Alf Bolin: Just the Facts, Part I

I published a post recently in which I decried the fact that so much misinformation, outright falsehood, and pure speculation about notorious Civil War bushwhacker Alf Bolin has seemingly become accepted as truth. Subsequently, a reader responded that he would like to see a chronicling of what is actually known for sure about Bolin, and I said I would try to provide such a chronicle. So, here goes.
The legend of Alf Bolin says that he grew up in the area of Christian, Taney, and Stone counties. In almost all versions of the legend, he was supposedly reared in a foster family because his parents were either dead or had abandoned him. In most versions of the story, the foster family was the Bilyeu family of Christian County, although one version of the legend that I know about says he was raised by the Cloud family of Stone County.
However, even these basic elements of Alf Bolin's early life cannot be substantiated by firsthand documentation. I have not been able to find Bolin in either the 1850 or the 1860 census, and, as far as I know, no one else has either. About the only thing I've been able to confirm is that Bolin was NOT living with either the Bilyeu family or the Cloud family at the time of the 1860 census. The letter about Bolin I recently referenced, which was published in a Springfield newspaper only a few years after the close of the Civil War, calls into question even the idea that Bolin was an orphan, because it suggests that Bolin's mother was still alive and a presence in his life during the war. The only Alf or Alfred Bolin living in Missouri at the time of the 1860 census who was anywhere near the right age to be the desperate bushwhacker was living in southeast Missouri near the Bolin brothers who became infamous during the war in that part of the state--John F., Nathan, etc. However, the Alfred Bolin of southeast Missouri was still living there in 1870. So, he was obviously not THE Alf Bolin. I do believe, though, that the two may have been related--perhaps even named after a common ancestor. One of the legends about Alf Bolin even suggests that he traveled east from the Taney County area about the time the war broke out to try to find his father before returning to the Forsyth area. There was also a 26-year-old man named "Alford Bowling" living in Stone County not far from the Clouds at the time of the 1860 census, but according to one of the proponents of the "Clouds as foster family" hypothesis, this person also could not have been THE Alf Bolin, although I'm not sure what proof exists that this is not our man. Until I see such proof, I'll keep open the possibility that this could be the Alf Bolin we're looking for. It is, of course, possible that Alf Bolin was simply missed in the 1860 census. The omission of people from early census records is something that did occur with some regularity but not with the frequency that beginning genealogists might think. More often they were listed under a variant spelling of their name or in a household headed by someone with a different name. I'm not saying that is necessarily the case here, but it's a possibility.
The earliest mention of Alf Bolin in contemperaneous records that I know about appears in a letter from Springfield dated July 18, 1862, in which a correspondent to the New York Times stated, "A young man, named Bowling, has devastated a strip of country thirty miles in width, between Arkansas and Missouri. Five or six others are associated with him. Armed with a long rifle...he lurks by the roadside to murder National soldiers and known Union men. You can no more find him by searching for him than you can find some particular deer in the forest. He never acknowledges having killed anyone, but he sometimes says, 'If my gun had not snapped, I would have tumbled a Federal over today.' It is thought that he has killed at least thirty men with his own hands. Union men have fled in fear of their lives, leaving their houses empty and their grain standing ungathered in the field. Secessionists have fled, dreading that vengeance will be taken upon them for his crimes." This letter lends some credence to the idea that Bolin was a terror to the countryside and that he may very well have killed a good number of Federal soldiers and/or Union citizens, but it seems to contradict the notion that he was indiscriminate in his killing.
Another contemporaneous source is a report written by Major John C. Wilbur at Ozark, dated August 10, 1862. Wilbur had just returned from a scout to Forsyth and beyond, and his scouting party had encountered a group of bushwhackers west of Forsyth along the White River. Some of the Federal scouts gave chase south of the river and "into the hills toward Laten's Mills, where I learn Boler has a band of horse-thieves, numbering some 50 men." Although Bolin's name is misspelled, "Boler" is almost certainly a reference to Alf Bolin. I have not seen the original document, but it is quite possible that the "n" in his name was simply mistranscribed as an "r." "Laten's Mills" was a reference to Layton Mill, which was located near the Missouri-Arkansas line about three miles south of the Murder Rocks, where Bolin supposedly killed many of his victims. In his report, Wilbur goes on to say that his advance guard was fired on by a party of five men belonging to Boler's command. When the Federals returned fire, the guerrillas reportedly threw their guns away and scattered into the woods to keep from being captured or killed.
The next contemperaneous reference to Alf Bolin that I know about appears in an October 14, 1862 letter written from Springfield by Colonel Clark Wright of the 6th Missouri Cavalry that can be found in the Union Provost Marshals' Papers. In the letter, Wright says he has received reports of a gang of bushwhackers under Bolin committing depredations west of Bower's Mills. This is surely a reference to Alf Bolin, but it also almost as certain that Wright had been misinformed. Bower's Mills was located on the Lawrence-Jasper county line fifty miles west of Springfield and even farther from Forsyth. It's unlikely Bolin had roamed that far afield.
The next contemperaneous references to Bolin concern his death, and I'll save those for next time.

