Doc,
Thank you. I suspected that Captain Chapman of Company G in LTC John A. Schnable's MO Cav BN was Nelson Knight Chapman's dad, William Chapman. That explains the "middle age" aspect of the Chapman mentioned earlier, because the 1860 census had Bill as age 40. I guess that Nelson and Puckett used Captain Bill Chapman's name when they distributed the mail they brought from Arkansas and recruited local southern men in Morgan County in the summer of 1864. That may be how the "Bill Chapman" name got back to the Yanks, because Nelson Chapman and former Sheriff James C. Puckett used the authority of Captain Chapman for their actions in Morgan County, so the residents wouldn't think they were just freebooters or renegades. Sadly, that's how they were viewed by Union officers anyway, and it almost cost Nelson Chapman his life when he returned home to Missouri on 6 May 1865 to a reduced Union miltiary that viewed itself under great threat from a hoard of returning northbound bushwhackers heading their way. The war wasn't quite over in the "Show Me State" on May 6, and it took a few more days and careful parleying between the two sides to bring it to a close. More good men were killed before that happened (and a lot more after that, too).

Thanks to John McGhee's 2008 "Guide to Missouri Confederate Units, 1861-1865," for about the best write-up on Schnable's BN we will probably ever see (on pages 147-149). Schnable's men were a "will-of-the-wisp" outfit during 1861 when the Yanks made Rolla a major base to connect the Springfield base with the logistic railhead at Rolla. Schnable's unit threatened that tenuous link to keep Springfield supplied even that early in the war. The Union officers picked up on Schable's name and spread it around during 1861 to where you even see rank-and-file mention it spelled 30 different ways in journals and memoirs. To them, Schnable represented the "unseen threat" of an enemy they couldn't find, and whose very presence in south-central MO along the Arkansas border was a reminder to stay alert when they were away from base.

Okay, more pieces fit together. It's still a funny way to discover the private little war way up in Morgan County, but I'll keep pecking away at it. It's that itch I can't quite scratch, because the guerrilla leaders there kept changing throughout the war.

Now, if somebody can just figure out the real identity for "General Crabtree" who ran the southern recruiting and bushwhacking during 1861 and most of 1862 in Miller County (and south Cole County, too) on the east side of Morgan County. That one has buffaloed me for over 25 years. Oh, well.

Bruce Nichols