You are welcome.

I can get set in my thinking and miss something, so hearing different ideas and different slants on things allows me to test the little bit of documentation remaining to us. As my father-in-law says about my writing, "Bruce, you weren't there, so how can you know?" He's right, of course, so I have to tread lightly. The principle I follow is to test everything against whatever material is also available. If I can get enough "pretty good" source material from different places and carefully put it together I may (or may not) have something that approaches the truth, especially when details from several sources agree.

The Morgan County guerrillas were active across much of Moniteau and Cooper Counties, but they were not active all the time, had different leaders at different times of the war, and did not appear to mix with the more famous bands that on occasion rode through the area (Bill Anderson's, George Todd's, and others). All of this makes them a challenge to me. They were well connected, well informed, mostly stuck to the land they knew, and knew when to "lay low." About the only way the northern troops (Federal as well as local) could even get close to them was through informants, for the most part, and some of them paid dearly for that afterwards. My better sources have been newspaper articles (depending on who wrote them) and the often prejudiced Union "Official Records," but several informative friends point the way to other material for me from time to time.

Bruce Nichols