sight, nothing occurred. Finally, late in the afternoon, having concluded that Federal fish weren’t biting that day, Todd and another guerrilla rode out onto the road, intending to tell the stagecoach driver that he could continue his journey. As they did so, a twenty-six man detachment of the Second Colorado came jogging down the road. It had not been planned that way, but Todd and his companion became the bait. On seeing them, the Coloradans gave chase, expecting easy prey. Instead they suddenly found themselves beset by a horde of bushwhackers, revolvers popping. Despite being taken by surprise, the Coloradans stood and fought; even the guerrillas later conceded that they showed “sand.” But along with a carbine and saber, each was armed with only one pistol—and that, an inferior model that “couldn’t hit a thing.” Hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned, they broke and fled when their bullet-riddled commander went down, leaving behind eight dead. Todd’s men suffered only one wounded, and they had demonstrated to the Coloradans that while they and other Union troops might hold the larger towns, the rest of the country belonged to the bushwhackers any time they desired it.12

  Shortly after this encounter, the Second Colorado moved across the Missouri River into Platte County, where Confederate partisans had captured Platte City and were terrorizing Unionists. Taking advantage of the regiment’s absence, Todd’s band headed in the opposite direction. On the night of July 20 they occupied Arrow Rock on the bank of the Missouri in Saline County, “confiscated” forty horses and $20,000, and then retired into their favorite hideout, the impenetrable wilderness of the Sni-A-Bar. Here the band remained for most of the next two months, unmolested by the enemy and making only a few small-scale sallies.

  Pressure from Federal forces had nothing to do with Todd taking a “vacation” from bushwhacking. Rather, he wished to preserve and prepare his men for an upcoming invasion of Missouri by Sterling Price’s army out of Arkansas. There, during the spring, the Confederates had driven back the Union army into its fortifications around Little Rock, opening the way for yet another attempt by Price to “liberate” Missouri, an event pro-Confederates eagerly anticipated. To quote from the official report of Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans, the new Federal commander in Missouri, all summer, “traitors of every hue and stripe . . . swarmed into life at the approach of the great invasion. Women’s fingers were busy making clothes for rebel soldiers out of goods plundered by the guerrillas, women’s tongues were busy telling Union neighbors ‘their time was coming.’” If Price succeeded in taking St. Louis or at least occupying the state capital at Jefferson City while in the east the Confederate armies held onto Richmond and Atlanta, Southern independence still might be won. In any event, his coming was the last chance for the Confederate cause in Missouri, and everyone knew it.13

  With Todd taking it easy, nothing stood in the way of Anderson moving to the forefront of the guerrilla war—and so he did. During the next four months he would preside over a bloody bacchanalia that far surpassed in ferocity all that had gone before it. William Quantrill, George Todd, and other bushwhacker chieftains were merciless killers, but only Bill Anderson became what one Missourian wrote of him: “Like the rider of the ‘pale horse’ in the Book of Revelation, death and hell literally followed in his train.”14

  Chapter Four

  Let the Blood Flow

  Western and Northern Missouri: Summer 1864

  Early July found Bill Anderson in a jolly mood—for him. Since returning to Missouri in May, bushwhacking had been good. Thus on June 12, near Kingsville in Johnson County—Archie Clements’s home territory—Anderson’s and Yager’s bands, some eighty strong and all attired in Yankee uniforms, had been able to ride up in a “friendly manner” to within point-blank pistol range of fourteen unsuspecting Federal troopers and kill twelve of them and shoot another so badly that he was unlikely to live. They then stripped the bodies and scalped one of them. Hitherto, the bushwhackers had rarely engaged in scalping, but in 1864 they would make it a common practice—none more so than Anderson’s men who, with Little Archie Clements taking the lead, made it their trademark.1

  Following the Kingsville massacre, Anderson proceeded north into Lafayette County, where on June 14, twelve miles south of Lexington, his band routed a thirty-five-man Union detachment escorting a wagon train, killing nine and destroying the wagons.2 His men then dispersed into small groups, with the main one under Anderson himself heading westward to the Missouri River village of Wellington. There, on June 24, Anderson took the postmaster and two other Unionists hostage, then sent a message to Brig. Gen. Egbert Brown, Federal commander of the District of Central Missouri with headquarters at Warrensburg, declaring that he would shoot the three captives if Brown executed a prisoner named Erwin. Brown countermanded the execution but at the same time ordered the arrest and “close confinement in irons” of six “prominent rebels or rebel sympathizers in the vicinity of Wellington.” They would, he notified Anderson, be put to death “if our friends [the hostages] are not returned to safety.”3

 
Satisfied with having, at least for the time being, saved Erwin from the hangman’s noose, Anderson released the hostages and, reversing course, headed east along the river until he reached Waverly. Here, on the morning of July 4, he and his followers, which an eyewitness described as numbering fifteen or sixteen—“all stout, able-bodied looking men”—each armed with one to four revolvers and a carbine, attempted to seize a docked steamboat taking on freight. The crew, realizing its peril in time, cut the mooring cable, and the craft escaped despite having its pilothouse splintered with 150 to 200 bullets, one of which wounded the watch in the arm. The bushwhackers thereupon “quietly repaired” to Waverly, a strongly pro-Southern village and home of Confederate general Jo Shelby, and celebrated the Fourth by having their photographs taken, getting drunk, and firing on another steamer as it passed by.4

  Two days later Anderson, with a force that the Federals estimated to be one hundred but probably consisted of less than half that strength, showed up on the outskirts of Lexington. Its garrison, believing itself outnumbered and fearing a repeat of the June 16 fiasco, dared not venture forth from its fortifications. On the other hand, some of the many Confederate sympathizers who lived in and around the town visited the bushwhacker’s camp, bringing with them copies of the latest issues of Lexington’s two newspapers. Anderson read them and disliked what he read—in particular, editorials urging citizens to resist the guerrillas and the reports of Col. James McFerran, commander of the garrison, and Cap. Milton Burris, who had been in charge of the wagon train escort. Anderson decided to make his displeasure known—and provoke the Federals in Lexington to come out and fight. On July 7 he dictated or supervised the writing of a long letter that combined threats with taunts and was addressed “To the editors of the two newspapers in Lexington, to the citizens and community at large, General Brown, and Colonel McFerran and his petty hirelings, such as Captain Burris, the friend of Anderson”: