Joe,

Regarding your question about bushwhackers joining Price's raid in MO, some parts of the former Quantrill organization joined Price, mostly in Shelby's brigade, when it passed through the Lafayette County area about 18 October, based on several guerrilla memoirs. This was mostly George Todd's group of them, and Todd was killed while scouting on 21 October not far from Independence in Jackson County. You see, Todd and Bill Anderson deposed Quantrill just after Anderson arrived back in west-central Missouri from wintering in Texas in about late May 1864.

A number of Quantrill's men were members of different units of Price's army--mostly Shelby's brigade--going back to the winter of 1862-63. So, a lot of the bushwhackers were regular Confederate soldiers part of the war, and guerrillas for part of the war. Quite a number of these men's names appear on the rolls in the regiments of Shelby's brigade. I should add that in autumn 1861 Shelby himself led a guerrilla band near his Waverly, Lafayette County, home for a few weeks, and even devised his own artillery. So you see, there were some connections between some regular Confederate Missouri units and some of the west-central Missouri guerrilla bands.

Major General Sterling Price desired the guerrillas to join his army when he led it into Missouri in September 1864 as force multipliers to offset the large number of unarmed conscripts and deserters forced back into ranks. Price viewed the bushwhackers as veteran fighters and excellent scouts who needed no training. Price even sent staff officers to conduct two simultaneous councils of war deep in the state of Missouri (Lafayette and Monroe Counties, actually) in early August 1864 in which various guerrilla leaders were invited so the staff officers could lay out Price's recommendations for their use. Some of Price's ideas involved having guerrillas damage the Missouri railroads to slow Union forces from shuttling their troops where needed to attack the Rebel forces when Price invaded the state. The problem was that the guerrillas counted on speed as a mounted force, which meant they didn't want to carry tools needed to wreck the railroad tracks. They limited their work to firing bridges, depots, water tanks, and rolling stock; which the railroads with Union military help could restore in a relatively short period of time. This was brought out in Price's court martial after the raid that the guerrillas were ineffective destroying the Union controlled railroads in Missouri.

The big factor in both Price's court martial and the guerrillas' actions with regular Confederate units was that they still fought by the "no quarter" rule imposed on Missouri by a Union commander in spring 1862. After they joined the regular forces in Lafayette and Jackson Counties as they passed by in October 1864, some of the guerrillas murdered some of the Union POWs and Union forces, after they found the bodies of comrades so murdered, also began killing Confederate POWs. Somehow, Union staff officers contacted Price's staff officers and Price was immediately convinced that he had to throw all the bushwhackers out of his force or be responsible for the continued murder of his men by their Union captors. He did eject a large number of the guerrillas (on October 21, I think), but, as I pointed out above, a number of them were already on the rolls of some of the units from earlier in the war, and it appears several kept quiet about their dual status, and remained with the Confederate force back down to Arkansas.

Price wrote actual orders to Quantrill, not knowing Quantrill was living in a form of self-exile after being deposed by Todd and Anderson back in the spring, and not available to carry out the orders. Actually, Quantrill did not leave his hideout to meet Price, as Anderson did. Price gave Bill Anderson similar orders in Boonville October 10 directing him to destroy infrastructure of one of the northeast MO railroads. After receiving the orders, Anderson remained with a division of Price's force and sent most of his band to northeast MO to carry out the orders without him. They burned depots, water tanks, rolling stock, etc. as written above, and then came back. Anderson, unlike Todd, chose not to remain with the Confederate regulars, and instead led his band north of the Missouri River to raid where he was killed in battle by Union militia in Ray County about 27 October.

You mentioned that Price rejected some bushwhackers. I know of none that he sent away, but Price in Boonville when Anderson and his band rode in to meet him (October 10, I think) was horrified that some of Anderson's men decorated their horses' bridles with human scalps and ordered them to remove them immediately. This was done promptly, and no more said about it. In Boonville there was also an awkward moment when Anderson's guerrillas wanted to kill some Union POWs held by regular Confederates, but this was refused.

Also, after paroled Union soldiers were released after the capture of Glasgow, MO, they requested and received escort by regular Confederate forces to walk back to Union lines south of the Missouri River so they wouldn't be massacred by southern bushwhackers known to be in the area.

As I said, much of my sources for the above were from guerrilla memoirs. I can cite them if you need it.

Bruce Nichols