William “Bloody Bill” Anderson was a Confederate guerilla during the Civil War. He was born in Missouri but raised in Kansas and considered himself a Kansan. He was drawn into the Missouri-Kansas Border War as a teen-ager when his father was killed by a Union sympathizer. Some accounts say that Bill’s father was killed for horse stealing while others say it was for his pro-slavery views. The Anderson family was Southern sympathizers. Wanting revenge for his father’s death, Anderson moved back to Missouri and hooked up with William Quantrill and his band of guerillas known as Quantrill’s Raiders.

Bloody Bill’s sister was killed and another was left crippled when Union soldiers placed them and other women of the Raiders in an old building in Kansas City. The building collapsed and a lot of the women were killed. Quantrill and the Raiders used this as the reason for their infamous and bloody raid on Lawrence, Kansas in 1863. It is also said that the building was made structurally unsafe by Union soldiers but this was never proven. The Union soldiers said that they were trying to make the building larger, however, Bloody Bill didn’t believe this and this sent him on a personal vendetta to kill all Union soldiers and Union sympathizers that he came across.

A few months after the Lawrence raid, Anderson had a falling out with Quantrill while they were hiding out in Texas, so Anderson moved back to Missouri and started his own band of guerillas which eventually included Frank and Jesse James, both of whom had also reportedly rode with Quantrill. This is when Bloody Bill really earned his name. The year was 1864. Bloody Bill Anderson and his men savagely killed Union soldiers and their supporters. It was even said that Anderson’s men even scalped their victims and hung the scalps on the bridles of their horses. William Anderson even went as far to send letters to newspapers to let people know that the carnage will continue.

Bloody Bill kept his promise. On September 27, 1864, dressed in Union uniforms, Bloody Bill and his men attacked Centralia, Missouri. They looted stores, burned buildings and killed the people of the town. His group also attacked a train of the Northern Missouri Railroad and robbed the passengers. They captured twenty- two soldiers and killed all but one by the side of the railroad. Anderson let a sergeant go so he could tell the tale of what happened. When the sergeant reported it later on that day, Union Major A.V. Johnston and the 39th Missouri mounted Infantry went after Anderson. When Anderson found out about this, he and his men joined forces with another guerilla faction led by a man named George Todd. The combined guerilla forces successfully thwarted the army. When it was said and done, one hundred twenty men and officers of the Missouri 39th were killed.

Finally on October 26, 1864, Bloody Bill Anderson finally met his demise. His guerilla force was led into an ambush by Col. Samuel P. Cox. Cox got Anderson’s men to shoot first and Cox had lines and lines of men firing rifles at the guerillas. Anderson was shot in the head and was killed. He remaining band of guerillas rode out of there. Anderson’s identity was confirmed when a photograph of him and his wife and a locket of their infant’s hair in his pockets. Bloody Bill Anderson’s body was taken back to Richmond, Missouri where it was put on public display and photographed before being decapitated. His head was hung on a pole for a warning to others and his body was dragged around by a horse before being dropped into an unmarked grave in Richmond’s Pioneer Cemetery. He was twenty-five years old.