Keith,
I haven't been back to the City main library since they re-opened after their two-year remodeling. I have been going to the St. Louis County library headquarters on Lindbergh Blvd across from Plaza Frontenac for my research, and just haven't switched over yet.
Yes, I would be happy to share about Riley Crawford. First, I seem to recall that you were looking for a way to purchase Rose Mary Lankford's "The Encyclopedia of Quantrill's Guerrillas." Since Rose Mary published this herself, you may want to contact her at Rural Route 1, Box 114-A in Evening Shade, Arkansas 72532, although perhaps some of the regional publishers such as the Blue and Gray Bookshop in Independence and the Bushwhacker Museum in Nevada, MO, and others may carry her book, as well. I like her book because she was careful to cite her sources, and arranged all the guerrilla personalities with bio. detail in a succinct, alphabetical arrangement that makes it easy to use. Rose Mary listed her souces in a separate Notes section at the back.
Regarding Riley Crawford, some accounts you read place Colonel Penick's men's murder of elderly neutralists Jeptha Crawford and John Sanders on 29 January 1862, but it actually took place in late January 1863, and, yes, reliable accounts attest that the widow Elizabeth or Eliza Crawford brought her 14 or 15-year-old son Riley to Quantrill to join the band specifically to avenge his father's murder. Some local sources tell about querrillas murdering some soldiers from Penick's unit a few days before, and Penick's men went on a revenge raid. Albert Castel used the 1862 year and his source was Connelley (page 430), alhtough Donald R. Hale did not mention it in his writings. Hale and others mention the story about the teenage Riley walking on Federal corpses at Baxter Springs in October 1863 when one of them got up and spoke, as he had been trying to escape death by playing "possum." The very young Riley was a favorite of many of the bushwhackers partly because he had a good attitude, and tried so hard to please his elders. Riley was one of Warren Welch's scouts examining Cooper and Moniteau Counties in late September or very early October for a raid by George Todd's entire band a few days later when local German-American citizens guards in Cooper County mortally wounded Riley in the bowels when with another man Crawford was trying to scrounge up food for the guerrillas' supper. The guerrillas were horrified to have to endure their young buddy's terrible suffering from for hours before he finally expired. Edwards mentions this, but the best source is the scout leader Warren Welch himself in his memoir "Warren Welch Remembers" by Two Trails Publishing in Independence in 1997. Riley's long-suffering was the primary reason Todd's band a few days later shot down a number of German-American farmers in that region, some of them armed and some of them defenseless.

Bruce