In August 1863, shortly after Union General Thomas Ewing issued the infamous Order No. In the Spring of 1863, they joined William Quantrill’s guerrilla band. The embittered brothers then formed a company of Confederate Missouri Partisan Rangers and raided Union Forces and sympathizers through the summer and fall of 1862. A few months later, the boys went back to Kansas and killed Baker. Afterward, Bill and Jim Anderson fled to Missouri, later sending a man to retrieve their three sisters who were placed with friends in Missouri. Two years later, her husband, William got into an altercation with a neighbor, A.I. Anderson was killed by lightning in June 1860. This book takes readers behind the legend and provides a closer look at the man-and at the face of terror.Mrs. Only 26 when he was killed charging an ambush, Bloody Bill Anderson had already become a legend.

The authors’ disagreements on many aspects of Anderson’s gruesome career add a fascinating dimension to the book. They examine his prewar life, explain how he became a guerrilla, then describe the war that he and his men waged against Union soldiers and defenseless civilians alike. More than compiling a chronicle of horrors, Castel and Goodrich have produced the first full-fledged account of Anderson’s career. Then he led the brutal Centralia Massacre, a blood-soaked nightmare recounted here hour-by-hour from firsthand accounts. He rode with Quantrill in the infamous sack of Lawrence and killed more victims than any other raider.

In telling this story of bitter bloodshed, historians Castel and Goodrich track Bloody Bill’s reign of terror over increasingly violent raids. Wherever Bloody Bill rode, the Grim Reaper rode alongside. Sometimes he decapitated them and rearranged their heads. Sometimes he left the bodies of dead Federal soldiers scalped, skinned, and castrated. A former horse thief turned bushwhacker, he became the scourge of Kansas and Missouri with a reputation for unspeakable atrocities. For a brief but dramatic period, “Bloody Bill” played the leading role in the most violent arena of the entire war-and did so with a vicious abandon that spread fear throughout the land.Ī name associated with William Quantrill and Jesse James, Bloody Bill Anderson was known for never taking prisoners. Nowhere was the Civil War as savage as it was in Missouri-and nowhere did it produce a killer more savage than William Anderson.

Bloody Bill Anderson by Thomas Goodrich