Okay, Sandy, where in Missouri is Modena or Modina? I give up.

The 5th may have passed through Illinois on the train or passed by on a riverboat, but the Dyer's little history gives me no indication that the 5th was stationed in Illinois. Southern Illinois was southern enough that quite a number of men from there joined the Confederate armed services, but not so southern that Union troops were garrisoned in that part of the state. The Illinois governor was too well connected and powerful to keep that from happening. Union troops were garrisoned to guard two military prisons in Illinois in Alton and Chicago. I don't recall a third prison. For a while the 10th Kansas Infantry guarded the Alton Military Prison, but not the 5th Cavalry.

Yes, I looked up Private Christopher Brown in Company C, and his death is noted as you wrote it. I was scanning through the Kansas Adj. General's record book once to find some guy I never could locate, and I remember seeing a number of poor Kansas privates on guard duty falling out of trees to their death. It must have been a Kansas thing. Not too many trees out there, and they failed to read the warning labels, I suppose. Seriously, I wonder if some Kansas military authority told the soldiers to pull guard duty from a tree early in the war so they could see those Rebels coming from afar. That may have been a throwback to fighting Native Americans on the plains. I would think a good sergeant would nix some guard pulling his duty in a tree where he couldn't move and therefore would fall asleep easier. Guards were supposed to walk their post so they could see better and remain alert. Some of us have experience doing that (I was armed with a baseball bat on my guard duty. That way, I was always ready if some enemy threw me a curve ball.)

David, Barry County was very, very southern, especially later in the war when local hate convinced the minority group to leave for their health so they wouldn't get lead poisoning. That tells me that whether you knew it or not your ancestors at some point moved to Cassville or even to Springfield. There were never enough Union troops stationed there to keep it safe for northern sympathizers, and it was too close to Arkansas to keep bushwhackers from there riding up for mischief. There is also a strong likelihood that any adult males in your family back then served either in the local EMM (the 76th EMM for Barry County), or the Provisional EMM (the 7th or 8th) or left the ladies and kids behind and rode someplace to join up. Another popular Missouri option for the men was to go to the gold fields in Montana or silver mines in Colorado until the war was over. At least that way if the Sioux didn't get them, there was a chance they could return rich or at least well-traveled.

Bruce Nichols