I believe that too many histories of William (Bloody Bill) Anderson have been written to avoid both Union and Confederate concerns about associating regular warfare with guerrilla warfare. It is interesting to note that both sides condoned guerrilla warfare as the source and the antidote to guerrilla warfare. The branches of guerrilla warfare extend back in American history (much less European, Asian, African, etc. history)to clashes between Caucasian settlers and American Indians. The very style of the frontiersman, pioneer and mountain man, contained elements that lent itself well to guerrilla warfare. And there are plenty of massacres, torture incidents, and killing of women and children, to make the guerrilla war during the Civil War, in Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, the mountains of North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, West Virginia (or western Virginia) and the valleys of Virginia no different.

We should not ignore history when Price and Hindman both used and distanced themselves from guerrillas. Union generals did the same thing. There was an appreciation and an abhorance in guerrilla warfare that probably did more to keep it going.

So lauding one guerrilla and castigating another doesn't accomplish anything, in my opinion. We need to study and understand these men. They are the closest examples we have of the self-styled guerrilla's we face today. Why men would commandeer a plane and pitch it into a building filled with civilians should be of more importance to us that whether or not one guerrilla was from Missouri or the other was from Kansas. It might even be important to study why Price did distance himself from Bloody Bill, and at the same time provided him with official orders, knowing that Anderson would exceed them in ways that Price might not want to associate himself with.