Yes, the "Dick Bowles" the Yankees said was in Bollinger and Cape Girardeau Counties in March 1862 could very well be one of the Bolins. Like I said before, the Yanks were bad with names of fast-moving Rebel commanders, and it was worse earlier in the war.

I couldn't find a Dick or Richard Bowles in the 1860 census in either Missouri or Arkansas that seemed to fit the bill. I noticed doing this for a few years that the census was not good at capturing energetic, young, single men. If they weren't living at home with their families there was a good chance they would be missed. Lots of these footloose guys had no home, and that was just the sort of person drawn to the thrill and danger of being a guerrilla. I have to remember that Missouri and Arkansas were on the frontier at that time, and there were lots of "characters" about. In an earlier day people called such men "soldiers of fortune." Add to that the patriotic appeal of one side or another and...you get the idea.

I am starting to think the Federals did the same thing I did. That is, they looked in their records for a Dick Boze or Bowles or something close even though the event was two years before several counties away and tried to stick a square peg in a round hole. Most of those Union intelligence reports began as oral reports, and later some clerk had to write the name down. I could easily see how after passing from a scout to a sergeant to a company-grade officer the original pronunciation of the Rebel commander's name would be warped, just like that old parlor game where you pass some whispered remark along a line of party-goers and then laugh at how garbled it shows up with the last person. Meanwhile, the brigadier general back in the district headquarters hung onto that garbled name like it was made of gold, when really he had a handful of alphabet soup. Ah, the fog of war.

Bruce