Appalachian Figures
In the fall of 1864 a Kentucky born farmer’s son found himself riding through brushy Missouri pastureland, hunting one of the most feared guerrillas on the border. Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Porter Cox, commanding a mixed detachment of Enrolled Missouri Militia, had spent weeks tracking William “Bloody Bill” Anderson, whose men had already left a trail of burned farms and massacred prisoners across central Missouri. On October 27 Cox’s column collided with Anderson’s band near the little settlement of Albany in Ray County. When the smoke cleared, Anderson lay dead on the field with a fatal head wound, and newspapers across the country reported that a Kentucky native from the Cumberland foothills had ended one of the Civil War’s bloodiest guerrilla careers. The fight near Albany would define Cox’s public memory, but it was only one chapter in a long life that began in Williamsburg, Kentucky, and wound through the Mexican War, frontier freighting, Civil War counter guerrilla warfare, and a brush with Jesse James.
From Williamsburg to the Missouri frontier
Near contemporary county histories and genealogical compilations agree that Samuel P. Cox was born in Williamsburg, Whitley County, Kentucky, on 16 December 1828. His birth placed him in the same courthouse town where another Samuel Cox, an older relative often called the “Father of Williamsburg,” had helped anchor the new Whitley County seat in the early nineteenth century. Historical markers from the Kentucky Historical Society and local histories of Williamsburg point out that early county courts met in the older Samuel Cox’s home, underscoring how deeply the Cox name was woven into the origins of the town. Those older connections sometimes lead later writers to tangle the two men together, but the records for Samuel Porter Cox show a distinct life and migration story.
When Samuel was about ten years old his parents joined the steady flow of Kentuckians moving into northwest Missouri. The 1882 History of Daviess County, later reprinted in genealogy collections, recalls that in 1839 his parents moved the family to what would become Jackson Township in Daviess County. There Cox grew up working on the family farm and absorbing the rhythms of a frontier county that still bore strong Appalachian fingerprints. Many settlers in that part of Missouri had followed river and road routes from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia, bringing with them familiar church ties, kin networks, and political habits.
By the mid 1840s national events pulled the young Kentuckian into wider currents. In the spring of 1847 Cox enlisted in Company D of the Oregon Battalion for service in the Mexican American War. The Daviess County biographical sketch and later genealogical summaries note that he served under Captain W. H. Rogers and Lieutenant Colonel Powell, a detail confirmed by his appearance in the Mexican War service index. The experience gave him a taste of soldiering on distant frontiers and introduced him to the networks of officers and scouts that would later shape his Civil War service.
After the war Cox returned to Missouri, married, and began building a civilian life that mixed farming, stock dealing, and short stints in public service. The 1882 county history and related genealogical sketches describe him as a deputy sheriff, a merchant, and a man who briefly tried his luck in the mining towns of California before returning to Gallatin to settle permanently. By the 1850s and 1860s census records place him firmly in Daviess County, part of a growing cluster of Kentucky born settlers whose politics and loyalties would be tested when civil war tore Missouri apart.
Guerrilla war and the road to Albany
When the Civil War began, Missouri fractured into competing provisional governments, militias, and guerrilla bands. Cox’s earlier military experience and local standing drew him back into uniform. State records referenced in a 1902 Congressional debate, along with the Daviess County history, indicate that he became an officer in the Enrolled Missouri Militia, a part time state force organized to protect local communities and support Federal operations against Confederate guerrillas.
By 1864 central and western Missouri seethed with irregular violence. William T. “Bloody Bill” Anderson, a Confederate partisan leader allied with figures like William Quantrill, led a mobile band that struck Federal patrols, pro Union civilians, and railroad lines. Contemporary reports and modern syntheses of guerrilla warfare in Missouri emphasize Anderson’s role in atrocities such as the Centralia massacre and describe how Union commanders grew desperate to stop him.
In late October 1864 Cox received orders that set him on a collision course with Anderson. John F. Jordin’s 1904 character sketch of Cox, drawing on local recollection, describes the lieutenant colonel summoning scattered militia detachments, conferring with Major A. W. Mullins and Major James A. Grimes, and moving rapidly across Ray County in search of the guerrilla camp. On the night of 26 October Cox wrote from Richmond, Missouri, to a fellow officer, Colonel Pace at Liberty, announcing his intention to march west the next day, a letter Jordin quotes to show Cox’s deliberate planning.
The next morning Cox’s column encountered Anderson’s band near a place locals called Albany in southwest Ray County. Cox’s own after action report, preserved in the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, offers the clearest primary account of what followed. Writing from Richmond on 27 October 1864, he informed his superior that his mixed force, drawn from the Thirty third and Fifty first Enrolled Missouri Militia, had surprised Anderson’s men and fought a sharp engagement in which his command suffered four wounded but no killed. He reported that Anderson fell in the fight and that his men captured horses, arms, and equipment from the guerrillas.
