Evelyn and George,

I looked up Resolved in the Kansas Adjutant General's Annual Report for the CW years, published 1896 in Topeka. Also in Company D, 11th Regiment Kansas Volunteer Cavalry were William P. Fuller, Daniel T. Fuller, William P. Fuller, and "Resoloed" Fuller, most of whom called Oskaloosa their residence, as George said. Resolved was listed as missing after the action at Webber's Falls, C. N. (Cherokee Nation, if not one of the other "C" tribes,) as of 8 November 1864. This was part of the Union pursuit after Price's Confederate army. It really doesn't say any more about what happened to Resolved, so he could have been captured, killed, or simply missing for a while after all the hullaballoo was over. I have read of soldiers who became separated from their unit during a tussle, and sometimes it was a few days before they found their unit again, and it is possible that the company clerk reflected Resolved being missing and may have omitted the rest of the story, whatever that is.

We lose track of Resolved at Webber's Falls, but we know what happened to the letter he wrote 20 October back in Independence, or do we? Somebody picked this letter off the ground or from Resolved's blanket roll or haversack somewhere between Independence and Webber's Falls, Indian Nations. I would guess that whomever picked up the letter, probably a Confederate to call it a "captured letter," just kept it as a souvernir of his recent adventures. And, somehow it came into the hands of Evelyn down through the years.

Resolved's letter he wrote and dated at Independence, Jackson County, MO on 20 October 1864, during the fights around Kansas City. Somebody wrote on the bottom of the letter, I would surmise, the words "Captured letter Oct. 20/64." So the only thing we know of Resolved captured at Independence or sometime during the pursuit south all the way to the northeast corner of the Indian Nations, was this letter. It says nothing about Resolved other than that, and it doesn't really tell us who found the letter. Some Missourians of either army would regard a letter from a Kansan to be "captured," depending upon their opinion of Kansas Union troops in general or the 11th KS Cavalry Regt in particular. How Evelyn came by the letter, I do not know, but this is a fine letter containing lots of pertinent details verifiable from other known facts of units and events of that campaign.

I found a letter from a Missouri soldier during the early years of the war in the archives of the Missouri Western Manuscripts Collection from Ellis Library at the MU campus. There was a hole in the letter at the center, which an attached memo said was where somebody found the letter stuck on the branch of a tree after a horrific tornado struck the town of Kirksville, as I recall. The memo said this letter was discovered pierced by the tree branch a county or two away from Kirksville and Adair County--sort of an early form of air mail, we might say. The finder of the letter could never discover who had possession of this letter before the tornado did, so some time later the finder donated it to the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection, since--hole or not--it described a part of Missouri's Civil War history.

Sometimes how we acquire letters and other writings in life are as interesting as what the writings actually say.

Bruce Nichols