I just came across this thread, which I found very interesting. My great-grandfather, Marshall Hamilton Williams, served as an 18-year-old private in Cochran's Bollinger County VMM. His son (and my grandfather) George W. Williams Sr. wrote a fictional novel about the militia in the early 1950s. The raw, unpublished manuscript, some 250 pages long, has come into my hands and I am editing it for limited publication to my family--maybe by Christmas 2010, if I'm lucky.

I can see that there is a lot of accurate information behind by grandfather's fictional account. (He referred to Captain Cochran as Captain Carnahan.) One of the figures in the novel is a despicable 1st Lt. named "Rollens," who originally hailed from Michigan. That must be the Lt. James Roges mentioned by John R.

George F. Williams
Clayton, Mo