Bloody Bill Anderson

by Albert Castel

  Once beyond it, he breathed more easily. Perhaps his guards allowing him to leave had not been a trick after all. He heard no shouts. He heard nothing. Perhaps he was escaping. Perhaps he actually was free!

  Fayette. Like the bright North Star in the heavens above that he struggled to keep in sight through the forest canopy, the very word was a beacon that drew him on. He had no idea where the town was, yet some instinct kept him moving north toward it.

  All through the night he crashed through the forest, stumbling down ravines, falling over logs, wading streams, clambering up rocky hillsides. Finally he reached his limit. Slowly, painfully, he placed one foot before the other until at first light he came to a well-rutted road. He spotted a sign post and staggered over to it. Despair gripped him as he read it. Although he had traveled for hours without stopping, he discovered that for the most part he had moved in circles and was only eight miles from where he had started.

  Looking around in the dawn light, he saw a rickety tobacco shed off in a nearby field. Even had he been physically able, he dared not travel by day. Making his way to the shed, he entered and saw a haystack in a corner, where he burrowed out a nest, then collapsed in a heap. Sleep came instantly and, blessedly, it remained.

  Goodman slept throughout the morning and most of the afternoon. When darkness fell, he resumed his journey, plodding along slowly because of physical and psychological exhaustion. Toward daylight he saw passing along the road a man who in his time was usually called a negro when not called nigger. Surely he could be trusted. So he hailed him and then awaited his approach. On being asked, the black man replied that Fayette was only a mile up the road and that Federal pickets were much closer—just three or four hundred yards away. He then pointed out the location of the nearest sentinel. Goodman thanked him, then limped onward as fast as he could. His goal he thought was nearly won: Liberty! Friends! Home!

  Suddenly he paused. He realized that attired as he was in cast-off guerrilla clothes, a bullet rather than a welcome might be awaiting him. To be killed by enemies was bad enough; to die at the hands of friends would be worse.

  He went on with wary caution. As he turned the bend in the road, he heard a voice shout: “Halt, there!” Facing him, some twenty paces distant stood a cavalryman, his rifle cocked and ready to fire. Goodman promptly obeyed the command, then responded to a series of questions about his identity. Satisfied by his answers, the sentinel summoned a corporal, who reported Goodman’s presence to headquarters in Fayette. A half-hour later the big but now haggard and emaciated sergeant sat in those headquarters relating his story to the garrison commander.

  He had survived. He had escaped. And now he was safe. Instead of being reserved for death, he had returned to life.

  Chapter Nine

  How Do You like That?

  Boonville, Missouri: October 11, 1864

  Sterling Price was a marble statue come to life. As he stood in the square waiting for the prisoners to assemble, he truly was a magnificent figure to gaze upon. Striking in his immaculate gray uniform and gold sash, straight as a rod at six feet two inches, robust and powerful at well over two hundred pounds, his was a presence the eye could not easily avoid. And after the first glance no one could mistake the general for anything but what he was: a true Southern gentleman. Even a brief study of his calm, handsome face, with its snowy hair and rosy complexion, clearly revealed an inner nobility as majestic and imposing as the outer. For most of his adult life other men had seen this in Sterling Price and accepted it as a mark of leadership—first in the war with Mexico, during which he attained the rank of brigadier general; then as a two-term governor of Missouri; and now as a Confederate major general in the fight for Southern independence. But beyond strength and character was also a distinct air of benevolence, something warm, even paternalistic. This more than anything else set him apart from other generals. Whatever it was, whatever it meant, his men saw it in Sterling Price and loved him for it. “Old Pap,” they fondly called him. And like a loving father, Price could be strong and firm on the one hand, and on the other be patient and understanding with the failings of “his boys.” For three terrible years they had followed him. Long after other soldiers had forgotten what they were fighting for and fled the colors, Missourians had held to their beloved Old Pap. As long as he led there was never a doubt. They knew. Sterling Price was faith. Sterling Price was courage. Sterling Price was the cause for which they fought. Sterling Price was Missouri.

