Sue and George,
The first military record I can find on Carroll Wood was that the southern Missouri State Guard in 1861 made him a first lieutenant in the MSG provost guard. If you think of the provost as a police force of the military, I wonder if his reputation with Charles Harrison as gun hands in Denver before the war convinced the MSG to consider him a man capable of enforcing his will on others.

John Edwards in his 1877 "Noted Guerrillas" on pages 123-6 indicated Harrison, Wood, a Captain William West and 40 others operated in the area around Sibley, northeast Jackson County during December 1861. This was while William C. Quantrill took leadership of a growing guerrilla band in another part of Jackson County. It is my understanding that the two guerrilla bands did not operate together, although in early November 1862, when Quantrill lead his band south for the winter, some of the other band including Charles Harrison and a number of the others accompanied Quantrill's band. You will see from the next paragraph and from George Martin's information that Carroll H. Wood was not around in November 1862 to ride with his old Denver buddy.

Union prison records and Union military records of the 1st Kansas Infantry and 2nd Missouri Cavalry ("Merrill's Horse) indicate that Union troops captured about three southern recruiting officers, including Wood, somewhere in Lafayette County on 11 January 1862. It was fortunate for Wood that he was captured with other officers, since the 1st Kansas tended to "shoot first and ask questions later." George Martin very well detailed Wood's movements through the Union prisons and his eventual exchange as a recognized Rebel officer on 28 March 1863 from Camp Chase in Ohio.

After Wood's exchange to Confederate forces, a garbled entry in Carolyn Bartels' 1995 "The Forgotten Men" on page 368 seems to indicate that Union forces captured Confederate officer/recruiter "C. H. Woods" again on 11 June 1863 in "Fayette Co. Mo." [which perhaps means Howard County in the center of the state whose county seat is the town of Fayette, as Missouri has no Fayette County]. As a result of Wood's capture the second time, he was tried and released on parole as a Confederate officer provided he remain anywhere in Missouri north of the Osage River.

George Martin detailed well Wood's military adventures thereafter in regular Confederate service.

Regarding Wood's contacts with Quantrill and the James brothers, I have doubts about that. I don't believe Quantrill was in Batesville, Arkansas in the spring of 1963, as other accounts follow his guerrilla band's return to west-central Missouri in the spring of 1863 through southwest Missouri from wintering in the South, and Quantrill's whereabouts during the rest of 1863 are well-enough documented to exclude any visit to northeast Arkansas. However, Quantrill in December 1864, leading 40 horsemen (including Frank James--according to Edwards' "Noted Guerrillas" starting about page 407), passed through that corner of Arkansas before they crossed the Mississippi River to operate in Kentucky thereafter. If Carroll Wood was still in the Batesville area in December 1864, he may have met Quantrill and Frank James on their way to Kentucky, as I mentioned above. Regarding Frank James, I don't know Carroll Wood's whereabouts after his 1863 parole indicated above, but in the spring or early summer of 1863 Ferdinando Scott brought his Clay County guerrillas south of the Missouri River and joined them to Quantrill's band for the rest of the year. It is possible that Carroll Wood met Frank James if Wood traveled to west-central Missouri in the summer or fall of 1863. It is very unlikely Wood met Frank's much younger brother Jesse, as Jesse was only 15 in 1863 and remained at his Clay County home with his family. Jesse joined his brother and guerrilla operations in the late spring of 1864, but it appears that Captain Carroll Wood was then busy serving in General Shelby's Cavalry Brigade in northeast Arkansas, as George indicated in his reply.

I hope this helps fill in the gaps in your wonderful account. I enjoyed reading it.
Bruce Nichols