Dan Schmidt's book The Heritage of St. Thomas includes a five page description of the events surrounding Loethen shooting a man presumed to be Crabtree. Although definitely written from the German-American point of view, it is very detailed. I was surprised to read in the book that Mosby Parsons filed a land patent for 200 acres in St. Thomas in 1854, very near Herman Scheuler/Scheulen. Anyone know if or when the federal authorities confiscated Parson's land? Parson's land was eventually settled by a Luebbering. Only 40 percent of the land grants around St. Thomas belonged to German-Americans. A hundred years later, the community was 95 percent German-American. Did the federal authorities confiscate the land belonging to men on the Confederate side and sell it to German-Americans?
Accounts of the massacre at Curtman's Island cite the execution by firing squad of John Wilcox in July as a reason for the event. Were there more factors such as the Provost Marshal in Jefferson City sending the Bond sisters to prison in St. Louis in May and possibly confiscating land from men on the Confederate side and selling it to German-Americans, many of whom sided with federal forces??