  But as he stood in the shadow of the Boonville courthouse and prepared to parole the Federals captured the previous day, this calm pillar of strength was not what he seemed. Inside his gallant old heart a quiet funeral was taking place. Hope was being buried, and at the graveside stood a sad, tired, broken old man.

  Figure 9.1 Maj. Gen. Sterling Price.

  COURTESY OF THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF MISSOURI.

  For three years a vision had kept Sterling Price strong—a vision so powerful that it swept all adversity before it like dust before the storm. He had seen in his mind tens of thousands of fellow Missourians springing up from the land to join him in his crusade. He had seen them rising up from the woodlands of the south and pouring down from the prairies of the north. He had seen them rolling in from the tobacco country to the west and streaming over from the big river to the east. He had seen them coming from all directions, joining together to rally around the standard and help him hurl the Yankee vandals from the sacred soil. But the vision never quite materialized. In 1861 he had won for them a tremendous victory at Wilson’s Creek in southwest Missouri. The populace had shouted and cheered his name and sang his praises to high heaven—but they did not come. He had won an even more spectacular victory a short time later at Lexington in the north. They had hugged and kissed and cried and waved their new flag furiously—but they did not come. He had issued a ringing, rousing appeal, urging them to stand up for their rights and hurry if they were coming. They had promised that they would be shortly—but they did not come, or if they did, most of them deserted when he had to retreat into Arkansas. And now he had marched with an army of twelve thousand men into the very heart of the state and stopped to wait for them. But still they did not come—not enough of them, anyway—and it was obvious to the old general as he stood in the square that his vision had been nothing but a beautiful dream. Missouri never would come. And Sterling Price was tired.

  The expedition had begun full of hope and promise: His army would move up from Arkansas, capture St. Louis and the state capital at Jefferson City, attract tens of thousands of recruits eager to throw off Union domination, liberate Missouri, and then march into Kansas. It was a tall order to fill, but Sterling Price believed it could be done. His men, or at least the Missourians among them, believed it could be done. Even Missouri’s Confederate governor-in-exile, Thomas Reynolds, believed it could be done and tagged along to take his seat in Jefferson City. The trauma caused in the North by the sight of a Confederacy still strong and vital and full of fight would swing thousands of votes from Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans to George McClellan and the Democrats, who had adopted a platform branding the Northern war effort a failure and calling for the restoration of the Union by means of a negotiated peace with the seceded states.

  It was a grand scheme, a fine phantasm to conjure around Arkansas campfires. But Missouri dawns brought cold reality. First came the unexpected and demoralizing rebuff at Pilot Knob in southeast Missouri, where on September 27—the same day as the slaughter at Centralia—one thousand fortified Union troops commanded by Thomas Ewing Jr.—he of Order No. 11 infamy—had bloodily repulsed an assault by seven thousand of Price’s soldiers, thereby putting an end to any notion of sweeping on to St. Louis. Price next experienced more frustration and humiliation on finding the defenses of Jefferson City so heavily manned (or so he mistakenly thought) that he marched away without making even an attempt to flaunt the Confederate flag from atop the capitol dome or seat Reynolds in the governor’s chair.


  Now, in Boonville, the most crucial part of his glorious dream, was fast fading away. Instead of a flood of recruits, only a thin trickle of unarmed youths were showing up to fill his ranks—far too few to provide him with the strength needed to remain in Missouri. Moreover, making what was bad enough worse still, some of his troops, two-thirds of whom were reluctant conscripts from Arkansas, acted more like conquerors than liberators, robbing and insulting citizens, looting stores, and drunkenly carousing day and night. Such conduct, to say the least, was not calculated to inspire a mass uprising against Unionist rule in Missouri, especially since many of the victims were pro-Confederates who had cheered Price’s army when it marched into Boonville on October 10.