Newspapers and later writers quickly turned Cox’s dry report into dramatic narrative. The St. Louis and Kansas City presses, along with regional histories, told stories of Anderson charging with revolvers in both hands before falling under a volley from Cox’s men, and some accounts claimed that he was shot twice in the back of the head, a detail repeated on a modern historical marker about Missouri bushwhackers. Whatever the precise manner of his death, Anderson’s body was unmistakable. Union soldiers displayed it in Richmond for identification, and contemporary photographs taken of the corpse have become some of the most reproduced images of the guerrilla war.
Modern scholarship on Missouri guerrilla fighting tends to treat the Albany fight as both a tactical victory and a grim symbol. Academic studies of irregular conflict in Missouri and public history projects like the University of Kansas’s Civil War on the Western Border note that Cox’s success came only after years of mutual reprisals, executions, and guerrilla campaigns that left entire communities traumatized. For residents of Ray and Daviess Counties, however, Cox’s column had killed the man they blamed for raids, burnings, and killings across the region, and local memory would long remember him as the officer who stopped “Bloody Bill.”
A Daviess County “hero” and Jesse James’s revenge
After the war Cox returned to Gallatin and resumed his business and civic roles. The 1882 county history portrays him as a respected merchant, stock dealer, and citizen and notes that he and his wife raised several children, whose birth dates and names appear in both the history and later genealogical compilations. He served as mayor of Gallatin and remained active in Republican politics, part of a postwar order in which Union veterans often held local power.
But the guerrilla war had not entirely ended. Younger former bushwhackers, including Jesse and Frank James, drifted into postwar banditry that mixed lingering Confederate grievances with attempts at self styled outlaw glory. Many of their targets were banks, railroads, and individuals associated with Union authority. In that climate Cox’s role in Anderson’s death made him a marked man.
On 7 December 1869 two armed men rode into Gallatin and entered the Daviess County Savings Association. Within minutes the cashier, Captain John W. Sheets, lay dead on the floor, and the robbers fled with a small amount of cash. During their escape they reportedly boasted to bystanders that they had killed Major Samuel Cox, the man who had slain their beloved leader, “Bloody Bill” Anderson. National newspapers soon linked the robbery to Jesse James, arguing that Sheets had been mistaken for Cox and that the killing was an attempted act of vengeance as much as a crime for profit.
Local historical work in Daviess County has mined contemporary papers and later reminiscences to tell the story from the town’s perspective. Articles from the Daviess County Historical Society describe residents’ panic in the robbery’s aftermath, recount how posses pursued the fleeing men, and emphasize that Cox himself was not present in the bank that day. In their retelling, Cox becomes the intended but absent target around whom myth and outlaw legend swirl.
Those same local sources present Cox as a kind of counterweight to James’s celebrity. A Historical Society piece titled “Samuel Cox, a Daviess County Hero” reprints an earlier biographical sketch that begins with his Kentucky birth and traces his long residency in the county, stressing that he had lived there for seventy five years and earned the confidence of his neighbors. The language mirrors the closing line of the 1882 county history, which calls him “among the most highly respected citizens of Gallatin,” and frames him firmly as a figure of order and community memory in contrast to the romanticized outlaw.
Death, memory, and a Kentucky connection
Samuel P. Cox died in August 1913 at his home in Gallatin. Obituaries in papers such as the St. Louis Post Dispatch and local notices cited by the Daviess County Historical Society reported that he was eighty five years old, had spent three quarters of a century in Daviess County, and was buried in Greenwood or Brown Cemetery near town. His grave, photographed and documented in cemetery records and online memorials, bears a stone that lists his birth in Williamsburg, Kentucky, and his death in Missouri, succinctly capturing the migration arc shared by thousands of Appalachian families in the nineteenth century.
Portrait photographs of Cox, preserved in local collections and reproduced in genealogical and public history sites, show a bearded man in late nineteenth century dress, with the gaze and posture of a prosperous small town businessman rather than a frontier fighter. Yet the objects associated with him still bear the memory of violent years. A presentation saber given to him in recognition of his role in killing Anderson has surfaced in collectors’ circles, where articles in military memorabilia magazines quote period descriptions of the gift and retell the story of Albany in condensed form.
For Appalachia, Cox’s life offers a reminder that the region’s people and conflicts never stayed confined to the mountains. Born in a Whitley County seat whose earliest courts met in a Cox family home, he became part of the broader Appalachian diaspora that carried Kentucky families into the Missouri and Kansas borderlands. There he found himself in the middle of a different kind of border war, one in which guerrillas and militia officers wrote their own harsh codes of retaliation. His actions at Albany, his near brush with Jesse James’s revenge, and his later career as a Missouri merchant all grew from a life rooted in that initial move from Williamsburg.
