William J. "Wild Bill" Heffington (1830–1863)

William J. “Wild Bill” Heffington was a former Confederate soldier who later operated as a Unionist guerrilla from a base at Mount Magazine in Yell County, in addition to being an officer in the First Arkansas Infantry Regiment (US). 

William Jasper Heffington was born in Wayne County, Tennessee, in 1830. He was born out of wedlock to Louisa McBride (and thus took her last name) and was one of several of her children believed to have been fathered by Henry Heffington. She and her children moved to Arkansas in 1842, settling in Yell County. William McBride married Elizabeth Tennessee Britt on January 9, 1850, and they lived at the foot of Mount Magazine with their six children. He began using the last name Heffington in 1860. 

When the Civil War began, Heffington enlisted as first sergeant of Company F, Seventeenth (LeMoyne’s) Arkansas Infantry Regiment (CS) on December 28, 1861. That unit would become Company E of the Twenty-first Arkansas Infantry Regiment (CS) when the Seventeenth merged with four companies of the Fourteenth (McCarver’s) Arkansas Infantry Regiment on May 15, 1862. Heffington had been elected second lieutenant of his company on April 2, 1862, but was discharged from the Confederate army on May 20, 1862. 

Heffington returned to Yell County, where he raised a band of irregular troops that operated in the Arkansas River Valley until March 1863, and it was during this period that he became known as “Wild Bill.” A. W. Bishop, the lieutenant colonel of the First Arkansas Cavalry (US), mentioned Heffington in his 1863 book Loyalty on the Frontier, calling him “a cool, daring, intelligent woodsman, who, unwilling in the rebel service, had remained there long enough to be disgusted with it,” but Kim Allen Scott, who edited Bishop’s book for rerelease by the University of Arkansas Press in 2003, wrote that he “raised a band of independent rangers that seemed to prey on secessionists and Unionists alike.” The Arkansas Gazette reported that “Wild Bill apparently was loyal to the Union and cooperated with the Federals. Yet he and his band of jayhawkers were primarily freebooters who terrorized the area with their killing and robbing.” 

In March 1863, Heffington led his band to Fayetteville (Washington County) to enlist in the First Arkansas Infantry Regiment (US); he was made captain of Company I. They were present on April 18, 1863, when Confederate general William Cabell attacked Colonel Marcus LaRue Harrison’s base at Fayetteville but did not participate in the Union victory because they had not yet been issued weapons. 

When Harrison’s troops fell back to Springfield, Missouri, following the battle, Heffington returned to the Arkansas River Valley. Confederate authorities placed a $15,000 bounty on Heffington’s head, and Confederate cavalrymen attacked his mountain retreat in June 1863 but were repulsed by around 125 men under Heffington’s command. 

Confederate guerrillas captured Heffington as he crossed the Arkansas River at Mulberry (Crawford County) on August 15, 1863, and hanged him. His burial place is not known. 

For additional information:
Adams, Loren. “‘Wild Bill’ Heffington and the Western Bushwhackers.” Flashback 45 (August 1995): 9–26. 

Bishop, Albert W. Loyalty on the Frontier, or Sketches of Union Men of the South-west; with Incidents and Adventures in Rebellion on the Border. Edited by Kim Allen Scott. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003. 

“CPT William Jasper ‘Wild Bill’ Heffington.” Find a Grave.com. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/256339951/william_jasper-heffington (accessed May 8, 2025). 

Huff, Leo. “Guerrillas, Jayhawkers and Bushwhackers in Northern Arkansas during the Civil War.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 24 (Summer 1965): 127–148. 

Prier, Jay A. “Under the Black Flag: The Real War in Washington County, Arkansas, 1861–1865.” MA thesis, University of Arkansas, 1998. 

Mark K. Christ
Little Rock, Arkansas