Bloody Bill Anderson: The Civil War Guerrilla Who Created Jesse James

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In September 1864, a Confederate guerrilla named Bloody Bill Anderson stopped a train in

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Centralia, Missouri, lined up 22 unarmed Union soldiers and had them executed one by one.

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Then he scouped them.

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An hour later, he ambushed a Union company and killed 123 more men in less than 20 minutes.

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The next to him, through it all, was a 16 year old kid named Jesse James, learning every

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lesson.

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This is the story of the man who created the American Outlaw.

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So here's what you need to understand about William T. Anderson.

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He didn't start out as a monster.

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He started out as a horse thief, which honestly feels almost quaint compared to what he became.

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Born around 1840 in Kentucky, his family moved to Kansas in 1857, right into the middle

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of what people were already calling "bleeding Kansas".

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Pro slavery and anti-slavery settlers were literally murdering each other over whether

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Kansas would be a free state.

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The Anderson family was pro-southern in a free state territory, which immediately made

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them targets.

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William and his brother Jim started stealing horses, running them across state lines, making

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decent money at it.

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They were a small time frontier criminals.

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Then everything changed on May 12, 1862.

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A former judge named AI Baker shot and killed Anderson's father over political disputes.

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William and Jim had to run to Missouri because they were already wanted for horse theft.

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Their sisters followed.

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Once in Missouri, the brothers joined the Confederate Bushwackers.

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These weren't regular soldiers.

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These were guerrillas who raided anti-slavery settlements, killed civilians, and disappeared

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before anyone could catch them.

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But Anderson had unfinished business with Judge Baker.

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On July 3, 1862, Anderson came back to Kansas with his gang.

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They lured Baker out of his house, shot him, kicked him down into a cellar, and then they

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did something that tells you everything about what Anderson was becoming.

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They rolled a heavy barrel over the cellar door, trapped him inside, and they set the house

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on fire, and made sure Baker burned alive.

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They stole his horses and rode off bragging about it.

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That's when William Anderson stopped being a thief and became something else entirely.

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By 1863, the union was trying to stop the Bushwackers.

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These guerrillas were using their families for intelligence and supplies.

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So union officers started rounding up female relatives of suspected Confederate guerrillas

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and throwing them in makeshift prisons in Kansas City.

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On August 14, 1863, a three-story brick building being used as a prison collapsed.

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Several women died.

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Several more were badly injured.

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Among them were William Anderson's sisters.

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Josephine Anderson was killed.

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Mary Anderson was seriously injured.

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The official cause has never been definitively established, but there were immediate rumors

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that drunken union guards had been bragging in a tavern that they deliberately removed

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support columns in the cellar.

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Whether that's true or not, Anderson believed it, and that belief transformed him completely.

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People who knew him said he became unhinged.

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Whatever restraint he'd been operating under disappeared.

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His grief and rage fused into a single purpose.

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The union had killed his sister.

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The union would pay in blood.

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Eight days after the building collapsed, William Quantrell led about 400 Confederate raiders

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into Lawrence, Kansas, and killed between 160 and 190 men and boys.

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They burned 185 buildings.

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Anderson was right there in the middle of it.

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The Lawrence massacre was retaliation for the prison collapse.

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The raiders spared the women and children, which tells you this was a calculated, gendered

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act of revenge.

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The union response was General Order No. 11, which forced thousands of civilians to evacuate

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four Missouri counties.

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The idea was to deprive the gril of their support base.

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Instead, it created a logistical paradise.

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All those abandoned farms meant unlimited access to livestock, feed, and food.

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The union accidentally made it easier for Anderson to survive and grow stronger.

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By spring 1864, Anderson had split from Quantrell and formed his own guerilla company, about

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80 men who operated like a death squad.

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They wore union uniforms to get close to the targets.

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They showed no mercy.

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Anderson personally adopted a policy of giving no quarter, torturing prisoners and cutting

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off ears.

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His violence wasn't random.

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In one raid, he targeted a wealthy union sympathizer who had freed his slaves.

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Anderson beat the man, raped his 12 or 13 year old black servant, and then trampled the

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man with a horse.

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The victim died from his injuries two years later.

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This was terrorism, racial hatred, and personal cruelty all wrapped into one package.

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Bill Anderson was tall, bearded, dressed with style, but people who met him talked about

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his eyes.

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They said it looked like burning coals.

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He earned the nickname "Bloody Bill" through sheer relentless savagery.

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His men decorated their saddles with scouts taken from the dead union soldiers.

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And right there in the middle was this 16 year old named Jesse James, who joined Anderson's

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band in 1864, along with his older brother Frank.

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Jesse's immediate mentor was Anderson's chief lieutenant, a small, ruthless killer named

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Archie Clement.

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People called Clement Bill Anderson's scalper and head devil.

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He taught young Jesse James that murdering unarmed men was not only acceptable, it was expected.

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Jesse James didn't become an outlaw despite his civil war experience.

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He became an outlaw because of it.

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He learned it from the best, and Bloody Bill Anderson was the best at what he did.

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Throughout the summer of 1864, Anderson's force rampaged across Central Missouri.

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They ambushed union patrols.

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They burned railway property.

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All of it was building towards September 27, 1864, in a small town called Centrelia.

