It was difficult to get the enemy out of the houses. Snatching up torches and braving the guns of the entrenched Federals, Dick and Ike Berry put fire to one house. Arch Clements and Dick West to another, Theo. Castle, John Maupin and Mose Huffaker to a third, and Ben Broomfield, Tuck, Tom and Woot Hill to the fourth.
It was a night of terror and agony. As the militiamen ran out they were shot down by the Guerrillas in the shadow. Some wounded, burnt to death, and others, stifled by the heat and smoke, rushed, gasping and blackened into the air, to be riddled with bullets. Eight, barely, of the garrison escaped the holocaust.
Anderson turned west towards Kansas City, expecting to overtake General Price there. En route he killed as he rode. Scarcely an hour of all the long march was barren of a victim. Union men, militiamen, Federal soldiers, home guards, Germans on general principles—no matter what the class or the organization—if they were pro-United States, they were killed.
Later on, in the month of October, while well advanced in Ray County, Anderson received the first news of the death of Todd and the retreat of Price. By this time, however, he had recruited his own command to several hundred, and had joined to it a detachment of regular Confederates, guiding and guarding to the South a motley aggregation of recruits, old and young. Halting one day to rest and to prepare for a passage across the Missouri River, close to Missouri City, Anderson found one thousand Federals—eight hundred infantry and two hundred cavalry. He made haste to attack them. His young lieutenant, Arch Clements, advised him urgently against the attack, as did Captain A. E. Asbury, a young and gallant Confederate officer, who was in company with him, commanding fifty recruits. Others of his associates did the same, notably Colonel John Holt, a Confederate officer, and Colonel James H. R. Condiff. Captain Asbury was a cool, brave, wary man who had had large experience in border fighting, and who knew that for a desperate charge raw recruits could not be depended upon.
Anderson would not be held back. Ordering a charge, his horse ran away with him and he was seventy-five yards ahead of his followers when he was killed. Next to him was William Smith, a veteran Guerrilla of four years’ service. Five balls struck him, and three struck Anderson. Next to Smith was John Maupin, who was wounded twice, and next to Maupin, Cundill, who was also hit, and next to Cundill, Asbury, who got four bullets through his clothes. John Holt, Jim Crow Chiles and Peyton Long had their horses killed. The three Hill brothers and Dick West and ten others of Anderson’s old company fought their way up to Anderson’s body and sought to bring it out. Tuck Hill was shot, so was his brother Woot and Dick West. Their wounds were severe, but not mortal. Once they succeeded in placing it upon a horse; the horse was killed and fell upon the corpse and held it to the ground. Still struggling heroically over the body of his idolized commander, Hank Patterson fell dead, not a foot from the dead Guerrilla. Next, Simmons was killed, and then Anson Tolliver, and then Paul Debonhorst, and then Smith Jobson, and then Luckett, then John McIlvaine, and finally Jasper Moody and William Tarkington. Nothing could live before the fire of the concealed infantry and the Spencer carbines of the cavalry.
A single blanket might have covered the terrible heap of dead and wounded who fought to recover all that remained of that tiger of the jungle. John Pringle, the red-headed giant of the Boonville scalps, far ahead of his company, was the last man killed, struggling even to the death to bear back the corpse. He was a captain of a company, and a veteran of the Mexican war, but he did what he would not order his men to do—he rushed up to the corpse heap and fastened about the leg of Anderson a lariat that he might drag the body away. The Federals killed his horse. Shot once, he tugged at the rope himself, bleeding pitifully. Shot again, he fell, struggled up to his feet, fired every barrel of three revolvers into the enemy, and received as a counter blow two more bullets.
This time he did not rise again or stir, or make a moan. All the wild boar blood in his veins had been poured out, and the bronzed face, from being rigid, had become august.
Joseph and Arch Nicholson, William James, Clell Miller and John Warren, all young recruits in their first battle, fought savagely in the melee, and all were wounded. Miller, among those who strove to rescue the corpse of Anderson, was shot, and Warren, wounded four times, crawled back from the slaughter pen with difficulty. A minie ball had found the heart of Anderson. Life, thank God, was gone when a rope was put around his neck and his body dragged as the body of a dog slain in the woods.
Many a picture was taken of the dead lion, with his great flowing beard, and that indescribable pallor of death on his bronzed face. The Federals cut his head off and stuck it on a telegraph pole.