his friends, “This town must have a cemetery,” and as a result of his efforts beautiful Highland stands as a monument to his memory. In 1870-71, there was much interest throughout the country in narrow gauge railroads, it being argued that there was economy in them. Anderson concluded that the idea was not practicable and determined to oppose the issue of the bonds asked for in Clay county. His ideas prevailed, and the track was relaid standard gauge. In the summer of 1872 Benjamin Harrison secured him a call from a church in Indianapolis, but his wife and family persuaded him to remain in Kansas. In the fall of 1873, Mr. Anderson was elected president of the Kansas State Agricultural College, at Manhattan. A radical change of policy resulted in the institution and it is to Mr. Anderson and the men associated with him, that the state is indebted for the policy which has placed the college near the head of the list of such institutions in the United States. Mr. Anderson remained president of the college until 1878, when he was elected to Congress and served as representative from the First and Fifth districts until 1891. In March of that year he was appointed consul general to Cairo, Egypt, and sailed for his new post on April 6, but his constitution was already impaired and he was unable to stand the change of climate. The following spring he determined to return, but died on his way home at Liverpool, England, May 18, 1892. His last message was from Malta, “It is all in God's hands and He will direct.” He was laid at rest on the hill top he had chosen years before, near the town where he said the happiest days of his life had been passed, and where seven of his family are also interred. The funeral ceremonies were conducted by the faculty and students of the Agricultural College, the Grand Army of the Republic and the Masonic Fraternity.
Anderson, William, usually referred to as “Bill” Anderson, was one of the most daring, brutal and bloodthirsty of those guerrilla captains who harassed Kansas during the early years of the Civil war. He was born in Missouri, but during his boyhood, and in fact up to the breaking out of the war in 1861, he lived with his father on the old Santa Fe trail at the crossing of Bluff creek. Shortly after the war began, Bill Anderson and his brother James, Lee Griffin and the Rice boys, all living in the same neighborhood, announced their intention of taking sides with the South. Early in June, 1862, Lee Griffin stole a horse and started for Missouri, but he was overtaken and brought before a justice of the peace named Baker at Agnes City, at the crossing of Rock creek in the northwestern part of Lyon county, where he was bound over for trial in a higher court. This so incensed Bill Anderson's father that he loaded his shot gun and started for Baker's residence to avenge the insult. But Baker, who had been warned, was on the look-out and fired first, killing Anderson. The tragic death of his father may have made Bill Anderson worse than he would otherwise have been, for he immediately commenced leading raids into Kansas, along the old Santa Fe trail, going as far into the state as Council Grove. His three sisters—Josephine, Mary and Jennie—returned to Missouri, where they were afterward