  Thus Price’s campaign to liberate Missouri and perhaps win Confederate independence had turned into nothing but a large-scale raid by a ragtag army that, except for a few units, was more adept at plundering than fighting. The most that could be achieved, Price sadly realized, was to gather as many recruits as possible while marching through western Missouri, swing into Kansas and give its people a taste of what it was like to be invaded by hostile forces, and then return to Arkansas. Although outwardly he seemed as proud and confident as always, inwardly the general was a beaten man, and beaten not by the enemy—that he could have accepted—but by what he deemed to be the cowardice and betrayal of his fellow Missourians.1

  The process of paroling the Federal troops captured at Boonville got underway. But before it could be completed, a large group of riders approached the square on an adjacent street. An eyewitness subsequently recorded that the horsemen were all “well clad . . . in black or dark suits, and had their hats fantastically decorated with ribbons.” All, too, “had at least four revolvers in their belts” and some scalps adorning the bridles of their horses, which they rode with “casual ease.”2 These were Anderson and his men, come to offer their services to Price.

  Then they saw the Union prisoners. “Shoot the sons of bitches!” they yelled, drawing their pistols and swiftly surrounding the unarmed soldiers. “Shoot the sons of bitches!”

  Outraged, Price rushed forward and ordered them away from the prisoners. Grumbling, they obeyed. Then Anderson, mounted on a magnificent black horse, rode up to Price and started to speak to him, only to be cut short by Governor Reynolds. Horrified and disgusted by the scalps hanging from the bushwhackers’ bridles, Reynolds angrily denounced Anderson and his men for dishonoring the Confederate cause by such barbarism. Price did the same, adding that he would have nothing to do with the guerrillas until they rid themselves of their ghastly trophies.

  This they did, whereupon Anderson pulled a handsome wooden box from a saddlebag and presented it to Price. Opening it, the general beheld an exquisite brace of silver-mounted revolvers. He gazed at them for several seconds, then stared deep into the steel-gray eyes of the slender, bearded bushwhacker. He knew about Centralia from Missouri newspapers picked up along the way. He knew, too, that Anderson never took prisoners, or if he did, it was only to murder them and desecrate their bodies, as witness the scalps. Should he accept this gift of pistols—probably stolen—from such a man? Should he make use of him and his band of cutthroats as he marched through Missouri?

  Price answered yes to both questions. To reject the gift would offend Anderson, and clearly he was a dangerous man to offend. Also, he needed more men—fighting men—and whatever else they were or were not, Anderson’s guerrillas were that, as they had so devastatingly demonstrated at Centralia. Besides, in war one cannot afford to be too choosy about the means used to wage it, especially if you are the weaker contestant and desperately endeavoring to stave off defeat. Therefore, Price thanked Anderson for the pistols and declared, “If I had fifty thousand such men, I could hold Missouri forever.”3

  Later that day Anderson received the following:

  (Special Order)

  Headquarters Army of Missouri

  Boonville, October 11, 1864

  Captain Anderson with his command will at once proceed to the north side of the Missouri River and permanently destroy the North Missouri Railroad, going as far east as practicable. He will report his operations at least every two days.

  By order of Major-General Price:

  McClean

  Lieutenant-Colonel and Assistant Adjutant General

  Price supplemented this written order by verbally instructing Anderson to “destroy the railroad bridge . . . at the end of St. Charles County.” Indeed, this was to be the “main object” of his raid, for if he succeeded, the rail connection between St. Louis and the Hannibal & St. Joseph would be broken for weeks, if not months.

  In addition, Price sent a message to “Colonel Quantrill,” ordering him to operate against the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad. Evidently he knew no more about Quantrill’s true status than did the various Union commanders in Missouri and Kansas, who continued to refer to him as the supreme chieftain of all the bushwhackers. But directing Anderson and Quantrill to strike the North Missouri and Hannibal & St. Joseph railways served no useful military purpose. All normal traffic had ceased on the North Missouri since the Centralia massacres, and, contrary to Price’s obvious assumption, Rosecrans was using neither that line nor the Hannibal & St. Joseph to transport reinforcements from St. Louis to the Kansas City area. Instead, he had all of his available field forces—Maj. Gen. Alfred Pleasonton’s cavalry division and Maj. Gen. A. J. Smith’s two crack infantry divisions—pursuing Price while leaving it up to Maj. Gen. Samuel Ryan Curtis, commander of the Department of Kansas, to check his westward progress long enough for these forces to overtake and smash Old Pap.4

  With his men, Anderson recrossed the Missouri via the Boonville ferry on October 11, carrying Price’s order in a wallet where he kept other papers of special value. The order in effect bestowed on him the official sanction of the Confederacy and at least a de facto captaincy in its army. It also testified to his status as the most dreaded (by Unionists) and the most admired (by secessionists) bushwhacker chieftain in all of Missouri. He had come a long way since fleeing Kansas to escape being hanged for horse stealing.

