At the Osage River the Federal pursuit, gathering volume and intensity as it advanced, struck Quantrell hard and brought him to an engagement south of the river. Too much haste, however, cost him dearly. The advance, being the smaller, had outridden the main army and was unsupported and isolated when attacked. Quantrell turned upon it savagely and crushed it at a blow. Out of sixty-six troopers he killed twenty. In those days there were no wounded. Before the main body came up he was over the Osage and away, and riding fast to encompass the immense prairie between the river and Johnstown. When scarcely over it, a flanking column made a dash at him coming from the west, killed Blunt’s horse and drove Quantrell to timber. Night fell and he rode out of sight and out of hearing. When he drew rein again it was at the farm of Judge Russell Hicks on the Sni, in Jackson County. The next morning at David George’s he disbanded for ten days, sending messengers out in all directions to announce his arrival and make known the rendezvous.
The ten days allotted by Quantrell for concentration purposes had not yet expired, but many of the reckless spirits, rapacious for air and exercise, could not be kept still. Poole, Ross and Greenwood made a dash for the German settlement of Lafayette County, and left some marks there that are not yet obliterated. Albert Cunningham, glorying in the prowess of a splendid manhood, and victor in a dozen combats against desperate odds, fell before the spring came, in an insignificant skirmish on the Harrisonville and Pleasant Hill road.
In the lull of military movements in Jackson County, Cass was to see the inauguration of the heavy Guerrilla work of 1863. Three miles west of Pleasant Springs, Younger and his comrades struck a blow that had the vigor of the olden days in it. The garrison at Pleasant Hill numbered three hundred, and from the garrison of Lieutenant Jefferson took thirty-two cavalrymen and advanced three miles towards Smith’s, on a scouting expedition. While Hulse and Noah Webster, two Guerrilas who seemed never to sleep and to be continually hanging about the flanks of the Federals, discovered Jefferson and reported his movements to the main body encamped at Parson Webster’s. Taking with him eight men, Joe Lee hurried to cut Jefferson off from Pleasant Hill. Younger, with eight more, was close up from the west. Lee had with him John Webster, Noah Webster, Sterling Kennedy, David Kennedy, William Hays, Perry Hays, Henry McAninch, James Marshall, Edward Marshall and Edward Hink. He was to gain the east end of the lane and halt there until Younger came up at its western extremity. Jefferson discovered Lee, however, and formed a line of battle in front of Smith’s, throwing some skirmishers forward and getting ready apparently for a fight, although afterwards it was reported that Lee’s men were mistaken for a portion of the garrison left behind at Pleasant Hill. Younger had further to go than he at first supposed, but was making all the haste possible, when Lee, carried away by the uncontrolable impulse of his men, charged down the lane from the east, at a furious rate. Jefferson held his troopers fair to their line, until the Guerrillas reached a carbine range, but could hold them no longer. A volley and a stampede and the wild race was on again. About a length ahead and splendidly mounted, William Hays led the Guerrillas. Shot dead, his horse fell from under him and crushed his senses out for half an hour. John and Noah Webster took Hays’ place through sheer superiority of horse flesh and forced the fighting, John killing three of the enemy as he ran and Noah, four. Noah’s pistols were empty, but he dashed alongside of the rearmost trooper and knocked him from his saddle with the butt of one of them, and seized another by the collar of his coat and dragged him to the ground. Both were dispatched. Too late to block the western mouth of the lane, Younger joined in the swift pursuit as it passed him to the left and added much to the certainty of the killing. Of the thirty-two, four alone escaped, and Jefferson was not among them. Hulse shot him running at a distance of fifty yards, and before he got to him he was dead.
Pleasant Hill was instantly evacuated. Not a Federal garrison remained in Cass, outside of Harrisonville, and the garrison there was as effectively imprisoned as if surrounded by the walls of a fortress. The Guerrillas rode at ease in every direction.
Younger and Lon Railey hung about the town for a week killing its pickets and destroying its foraging parties. Other bands in other directions gathered up valuable horses for future service and helped onward to the southern army troops of recruits who needed only pilots and protection to the Osage River.
Like Cunningham, the man who had fought as a lion in twenty different combats, was destined to fall in a sudden and unnoted skirmish. Returning northward in the rear of Quantrell, Lieutenant William Haller was attacked at sunset and fought till dark. He triumphed, but he fell. His comrades buried him and wept for him, and left him.
The battle of the year 1863 had commenced; formidable men were coming to the surface in every direction. Here and there sudden Guerrilla fires leaped up from many places about the State, and burned as if fed by oil, until everything in their reach had been consumed. It was a year of savage fighting and killing; it was the year of the torch and the black flag; it was the year when the invisible reaper reaped sorest in the ranks of the Guerrillas and gathered into harvest sheaves, the bravest of the brave.
Anderson, newly coming into sight, was flashing across the military horizon as a war comet. Left to himself and permitted to pursue his placid ways in peace, probably the amiable neighbor and working man would never have been developed into a tiger. But see how he was wrought upon! One day late in 1862, a body of Federal soldiers, especially enrolled and uninformed to persecute women and prey upon non-combatants, gathered up in a half day’s raid a number of demonstrative Southern girls whose only sin had been extravagant talk and pro-Confederacy cheering. They were taken to Kansas City and imprisoned in a dilapidated tenement close upon a steep place. Food was flung to them at intervals, and brutal guards sang ribald songs and used indecent language in their presence. With these women, tenderly nurtured and reared, were two of Will Anderson’s sisters. Working industriously in Kansas with his father, Anderson knew nothing of the real struggles of the war, nor of the imprisonment of his sisters. A quiet, courteous, fair-minded man who took more delight in a book than in a crowd, he had a most excellent name in Randolph County, Missouri, where he was born, and in Johnson County, Kansas, where he was living in 1862. Destiny had to deal with him, however. The old rickety, ramshackle building in which were the huddled women, did not fall down fast enough for the brutes who bellowed about it. At night and in the darkness it was undermined, and in the morning when a little wind blew upon it and it was shaken, it fell with a crash. Covered up, the faces disfigured, the limp, lifeless bodies were past all pain! Dead to touch, or kiss, or passionate entreaty, Anderson’s eldest sister was taken from the ruins a corpse. The younger, badly injured in the spine, with one leg broken and her face bruised and cut painfully, lived to tell the terrible story of it all to a gentle, patient brother kneeling before her at her bedside and looking up above to see if God were there.
Soon a stir came along the border. A name new to the strife was beginning to pass from band to band and about the camp fires to have a respectful hearing.
“Anderson?” “Anderson?” “Who is this Anderson?” The Guerrillas asked one of another. “He kills them all. Quantrell spares now and then, and Poole and Blunt, and Yager, and Haller, and Jarrette, and Younger, and Gregg, and Todd, and Shepherd, and all the balance; but Anderson, never. Is he a devil in uniform?”