In Defense of Alf Bolin

Alf Bolin, a Civil War bushwhacker in the Taney County, Missouri, area, was, according to legend, one of the worst fiends who ever lived. The legend holds that Bolin slew upwards of forty people and was largely indscriminate in his heinous crimes, killing defenseless old men as well as young boys, although the legend does allow that he tended to target loyal citizens more than Southern sympathizers.
The problem with the legend is that very little of it can be documented, and much of it is probably untrue. The main reason it gained credence more than likely had to do with the unusual circumstances of his death. With a Federal bounty on his head, Bolin was double crossed by people he thought were his friends and killed in a scheme hatched by Yankee authorities. Then his corpse was decapitated and his head taken into Ozark and later Springfield for public display.
As the story of Alf Bolin's life and death was told and retold, details of his life no doubt had to be invented or the real details embellished so that they were just as sensational as the details of his death. Thus, the legend grew in the retelling until Alf Bolin became almost a caricature of evil.
The legend of Alf Bolin as bogeyman that has been handed down is, understandably, told mostly from a Union perspective, but I recently ran across a letter published in an 1872 Springfield newspaper showing that, where Alf Bolin was concerned, the Union side had no monopoly on exaggeration. The letter was written by a correspondent calling himself simply "Reb," and it is as full of absurd claptrap as the Union legend.
According to the Southern version of Bolin's story, Alf and about ten or twelve other Taney County men banded together at the beginning of the Civil War for their own protection but vowed not to join either army. However, all of the men except Bolin betrayed their pledge as soon as the Union army made its appearance in the region, as they quickly enlisted in Federal service. To prove their loyalty, they almost immediately arrested their old pal Bolin and started with him to Springfield. When Bolin tried to escape on the way to Springfield, the men riddled him with bullets and left him for dead beside the road, but Bolin survived and eventually killed all of his betrayers, thereby "earning for himself at the same time the reputation of being a desperado." Stories unfairly representing Bolin to be a fiend were soon circulated and a bounty placed on his head. Shortly afterwards, a party of Yankees started in pursuit of the incarnate devil and went to his mother's home asking his wheareabouts. When "the old and tottering mother of the victim" refused to tell, the low-life Yankees whipped her with a cowhide. Enraged by this act, Bolin "watched his opportunity and put a ball through the brain of each one who took part in the dastardly act of whipping his mother."
The rest of the letter, detailing the Yankee scheme for capturing and killing Bolin, follows the Union version of the legend fairly closely, and, in fact, I think it's fairly safe to say that the part of the legend involving Bolin's death that has been handed down is probably pretty accurate. I think it's just as safe to say, however, that the Union version and this "Reb" version of Bolin's Civil War career prior to the events surrounding his death are both a bunch of malarkey. Both versions may contain certain elements of truth, but Bolin's Civil War "career" was almost certainly much less sensational than either version would suggest.

