On September 27, 1864, the morning train rolled into Centralia, Missouri, a depot town too small to matter on the North Missouri Railroad. Waiting on the platform were about eighty guerrillas wearing stolen Union blue, led by a twenty-four-year-old man in a silk shirt embroidered by a woman’s hand. Human scalps hung from his horse’s bridle. The newspapers already called him Bloody Bill.
His men stopped the train and dragged the passengers out one by one. Among them were twenty-four unarmed Union soldiers heading home on furlough, boys in uniform with no weapons and no orders. The guerrillas stripped them down, lined them up on the platform in the open air, and executed them. One soldier survived only by falling beneath the dead and lying still.
Before sundown, roughly 150 Union troops would ride into Centralia to punish the man responsible. Not one of them understood what they were riding into. William Thomas Anderson was born around 1839, most likely in Hopkins County, Kentucky. His family moved west during his childhood and settled in the contested border country of western Missouri.
His father, William C. Anderson, was a farmer and sometime horse trader. His mother died when he was young, and his father remarried. They were middling frontier people, not wealthy, not destitute, just close enough to the Missouri-Kansas line to get caught in machinery that was already grinding before the war had a name.
The border between Missouri and Kansas was not a political boundary. It was a fault line. Kansas was free soil; Missouri was a slave state. The argument between them did not wait for Fort Sumter.
For years before the Civil War officially began, armed bands from both sides had crossed that line to burn, steal, and kill. Kansas Jayhawkers raided Missouri farms. Missouri Bushwhackers raided Kansas towns. The federal government watched and did almost nothing useful.
In 1862, Anderson’s father was killed. The circumstances were never fully settled. Some accounts connect the killing to a confrontation with a Kansas judge over a land or livestock dispute. Other sources place it squarely in the guerrilla conflict already burning across the border.
What no account disputes is the result: William Anderson’s father was dead. No authority on either side investigated. No one was charged. No one answered for it.
A young man on the most dangerous strip of ground in America had lost his father and gained nothing from the law except silence. Anderson did not ease into violence. He fell into it fast, starting with small raids, horse theft, and ambushes along the border. He joined the loosely organized Missouri Bushwhacker bands fighting under Confederate sympathies but outside any formal Confederate command.
He was good at it. The name Bloody Bill was not invented later by dime novelists; it was earned early, in the field. Other guerrillas noticed a willingness in him that went past what the fight required. He found his way to William Clark Quantrill, a former schoolteacher from Ohio who had come to the border country before the war under a false name.
Quantrill was charismatic, cold, and gifted at the one thing that mattered most in guerrilla warfare: keeping volatile men pointed in the same direction. His band was the largest and most organized guerrilla force in the theater. It was not an army. It had no supply chain, no barracks, no formal discipline.
It was a roving company of young men, mostly from dispossessed Missouri families, operating under a loose Confederate commission Richmond was never fully comfortable endorsing. For a stretch of months, the guerrilla network functioned as a kind of family for men who had lost their real ones. They wintered in the homes of Southern-sympathizing civilians. Local women fed them, hid them, mended their clothes.
The loyalty ran deep and in both directions. The Union Army understood this, and the Union Army decided to use it. Missouri under federal occupation was not governed the way a loyal state would be. Missouri had never officially seceded, but the Union military treated large portions of it as hostile territory.
The man responsible for the border region was Brigadier General Thomas Ewing Jr. , commander of the District of the Border, headquartered in Kansas City. Ewing was a lawyer by training, a brother-in-law of William Tecumseh Sherman, and a man given an impossible task: suppress a guerrilla insurgency that could not be separated from the civilian population it lived among. Ewing’s solution was collective punishment.
If guerrillas sheltered among the people, punish the people. Union authorities began rounding up the female relatives of known guerrillas, mothers, sisters, wives. They were arrested and held in makeshift prisons. One of those prisons was a three-story brick building on Grand Avenue in Kansas City.
The women held inside included Anderson’s sisters, Josephine and Mary. They had committed no crime and faced no charges. They were held because of who their brother was. On August 13, 1863, the building collapsed.
Three stories of brick and timber came down on the women inside. Five women were killed outright; others were pulled from the rubble with broken bones and crushed limbs. Anderson’s sister Josephine was among the dead. Mary survived but was severely injured; some accounts say her back was broken.
The cause of the collapse was immediately disputed. Confederate sympathizers believed Union soldiers had deliberately weakened the supports. Union investigators said the structure failed on its own. Modern historians generally lean toward neglect rather than sabotage, but the building was known to be in poor condition before a single woman was locked inside.
No one in Union command was held responsible. Ewing remained at his post. The arrests continued. Whatever Anderson was before August 13, he was something else after.
Eight days later, on August 21, 1863, Quantrill’s full guerrilla force rode into Lawrence, Kansas, at dawn. Anderson was among them. Lawrence was the symbolic heart of the Free State movement, home of Senator James Lane, the abolitionist Jayhawker who had led raids into Missouri for years. Quantrill’s men went door-to-door.
Over four hours, between 150 and 200 men and boys were killed. The dead were civilians: shopkeepers, farmers, teenagers dragged from their beds and shot in front of their mothers. The town was burned. Lane escaped by running through a cornfield in his nightshirt.
Lawrence was not a battle. It was a massacre carried out in retaliation for a building collapse and a decade of border war. After Lawrence, Anderson broke from Quantrill. The reasons are not entirely clear; some historians point to a personal falling out, while others say Anderson’s escalating brutality unsettled even Quantrill.
