Nowhere was the Civil War as savage as it was in Missouri-and nowhere did it produce a killer more savage than William Anderson. 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. A name associated with William Quantrill and Jesse James, Bloody Bill Anderson was known for never taking prisoners. A former horse thief turned bushwhacker, he became the scourge of Kansas and Missouri with a reputation for unspeakable atrocities. Sometimes he left the bodies of dead Federal soldiers scalped, skinned, and castrated. Sometimes he decapitated them and rearranged their heads. Wherever Bloody Bill rode, the Grim Reaper rode alongside. In telling this story of bitter bloodshed, historians Castel and Goodrich track Bloody Bill's reign of terror over increasingly violent raids. He rode with Quantrill in the infamous sack of Lawrence and killed more victims than any other raider. Then he led the brutal Centralia Massacre, a blood-soaked nightmare recounted here hour-by-hour from firsthand accounts. More than compiling a chronicle of horrors, Castel and Goodrich have produced the first full-fledged account of Anderson's career. 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. The authors' disagreements on many aspects of Anderson's gruesome career add a fascinating dimension to the book. Only 26 when he was killed charging an ambush, Bloody Bill Anderson had already become a legend. This book takes readers behind the legend and provides a closer look at the man-and at the face of terror.

A story of bitter bloodshed, one in which farmers and honest laborers are transformed into thieves and murderers. The authors track the rise and reign of Bill Anderson' terror from 1862 to 1865.

When the Civil War broke out, Missouri was secured for the Union, but many Southern-leaning citizens in the border state resented the Federal occupation. Fighting along the border flared up again as hundreds of boys and young men took to the bush to champion the Rebel cause. Waging a particularly vicious brand of guerilla warfare, they stayed to fight long after regular Confederate forces had been driven from the state. Although William "Bloody Bill" Anderson always warrants special mention in books about Confederate Civil War guerrilla William Quantrill, Anderson's story has scarcely been told in its own right. In "The Civil War Story of Bloody Bill Anderson," Larry Wood aims to neither condemn nor to justify, but merely to tell a story that is fascinating-the story of perhaps the bloodiest man in America's bloodiest war.

Th e western arena of the Civil War seemed distant and fought for reasons other than slavery. Jayhawker and Border Ruffi ans clashed mercilessly before and after the fi ring on Fort Sumter. One confl ict after another caused tensions to escalate as each side of the Missouri/Kansas state line attempted to establish its superiority. Each injustice led to a retaliation of even more unjust actions. Certainly the Lawrence Massacre could be interpreted as a reprisal for the collapse of the Bingham Building. However, the Centralia Massacre can only be attributed to the diabolical cravings of the maniac 'Bloody Bill Anderson'.

From the hills and valleys of the eastern Confederate states to the sun-drenched plains of Missouri and "Bleeding Kansas," a vicious, clandestine war was fought behind the big-battle clashes of the American Civil War. In the east, John Singleton Mosby became renowned for the daring hit-and-run tactics of his rebel horsemen. Here a relatively civilized war was fought; women and children usually left with a roof over their heads. But along the Kansas-Missouri border it was a far more brutal clash; no quarter given. William Clarke Quantrill and William "Bloody Bill" Anderson became notorious for their savagery.

In this brilliant biography T. J. Stiles offers a new understanding of the legendary outlaw Jesse James. Although he has often been portrayed as a Robin Hood of the old west, in this ground-breaking work Stiles places James within the context of the bloody conflicts of the Civil War to reveal a much more complicated and significant figure. "Carries the reader scrupulously through James’s violent, violent life.... When [Stiles]… calls Jesse James the ‘last rebel of the Civil War; he correctly defines the theme that ruled Jesse’s life." —Larry McMurtry, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove via The New Republic Raised in a fiercely pro-slavery household in bitterly divided Missouri, at age sixteen James became a bushwhacker, one of the savage Confederate guerrillas that terrorized the border states. After the end of the war, James continued his campaign of robbery and murder into the brutal era of reconstruction, when his reckless daring, his partisan pronouncements, and his alliance with the sympathetic editor John Newman Edwards placed him squarely at the forefront of the former Confederates’ bid to recapture political power. With meticulous research and vivid accounts of the dramatic adventures of the famous gunman, T. J. Stiles shows how he resembles not the apolitical hero of legend, but rather a figure ready to use violence to command attention for a political cause—in many ways, a forerunner of the modern terrorist.

The guerrillas who terrorized Missouri during the Civil War were colorful men whose daring and vicious deeds brought them a celebrity never enjoyed by the Federal soldiers who hunted them. Many books have been written about William Quantrill, "Bloody Bill" Anderson, George Todd, Tom Livingston and other noted guerrillas. You have probably not heard of George Wolz, Aaron Caton, John Durnell, Thomas Holston or Ludwick St. John. They served in Union cavalry regiments in Missouri, where neither side showed mercy to defeated foes. They are just five of the anonymous thousands who, in the end, defeated the guerrillas and have been forgotten with the passage of time. This is their story.