Please forgive my delay in replying to you. I've been busy.

The 79th EMM Regiment had six companies in all, Companies A through F in Scott, Stoddard, and Mississippi Counties. It was common in predominantly southern regions for EMM regiments to cover several counties if men of northern sympathy were scarce, and the "Bootheel" was very southern at the time of the war. I applied the list of officers of Company A from the 1865 MO Adjutant General's report against the 1860 Missouri Census index and discovered that this company seemed to hail from Twappity Township in north-central Mississippi County near the county seat of Charleston, since four of the six listed officers seemed to match households in that township. I only checked out the Company A officers because of limited time.

I attempted to discover some answers about your Bollinger County outfit with Captain Montgomery and LT Cober or Coper with minimal success. I found no such officers listed in the EMM and related units even of Bollinger County. However, there were Richard Cobber and Richard Cober households both on page 607 of the Castor Township census rolls from 1860 for the western part of Bollinger County. As you have discovered, some of those Bollinger County militia units were mysterious during the war and even now to us researchers!

Anyone brave or scary enough to join those EMM units and remain in them in some of those mostly southern SE MO counties were what they called "radicals" in those days. Some of those guys carried on their own private war during the real one and afterwards, too. These were the guys that guerrillas like Sam Hildebrand hunted down and vice versa, and not men to trifle with. Their EMM duty was not what most other EMM men in other places performed and they did not really want anyone writing down their accomplishments. "The less said the better," was the watchword of the day back then.

I wish you good hunting.

Bruce Nichols