Whatever the cause, Anderson formed his own band and began operating independently across central and northern Missouri. He and his men started taking scalps from dead Union soldiers and tying them to their horses. The decorations were not hidden; they were displayed. Anderson was no longer fighting a war.
He was waging terror, and he no longer distinguished between soldiers who had done him harm and boys in uniform who had never heard his name. Four days after Lawrence, Ewing issued General Order Number 11, the forced depopulation of four Missouri border counties: Bates, Cass, Jackson, and the northern part of Vernon. Every civilian, Union sympathizer or Confederate, was given fifteen days to leave. Those who could prove loyalty to the federal government could relocate to designated military posts; everyone else was driven out with nothing.
Tens of thousands of people were displaced. Kansas Jayhawkers and Union troops used the order as license to loot and burn. The affected area became known as the Burnt District. Entire communities simply ceased to exist.
Many of the displaced men and boys, now homeless and enraged, joined the very guerrilla bands the order was supposed to destroy. Now Centralia, September 27, 1864. Everything rode with Anderson into that depot town: the dead father, the collapsed building, the sister’s body in the rubble, Lawrence burning, the Burnt District emptied of its people. All of it was in the saddle when he lined up those twenty-four unarmed soldiers and executed them in the open air.
Within hours, three companies of the 39th Missouri Infantry rode into Centralia, roughly 150 men under Major A. V. Johnson. Johnson was new to the command; his troops were raw recruits, mostly boys, armed with single-shot Enfield muskets that took thirty seconds to reload.
Anderson’s guerrillas carried four to six revolvers each and rode horses trained for close mounted combat. Johnson dismounted his infantry in a field south of town and formed a line. Anderson charged. The guerrillas overran the Union position in minutes.
Johnson was killed. Of roughly 150 Union soldiers, between 116 and 123 were killed, many shot while trying to surrender. Wounded men were executed where they lay. Bodies were scalped, some dismembered, some decapitated.
Centralia was not a battle; it was a slaughter. After Centralia, Anderson was the most wanted guerrilla in Missouri. The man assigned to find him was Lieutenant Colonel Samuel P. Cox, who commanded a battalion of Missouri State Militia.
Cox was a local man who knew the terrain of northern Missouri, the creek bottoms and timber lines where guerrillas moved. Anderson’s band was fragmenting; some of his men were heading south to winter in Texas. Anderson stayed, kept raiding, kept killing, but the network of sympathetic households that had once hidden his kind was thinning out. The ground beneath him was disappearing.
Cox set his ambush on a road near the town of Albany in Ray County. The date was October 26, 1864. Anderson and a small party rode into it. Every account agrees on the result: Anderson was shot from his horse.
At least two bullets struck him, one hitting the back of his head. He was dead before he reached the ground or within seconds after. He was twenty-four or twenty-five years old. The men who killed him did not bury him.
They hauled his body into Richmond, Missouri, propped him in a chair, opened his eyes, and someone took a photograph. The image survives; he is wearing the embroidered guerrilla shirt, his face still. Then they cut off his head and mounted it on a telegraph pole outside of town, and dragged his body through the streets. No trial.
No last words. A young man who had scalped his enemies was beheaded by the men who killed him. Thomas Ewing Jr. survived the war and went into politics.
In 1879 he ran for governor of Ohio and lost; his opponent used General Order Number 11 against him in the campaign. But the real damage had been done years earlier by George Caleb Bingham, a Missouri Unionist who had watched the forced evacuation with his own eyes. Bingham spent years creating a massive canvas depicting the horror of Order Number 11, painting it specifically to ruin Ewing’s career. He succeeded.
Ewing died in 1896, still defending the order that destroyed four counties and created the very enemy it was supposed to eliminate. Samuel Cox collected his recognition for killing Anderson and faded into quiet obscurity. William Quantrill did not survive the war. He was shot and captured by Union irregulars in Kentucky in May 1865, weeks after Lee surrendered.
He died in a Louisville military prison on June 6 at twenty-seven. His remains became a grotesque post-war relic; parts of his skeleton were scattered, displayed, and fought over for decades. The Burnt District was never fully repopulated. The communities erased by Order Number 11 did not return intact.
Some families came back; many did not. The damage persisted for a generation, and the silence in those families persisted longer. Anderson’s violence was his own. The scalps were his choice.
The executions at Centralia were his doing. No collapsed building and no burnt county excuses what he became. But the system that produced him, the dead father no one investigated, the sisters imprisoned in a building everyone knew was failing, the order that emptied four counties of their people, that system does not get to pretend it was surprised by what walked out of the wreckage. The Missouri border communities remembered Anderson in terms that never settled into agreement.
In towns that had supported the Union, he was a monster, a name used to scare children for a generation. In the old Confederate-sympathizing households of western Missouri, the memory was quieter, something closer to recognition. They had watched what the law did to people like them, and they understood how a boy becomes a thing like Bloody Bill, even if they wished he had not. The guerrilla war’s survivors did not talk about it the way veterans of Gettysburg or Shiloh did.
Many never spoke of it at all. Anderson’s grave is in the Pioneer Cemetery in Richmond, Missouri. For decades, the exact location was unmarked or disputed. A headstone stands there now, drawing visitors, some historians, some enthusiasts, some harder to read than others.
The George Caleb Bingham painting hangs in the collection of the State Historical Society of Missouri, one of the most politically weaponized pieces of American art ever made. The Centralia battlefield has a small memorial. The town itself is quiet. Most of the ground where 120 men died in minutes is farmland now.
The soil does not look any different.