A question came in a few days ago from a reader wanting to know how many men did Jesse kill? Trying to count Jesse’s kill total during the war – it isn’t really possible. He joined the guerrillas in early 1864. Not long after joining, Jesse was wounded and out of action for a couple of months. Guerrilla can be chaotic. I’m sure he had a few kills during his year as a soldier.
Frank and Jesse were with the very large group of guerrillas under the combined commands of Charlie Quantrill, Bloody Bill
Anderson, George Todd and Dave Poole in the area near Centralia. Frank said he wasn’t at the massacre but he didn’t say if Jesse was or not. Anderson took a big group of men into the town to raid it. Not all the 80 or so men were at the train station to attack the train and kill the unarmed soldiers. This massacre was terrible and to our eyes totally uncalled for and cowardly. However, when set during the time of the total, unconditional, no quarter war that was being waged in Missouri and Kansas before, during and after the Civil War, this wasn’t out of the norm. Had Jim Lane or Charles Jennison’s Kansas men stopped a train with unarmed Southern soldiers or suspected guerrillas, they would have done the same thing. After the attack on the town, a group of Union soldiers sought out the guerrillas and attacked them. Frank credited Jesse with killing the Union commander, Major A. V. Johnson. Other soldiers who left accounts of the battle say Frank or someone else shot Johnson. The guerrillas and Union men were on horses and there was a lot of shooting going on. It would be nearly impossible to say the killing was by a specific soldier.
