E.D.--this is a tough one. If we have a gauge numbered from 0 to 10, with 0 being Sept. 22 certain, and 10 being Sept. 27 certain, and 5 being could be either one--in my mind the needle of certainty is hovering around 7. Not a certainty just because Carpenter remembered it that way, but maybe leaning a bit more in that direction. I'll have to admit that before I looked the memoir over again tonight, I was thinking the way you were. Thing is, Dyer is not always correct--case in point being his take on the service of the 3rd MSM Cavalry (Old) and 3rd MSM Cavalry (New). Half of what he has on Old in fact belongs to New. That is just one example.

One possibility in regard to Dyer's reference to a Sept. 22 skirmish for 17th Illinois Cav is that possibly there was a skirmish there on another date, but in Dyer's review of the reports he mis-transcribed a date. Could be he misread a 27 as being a 22....

Also, as stated, Carpenter's account is not exactly dispositive. In his writing on Centralia he had it happening in July. But his account was written 20 years after the fact so mis-remembering the month is not fatal to his account. Also, I would think that Centralia was probably one of the most memorable events for that time period for a north Missouri Federal and it likely shook every Fed in north Missouri to his core--so I would think that word of a comrade being killed at the massacre would have shot like a bolt of lightning through the entire regiment. But then again, by time word got around, reference to 'Harvey was killed at Centralia a few days before the massacre' could have erroneously morphed into, 'Harvey was killed at the Centralia Massacre.'

How's that for overanalyzing this thing. There has got to be something more definitive one way or another. Maybe pension records. Maybe a county history for his home county back in Illinois (Illinois has some old county histories just as good as Missouri's old county histories--I gained immense insight from a history of Cole County, Ill. when I wrote my North & South magazine article on the burning of Doniphan Missouri back in '03).

In the meantime, I would think that in choosing between Dyer and Carpenter, that Carpenter was much closer to the matter--he almost certainly either knew Harvey, or knew people who knew him--and his take on it edges out Dyer's.