The Brutal Bloody Trail of Champ Ferguson

As the Civil War raged across Missouri in the early 1860s, one man carved a particularly gruesome path of murderous carnage and terror that made him infamous even amid that conflict's unfathomable bloodshed. His name was Champ Ferguson, and by the time his killing spree ended, he had become one of the most depraved and prolific murderers the war had ever witnessed.

Ferguson was a Tennessee native whose life seemed fated for violence from a young age. Despite a relatively privileged upbringing, he killed his first man at age 18 after a petty disagreement, a crime for which he incredibly avoided significant punishment. This appeared to only whet his appetite for mayhem, as Ferguson spent much of his young adulthood drifting between criminal enterprises like counterfeiting and robberies while cutting an infamous reputation as a chaotic, habitual brawler.

When the Civil War erupted in 1861, Ferguson saw it as an opportunity to truly indulge his darkest urges under the guise of patriotism for the Confederate cause. He raised and commanded a roving band of guerilla fighters that quickly devolved into a characteristically ruthless gang of psychopathic marauders. From their camps deep in the Missouri woods and hills, Ferguson and his men spent the next four years unleashing a horrifying spree of murders, robberies, and depravities against any Unionists unlucky enough to cross their path.

While guerilla warfare by its nature involves less discrimination between civilian and military targets, Ferguson elevated his sadistic disregard for human life to shocking, almost supernaturally brutal lengths. His men blindly followed his fanatical lead, doling out gruesome punishments like lining up random civilians to be sewn up in green rawhide to slowly roast alive over fires. Acts of torture, mutilation, decapitation, and massacres of entire towns guilty of no other crime than not declaring support for the South became routine fare in making Ferguson's guerillas the most feared marauders of the war.

Amidst all the darkness, a few rare bright spots emerged from the haze of blood surrounding Ferguson's crusade of carnage. There was the infamous female bushwhacker "Bloody Bill" Anderson, whose relationship with Ferguson ranged from torrid battlefield romance to sometimes-bitter rivalry. And then there was the legendary 1863 massacre of Ferguson's men at the Battle of Centralia, where a temporary Union victory was achieved at the loss of two dozen guerilla lives and dozens more taken prisoner - though they would ultimately seal their grisly fates under Ferguson's retaliatory wrath.

After the Centralia bloodbath, the full extent of Ferguson's depravity and disregard for human suffering became even more terrifyingly unbound than before. Among his most infamous final atrocities were the systematic executions of the captured Union soldiers, culminating in the harrowing death march where he massacred the final six survivors with a chilling indifference, almost reveling in the butchery. As he bragged to those around him, it brought his personal body count from the war's cruelties well into the triple digits.

Ultimately, his thirst for violence could never be sated, even as the tides of war turned hopelessly against the Confederacy. In the end, it was only Ferguson's own disregard for authority that finally brought the mania to an end. When he drunkenly shot and killed a Southern recruit who annoyed him, he found himself arrested and court martialed by the very Confederate commanders who had once exploited his talents as an efficient killer of Yankees.

In October 1865, Champ Ferguson was hanged in Tennessee after a farcical "trial" found him guilty of 53 separate murders, his trademark black slouch hat pulled tightly down over his eyes until the last dying gasps finally left his body. With his death, the most notorious Confederate guerilla butcher finally met his own incredibly overdue demise. But the tales of his unquenchable savagery on the Missouri-Kansas border during the Civil War would endure as a harrowing example of the inhuman depravities human beings can rationalize under the deceptive banners of war and patriotism taken to their most disturbing extreme.