Your request turned out to be tougher than I thought it would be, but I will give you what little I know and some conjecture about some of the men I THINK rode with Bill Anderson in July 1863.

FIRST, what I know.

I know Dave Poole, of near Tabo Creek of central Lafayette County not far from present-day Higginsville, guided Bill Anderson's band of about 40 riders, which does not necessarily mean Poole was a member of Anderson's company. Poole, evidently for personal reasons, raided off and on the German settlement of Freedom Township of southeast Lafayette County throughout the war, as we discussed in this forum several days ago.

I know that John McCorkle of Jackson County was present on that raid because he described it briefly as a partipant in his postwar memoir on pages 113-4. Unfortunately, McCorkle did not disclose any other names than Dave Poole's of who went along with Anderson on that raid.

SECONDLY, who I think was part of Anderson's company in July 1863.

You probably already know that Bill and brother Jim Anderson were members of a loosely knit band of mostly exiled Kansas southern men who back in early 1862 formed their own guerrilla band as exiles in Jackson County, and that Quantrill shunned them and strongly encouraged his men not to associate with them because they forced Jackson Countians of all sympathies to feed and subsist them. Quantrill didn't like to see these Kansans take by force food, forage, and whatever from southerners. Back in 1862 one of the members of the Kansas exiles guerrilla band was Denver gambler and gunman Charles Harrison, but he managed to obtain a colonelcy in the Confederate army and left the band before 1863. Bill Haller of Jackson County was said to also be a member, but in early 1862 Haller joined Quantrill's band. I obtained this from Gary Cheatham's article "Desperate Characters," in the "Kansas History" magazine article printed about 1991 or so, and whose primary source seemed to be period Kansas newspaper articles. Cheatham's article also named Bill Reed and Lee Griffin. Quantrill's attitude and the feeling of his men toward this other band all changed in late May 1863 when this band of Kansas exiles of about 23 men led by Bill Reed and guided by prewar freighter and Quantrill member Dick Yeager or Yager of Westport conducted a highly successful raid deep into Kansas all the way to Council Grove and back to Missouri again. Well, not totally successful, as a posse captured Reed and ten of the raiders near the Cottonwood River and the Santa Fe Trail, which then turned the captives over to a Captain Stewart and his patrol of cavalry who then killed them while supposed to be taking them to Fort Riley. The remaining 12 or so including the two Andersons made it back to Jackson County during the first day or so of June 1863.

Quantrill and his men were so impressed that he welcomed these 12 Kansas exiles into his own band in early June 1863 and a few days later broke his large band into four companies and gave Bill Anderson command of one of them. I do not know how Quantrill divided his large band into the companies, which is the crux in determining exactly who rode with Anderson by the time he took his company to raid the German community--present day Concordia--on 13 July 1863. I would imagine that Bill had in his company his brother Jim and any of the other 12 men who survived the deep Kansas raid of May-June 1863--maybe that Lee Griffin guy. I couldn't discover much of what Bill Anderson did after Quantrill gave him his own company until the Concordia raid on 13 July 1863. John McCorkle wrote that he was with his brother Jabez before this, but his brother died of an accidental gunshot in spring 1863. Other guerrillas McCorkle kept company with included Frank James, Ferdinando Scott, and Tom Harris. Harris seemed to be from Jackson County, but James and Scott hailed from Clay County across the Missouri River. This makes me wonder if Quantrill gave Anderson the several Clay County men who joined his group early that summer. Other of McCorkle's pals in the guerrillas included George Wigginton (McCorkle's cousin from Lafayette County) and John Barnhill from Blue Springs in Jackson County.

I know from the 1911 Carroll County history (page 290) that as of July 1864 Bill Anderson's inner circle of trusted men included Archie Clements, John Maupin, Tuck Hill, Woot Hill, Hiram Guess, Jesse Hamlet, Polk Helms, William Reynolds, Cave Wyatt, and Ben Broomfield. This does not necessarily mean that these particular men were in his company as of July 1863, but I would say there is a good chance some of them were. Somewhere along the line and by summer of 1864 Bill Anderson's band tended to be the most bloodthirsty of all the west-central Missouri guerrilla bands, and I have a theory that anybody in his original company that felt that was too much for them left Anderson and joined Todd or one of the others. I would also would estimate that the reverse was true--that anybody who wanted to be in the roughest guerrilla band would leave their present group and gravitate to Anderson's, and by summer 1864 the character of the different parts of Quantrill's former band was established.

That's about the best I can do.

Bruce Nichols