The military prison ledger entries for Joseph B. Wigginton from Joanne Eakin's "Missouri Prisoners of War" don't add too much to this. There are three separate entries, which are duplicates of each other, for the most part. Putting them all together they tell us that to the Yankees:
Joseph B. Wigginton was considered as a guerrilla of Porter's command, captured in Boone County 24 September 1862, sent to Gratiot Street Prison first (no date, but probably within 2 to 3 weeks of capture); transferred to Alton Military Prison in Alton, IL just up the Miss. River 27 Nov 1862; transferred to the Smallpox Hospital on 27 January 1863; then transferred to the "Sisters Hospital" (Sisters of Mercy?) 20 March 1863.

It seems that Wigginton managed to beat smallpox, if I read this record correctly, but we can't be sure just from these sketchy records. The prisoners held in the St. Louis area military prisons were farmed out to area civilian hospitals when they became very sick, with the exception of the terribly contagious smallpox. If they had that they were sent to designated islands in the Miss. River--one for the Alton prison and one for the two main downtown St. Louis prisons. The Union military maintained makeshift hospitals on those islands. My sources include the Winter book about the Civil War in St. Louis, Hesseltine's old article in the "Missouri Historical Review" and the part of the "O.R." in series 2, volumes 1 through 8.

Colonels Porter and Poindexter recruited for the Confederacy in northeast MO at about the same time, and the Federals had a hard time telling prisoners from one colonel from the prisoners that came from the other colonel's outfit. They called them guerrillas but--fortunately for the men involved--did not employ the execution order in effect for guerrillas caught bearing arms. Instead, the Union captors reluctantly granted the men from both units the rights as prisoners of war unless they were found to have taken an oath not to bear arms against the U.S. earlier. The Federals captured scores of both units in the late summer and autumn of 1862 in a vast dragnet across NE MO, and those men suffered terribly in those St. Louis area prisons during that winter. Colonel Joseph Crisman Porter managed to get a portion of his command through Union lines to the Confederate army in Arkansas, whereas Colonel John Poindexter's units disintegrated under pressure from pursuing Union troops and he was eventually captured, as were the majority of his men. The Union actually made good use of these men's POW status, as they were able to exchange them back to the Confederacy for Union POWs (at least for those who didn't die of disease in prisons before the exchange dates).

Bruce Nichols