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Anderson and 6280 of his bushwackers rode into town, looted it, robbed a stagecoach, and

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drank all the liquor they could find.

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Then they did something that had never been done before in the Civil War.

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They captured a passenger train belonging to the North Missouri Railroad.

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First train captured by Confederate guerrillas in the entire war.

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When that train were 22-24 unarmed union soldiers, probably recruits or men heading home, Anderson

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berated them, selected one sergeant named Thomas Goodman for a potential prisoner exchange,

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and then had his men execute the rest in a line, one by one.

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Then they mutilated and scouted the bodies.

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Goodman, the only survivor, later called it the most monstrous in human atrocity he'd

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ever witnessed.

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He bills men, set the train on fire, and sent the burning engine down the tracks toward

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the next town.

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But the real disaster was still coming.

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The smoke from the burning train drew a union major named Andrew Johnson and 147 men from

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the 39th Missouri Volunteer Infantry.

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These were raw recruits, inexperienced, riding on farming horses and mules.

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They were armed with slow, muzzle-loading infield rifles.

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When Johnson challenged Anderson outside of Centralia, Anderson's guerrillas responded

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with a mounted charge.

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It was a slaughter.

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The union line collapsed immediately.

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Anderson's men had rapid fire revolvers.

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They knew how to fight on horseback.

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They were experienced killers facing green troops.

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Out of 147 union soldiers, 123 were killed.

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Anderson's force only lost three men.

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James later claimed that his younger brother Jesse fired that shot that killed Major

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Johnson.

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The Centralia massacre demonstrated that Anderson was more than a sadistic killer.

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He was a cunning, lethal commander who knew exactly how to exploit his enemy's weaknesses.

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The Centralia massacre made bloody bill the most hunted man on the border.

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One month later, on October 26, 1864, Union forces lured Anderson's band into an ambush

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near Albany and Ray County, Missouri.

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Bloody Bill Anderson was killed in the fight.

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His men desperately tried to recover his body, losing up to 10 more men in the attempt, but

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the union held the corpse.

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Union militia took Anderson's body to Richmond, Missouri.

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A doctor named Richard B. Keiss photographed him.

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In the 10 type, Anderson is propped up wearing his guerrilla shirt with a pistol in his hand

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and a union soldier holding his head upright for clear identification.

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Then they decapitated him.

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Officially, they put his head on a spiked telegraph pole and dragged his body through the streets

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before burying it in an unmarked grave.

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The union wanted to prove bloody bill was dead.

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They wanted to terrorize his followers.

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Instead, they created a martyr.

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That public mutilation gave Anderson surviving men a visceral reason to keep fighting.

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After Anderson died, Archie Clement took command of the guerrilla band.

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Jesse and Frank James stayed with him.

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They refused to recognize the end of the Civil War.

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They kept fighting, even after the Confederate surrender in 1865.

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In 1869, the James Younger gang robbed a bank in Gallatin, Missouri.

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During the robbery, Jesse James shot and killed the cashier, John Sheetz.

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But the robbery wasn't about money.

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Jesse believed Sheetz was Samuel P. Cox.

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The man he thought had killed Bloody Bill Anderson.

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He was wrong about the identity, but the motive was clear.

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The first major crime of the James Younger gang was revenge for Anderson's death.

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Bloody Bill Anderson was killed at 24 years old after a two-year reign of terror.

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Union forces tried to erase him by mutilating his corpse and burying him without a marker.

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But in 1967, over a century later, a sympathizer convinced the United States government to officially

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mark Anderson's grave with a headstone that highlighted his service to the Confederacy.

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Anderson's real legacy is Jesse James.

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The systematic murder of unarmed men, the refusal to show mercy, the belief that violence

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is the only legitimate response to grievance.

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That was Bloody Bill's lesson.

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Jesse James learned it at 16 years old, and he carried it for the rest of his life.

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The American outlaw tradition didn't start with bankruptries and train heists.

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It started with a guerrilla commander who decorated his saddle with scouts and taught a teenager

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that murder was business.

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That's the story of Bloody Bill Anderson, the butcher of Centrelia, the man who created

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Jesse James, the ghost that haunted the American frontier long after his head came off that

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telegraph pole.

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Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder, Bingeable True Crime Stories.

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I'm Joe, I'm the host, and here's an email subject I told my kid about your podcast.

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"Hey, Joe, my teenager overheard me listening and asked what the show was.

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I said, 'It's a man who explains terrible things in a calm voice.'"

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She said, "So like a cool history teacher, thought that was funny enough to share.

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Kim in Muncie, Indiana."

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And Kim, especially with today's episode, because today felt like a history lesson, but I

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don't even know how to respond to that.

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A cool history, I did want to teach history at one point in my life.

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I thought when I grow up and become an adult, I want to be a basketball coach or a baseball

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coach, just a high school coach, and also teach history.

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That was what middle school Joe wanted to be when he grew up.

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Obviously, I didn't do that, but now I tell murder stories on the internet.

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Hey, if you're a new listener to the podcast, make sure you hit subscribe right now.

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Quick reminder to share this podcast with your friends and family if you've got friends

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and family that you think could be into brief, bingeable stories about true crime.

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And that's going to do it.

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That's your episode for today.

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Thanks again for listening to 10minute Murder.

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See you next time.

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[Music]