Red and Drew,

I am not ignoring your request, but I wanted to satisfy Dave Smarr's inquiry. I am on midnight shift and I need to go back to bed now, but I will put out a couple of things I have been thinking about regarding your efforts to enumerate guerrilla warfare related deaths in CW MO.

Please count regular unit actions as such, and please don't include them in guerrilla war. I am referring to General Marmaduke's SW MO raid of January 1863, his April 1863 raid of SE MO, General Shelby's October 1863 raid, and, of course, General Sterling Price's autumn 1864 great MO raid. I personally don't consider some of the crazy stuff during 1861 as guerrilla actions, but a few of them either sit on the line or cross that imaginary line between regular and irregular actions. Let's not take something away from those commanders of both sides who put aside the irregular war for a while to fight honorably (mostly) in regular warfare as the situation demanded.

The problem in MO is documentation for guerrilla related deaths. I discovered over time that the guerrilla war was not well recorded earlier in the war, and there is much more documentation (including corroboration) as the guerrilla war went on until June 1865 and the beginning of Missouri's great outlaw period. Finding detail of 1862 irregular actions is really tough, and by 1864 and 1865 there is much more that is recorded. I suppose, for the lack of a better term, that the mechanisms for recording actions grew more sophisticated as the Missouri version of conducting war cranked on. This was certainly true with the Union military, and, I maintain this is true for southern sources, too. I like the period newspaper accounts, but I tend to discount the early versions of anything and look to the correspondent who waited a day or two and got more of the whole story.

Another real problem with documentation is that lots of Missourians tried hard not to bring up all those horrible fears and distrusting and hatred in the years after that long war. I have seen county histories of that golden 1881-WWII period leave the CW out completely. Nothing to say about it! I will always remember one county history that used only peoples' initials so they wouldn't step on toes. Really!

A real problem I had documenting guerrilla war for 1862 and lesser so for 1863 was that different sources describing the same event were very hard to distinguish. A number of times I laid out my documentation for some 1862 skirmish or whatever and began to write only to discover two other events were actually the same one! The details varied so much I was fooled for a while in thinking these were separate events until my mind caught one or two distinguishing details that finally dawned on me that I was handling the same action with widely different points of view. Of course, finding different viewpoints on the same event is gold, but if you don't catch on that they actually cover the same event, you have a mess. This circumstance happened to me over and over again in 1862 and 1863 actions. This happened in local county histories time and again. I had to read every word in some of those to avoid that trap, and the longer an account was written after the real event the worse it got. Quantrill's men used the same ambush point in the same Jackson County road-cut on the same road over and over again, since the Union troops cycled in and out and another unit came ambling in with no warning. When individual guerrillas penned or dictated their memoirs years later they tended to mix them up, too.

One source that helped me a lot was John N. Edwards' "Noted Guerrillas." First of all, Major Edwards interviewed many of the guerrillas not long after the war and used their accounts in his 1877 book. Now, many historians run away from Edwards's book because of his prose and obvious errors, and they don't see his formula. Edwards was usually truthful about the guerrilla side and account of a certain action, but he cared nothing for the Union side and stuck any Union officer's name that came to his head in the story and then increased the Yankee death toll to some ridiculous figure. Why did he do that in his book? I don't know. I just know that on many of his accounts of actual fights that I can corroborate from different sides some of what he wrote, if I just discount what he said about the Yankee side of that fight. If I cannot corroborate his account somewhere else, I am less likely to trust it. The amazing thing is that with a bit of study, I can connect large numbers of the events he described to actual events, because he gave enough detail that I could do it. I used more "Author's Notes" in my endnotes for Edwards than any other source, and my Author's Notes on Edwards vary from disgust to respect.

Well, I had better climb down off this soapbox and get more sleep.

Let me think about your requests and get back to you later on it.

Bruce Nichols