Why Samuel P. Cox’s story matters for Appalachian history
At first glance a Missouri militia officer remembered for killing “Bloody Bill” Anderson might seem far from the usual subjects of Appalachian history. Yet his biography underscores three themes that run through the region’s nineteenth century experience.
The first is migration. Cox’s move from Williamsburg to Daviess County placed him in a stream of Appalachian settlers whose labor, votes, and family networks shaped the middle border long before the Civil War. County histories on both sides of the Ohio often note how many Missourians traced their roots back to Kentucky and Tennessee, and Cox’s story slots neatly into that pattern.
The second is the reach of Appalachian born soldiers. From the Mexican American War through the Civil War and later militia service, Cox carried lessons learned in one conflict into another. His Mexican War enlistment in the Oregon Battalion, documented in service indexes, foreshadowed his later reputation as a capable scout and organizer against guerrillas. When he wrote his after action report from Richmond in October 1864, he did so as a veteran who had already seen how quickly small fights on distant frontiers could ripple back into local memory.
The third theme is contested memory. In Missouri, as in Kentucky, communities argued over how to remember guerrilla fighters, militia officers, and bandits. Jesse James’s admirers sometimes treated the Gallatin robbery as a daring act of Confederate vengeance. Local historians in Daviess County, drawing on their own newspapers and county histories, instead centered the story on the murdered cashier, John Sheets, and on Cox as a defender of the community whose life had already been risked in earlier battles.
For readers in Whitley County and across Appalachian Kentucky, the name on Cox’s grave in Missouri is a reminder that mountain born men and women helped shape events far from home, often in ways that still echo through public markers, outlaw legends, and collector’s displays. To trace his story is to follow a path from a courthouse town on the Cumberland to a dusty pasture near Albany and a tense morning in a Gallatin bank, and to see how an Appalachian life could intersect with some of the most dramatic episodes of nineteenth century American violence.
Sources & Further Reading
Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Vol. XLI, Pt. I, “Report of Lieut. Col. Samuel P. Cox, Thirty third Infantry Enrolled Missouri Militia,” Richmond, Missouri, 27 October 1864, as transcribed and discussed in CivilWarTalk forums and related digital editions.American Civil War Forums
The History of Daviess County, Missouri (St. Louis: Birdsall and Dean, 1882), biographical sketch “Maj. Samuel P. Cox,” as reprinted in GenealogyTrails and AccessGenealogy, for details on Cox’s birth in Williamsburg, 1839 move to Missouri, Mexican War service, business career, and family.Genealogy Trails+1
John F. Jordin, Memories: Being a Story of Early Times in Daviess County, Missouri, and Character Sketches (Gallatin, Missouri: Northern Missouri Press, 1904), chapter “Lieut. Col. Samuel P. Cox,” available in digital facsimile, for narrative of Cox’s scouting and the lead up to the Albany fight.US Genealogy Research
US, Mexican War Service Record Index, entry for “Cox, Samuel P.,” digitized on Fold3 and referenced in FamilySearch trees, confirming his enlistment in Company D, Oregon Battalion, during the Mexican American War.Find A Grave+1
Daviess County Historical Society, especially the articles “Samuel Cox, a Daviess County Hero” and “Jesse James Swore to Kill Samuel P. Cox to Avenge ‘Bloody Bill’ Anderson Ambush,” for transcribed local newspaper material, Cox’s own recollections, and synthesis of county memory about the Albany fight and the Gallatin bank robbery.Daviess County Historical Society
Find A Grave memorial “Samuel Porter Cox (1828–1913)” and associated Greenwood Cemetery photographs and biographical sketch, for visuals of Cox’s grave and a compiled narrative grounded in older county histories and obituaries.Find A Grave+1
“Bloody Bill Anderson,” entries in Civil War on the Western Border (University of Kansas) and related modern works on Missouri guerrilla warfare, for context on Anderson’s career, his operations along the Missouri Kansas border, and the significance of Cox’s victory at Albany.Historica+1
National and local coverage of the 7 December 1869 Gallatin bank robbery, as synthesized in HistoryNet features on Jesse James and in National Geographic History’s article “How Jesse James Became America’s Most Popular Criminal,” for the story of the attempted revenge on Cox and the mistaken killing of cashier John Sheets.National Geographic+1
Kentucky Historical Society marker “Samuel Cox, 1756–1832” and ExploreKYHistory entry on the older Samuel Cox of Williamsburg, along with Whitley County and Williamsburg local histories, for background on the Cox family’s early role in the county seat and to distinguish that earlier figure from Samuel Porter Cox.Appalachianhistorian.org+1