Brian,

Thank you for all that information! Excellent! Not everyone checks out their family stories with such detailed research as you did. I have found with experience that most family lore has a basis in fact, and some of it has a lot of basis in fact.

First, we will have to agree to disagree as to whether Dick Boze and Jeptha Bowles actually did travel to west-central MO and fight with the guerrillas way out there. I must admit on your side that nobody seems to be able to account for the Jeptha Bowles who participated in 1864 in west-central MO. I looked up every Bowles family in the 1860 census in that area (Clay, Buchanan, Andrew, Johnson, and Jackson Counties) and found no Jeptha among them. However, active young men were hard for census-takers to catch anywhere. Which reminds me; I found the census record for Dick Boze, but not for Jeptha Bowles, John Lowry, or Aleck Shelton in the Oregon, Ripley, Butler County area, unless I was just careless or tried the wrong spellings. This means nothing for the reason I just gave, however. It is entirely possible if Dick and Jeptha wintered in north-central Texas where the Quantrill guerrillas did that they could have ridden north with them in spring 1864 and participated with them in west-central MO for a while before riding back to Oregon and Ripley Counties later in 1864. It is possible.

I have not invested much time researching the Union military's provost marshal records of Missouri. When I did study some I found they were full of informants' reports and lots of heresay and gossip. There are few dates and actual events given that I found useful. Just the mention of somebody's name in those is not ironclad proof that person actually did something. You write like you sort of agree with my assessment of this source as questionable.

There is more research I want to do with this.

Also, what I have for Boze is that He MAY have operated with Confederate Major Solomon Kitchens in Bollinger and Cape Girardeau Counties in late March, early April 1862. This could have been a man with a similar name. Then in March 1864 he operated in the Ripley County area for a while, and then was active again from December 1864 through March 1865 with Confederate Colonel Tim Reeves throughout this region. On 19 June 1865 a sergeant's patrol of ten troopers of 7th Kansas Cavalry rode to the Eleven Point River and allegedly killed Dick Boze and captured five other guerrillas. These activities are from the "Official Records." I wonder if this reference to the 7th KS Cav was what you meant in your Sunday entry by "Kansas Jay Hawkers."

You mentioned that Dick was murdered "...by the 7th division of the Missouri home guard." The 7th Division of the Missouri State Guard covered the part of the state that includes Boze's home area, but they were southerners and had all but ceased to operate in Missouri back in February 1862 when they were converted to the Confederate Army. I know at war's end citizen posses that sometimes included returned Confederate soldiers hunted down holdout bushwhackers in order to help bring about peace and help restore civil law to lawless parts of the state. Is this what you are saying happened to Dick Boze?

There is earlier message traffic in this forum about the fight at Pulliam's Farm in Ripley County on Christmas Day, 1863. I seem to recall that I put in my two cents about that in a reply some months back.

It's late, and I have to get to sleep to get up at "o dark thirty" in the morning for work. Maybe we can exchange some more about this later.

Bruce