  Yet although pleased by Price’s order, he had his own notions about executing it—notions that had nothing to do with wrecking a railroad or aiding the Confederate cause in Missouri. Rather, they derived from what he told Charles Strieby when, early in the war, he had tried to recruit him for bushwhacking forays into Missouri: “There is a lot of money in this business.”

  St. Joseph, Missouri: October 13, 1864

  Tom Goodman stepped from the train onto the busy streets of St. Joseph. He had finally arrived at the destination he had expected to reach half a month ago. But not only had he been “detained,” to put it euphemistically, by what happened to him at Centralia, he had also encountered further delays after his escape to Fayette. Being there, it turned out, by no means assured his safety. In large part because of what he told the garrison commander about the strength of the bushwhackers and their intention to join Price’s army, that officer decided to evacuate Fayette in the belief that it soon would be attacked by an overwhelming Rebel force. Thus Goodman again found himself fleeing, this time with the troopers of the Ninth Missouri as they marched from Fayette to Macon City. Moreover, not until the day before had he been able to board a train to St. Joseph, and not until now could he fully relax and feel safe. After all, if bushwhackers could waylay a passenger train on the North Missouri Railroad, they were capable of doing the same on the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad. And if those bushwhackers happened to be Anderson’s. . . . It was too awful even to think about.

  The quickest and easiest way to reach his home and family was to take a steamboat from St. Joe up the Missouri to Payne, Iowa, and then travel the nearly thirty miles to Hawleyville by stagecoach, hired horse, or if need be on foot. Accordingly, he checked at the landing and learned that the next northbound steamer did not depart until later in the day. This gave him time to go to the office of the St. Joseph Herald and Tribune and tell its editor the st
ory of his capture by and escape from Anderson’s bushwhackers and what he had seen and experienced between those events—a story that appeared in the paper the following morning.5

  Hawleyville, Iowa: Morning, October 14, 1864

  Mary Goodman had refused to believe the telegram from the army stating that her husband, Sgt. Thomas Goodman of the First Missouri Engineers, had been killed by Rebel guerrillas at Centralia, Missouri, on September 27. It was not true because it could not be true. God would not be so cruel as to let him survive unscathed two years of war deep in enemy country only to let him be murdered while traveling far behind the battlefront to his home and family. Despite what the newspapers reported, regardless of what everybody said, contrary to all reason, Mary continued to cling to her faith that he still lived and would return to her.

  During the dark early morning of October 14 she had a startling dream, awoke, dismissed the dream as just that, and went back to sleep.

  She dreamed the same dream.

  This time on awakening she knew it had not been a dream but a foretelling, a vision. It simply was too real and vivid to be anything else.

  She quickly dressed, then left the house and walked a short distance until she came to the place pictured in the vision. Here she stopped and waited. And waited and waited. But her man did not come walking up the road toward her as in the vision. Her eyes teared up, and hope slowly tumbled away like the windblown leaves at her feet.

  Suddenly she saw him and he saw her. Each ran toward the other, they met, they embraced, they cried with joy, and then laughed at their tears.6

  Tom Goodman’s journey home by way of Hell had ended.

  Glasgow, Missouri: Night, October 21, 1864

  The ticking clock on the mantel read 9:55. Another day was nearly gone. Benjamin Lewis’s luck was holding. With each hour that passed the odds in the big man’s favor grew. Time was his strongest ally now, and soon—perhaps any minute—Union cavalry would come and the nightmare would end.