Alf Bolin: Just the Facts, Part II

The amount of firsthand documentation about the activities of notorious guerrilla Alf Bolin while he was still alive is very scant. Contemporaneous sources of information about his death are also few and far between, but we can learn a little bit more from primary sources about his death than we know about his life.
Sometime around the beginning of 1862, the Federal army placed a bounty on the head of Alf Bolin because of his murdering and pillaging. According to Federals on the Frontier, the Civil War diary of Sergeant Benjamin F. McIntyre, a soldier of the 1st Iowa Cavalry named Zack Thomas set out to collect the reward by implementing a scheme hatched by Union officials. Dressed as a southern soldier or "butternut," Thomas made his way south from Springfield to southern Taney County near the Arkansas border, where Bolin was known to hide out. Here Thomas stopped about the first of February, 1863, at the home of a woman who knew Bolin and who had promised to help carry out the scheme. (Later accounts, which appear to have considerable merit, reveal that the woman was a Mrs. Foster, and that she agreed to cooperate in order to gain the freedom of her husband, a Confederate sympathizer who had been arrested by Union authorities.) The woman went to where Bolin was staying and asked him to come to her cabin the next morning. When Bolin arrived, Thomas, who was introduced as a southern soldier, bided his time while awaiting an opportunity to kill the desperado. Finally, as Bolin leaned down near the cabin's fireplace, Thomas clubbed him over the head with a broken plow coulter, causing his death. (Later versions of the story suggest that Bolin started to revive a short while after being struck in the head and had to be finished off with gunfire.)
McIntyre was present when Bolin's body was brought to Forsyth the next day, February 2, and he went to view the corpse. He described Bolin as a "large sinewey man" who "must have been of great strength and indurence." According to McIntyre, Bolin had boasted of killing forty Union men and had been a terror to several counties in southern Missouri. Another contemporaneous source, a letter written at Forsyth by Madison Day of the 14th Missouri State Militia Cavalry on February 2, the day Bolin was brought in, also describes Bolin as a desperado--specifically a "highway robber and murderer."
The last sentence of McIntyre's February 2 diary entry tells us that plans called for Bolin's body to be sent to Springfield as proof of his death so that the reward could be collected by the appropriate parties. The next thing we know from contemporaneous sources is that Bolin's head, severed from his body, did arrive in Springfield on the evening of February 4. This we know from a brief piece written by a Springfield correspondent on February 5 that appeared in a St. Louis newspaper a week later. Exactly what happened between Forsyth and Springfield is less certain, but according to seemingly reliable accounts that were written later, the head was chopped off with an ax about a mile or so north of Forsyth and the body buried at the road side. The head was then placed in a wooden box and taken to Ozark where it was displayed on a pole. It was also supposedly displayed for public viewing after it reached Springfield on the evening of the 4th.
What we can fairly safely conclude from the available evidence is that Alf Bolin was, in fact, a notorious bushwhacker who operated in the Taney County area during the Civil War, but he almost certainly was not as notorious as his legend would lead one to believe. His claim to have killed 40 men, for instance, was almost surely an exaggeration, and some of the ones he did kill were probably not killed by him personally but by men associated with him. (We know from contemporaneous sources, for example, that Old Man Budd, who was supposedly one of Bolin's victims, was actually killed in the early fall of 1861 by a gang of men who had previously been part of Missouri State Guard captain David Jackson's command and who were now led by a man named Hilliard. Bolin may have been in the gang, but he wasn't the leader.)       

Alf Bolin

Alf Bolin, as most students of Ozarks history and folklore know, was a notorious bushwhacker in the Taney County area during the Civil War. He was not, however, nearly as notorious as the legend would have one believe. At least, I don't think so. I've written about this before in The Ozarks Mountaineer and elsewhere, but it continues to bother me when I see stuff written about Bolin perpetuating the notion that he was one of the worst criminals to ever step foot on the soil of Missouri. In fact, so much bloated nonsense has been written about Bolin that he has been turned almost into a folk hero.
The truth is Bolin wasn't even very well known in his own time. He may have had a local reputation around Forsyth as a thief and a bully, but if he had been even half as bad as the modern-day legend leads one to believe, he would have been well known throughout the whole state. Taney County may have been an isolated area during the Civil War, but it wasn't that isolated. Confederate guerrillas like Tom Livingston of Jasper County were well known in Union circles at least as far away as Kansas City and St. Louis, and Livingston was often mentioned in official Union and Confederate reports. Bolin, on the other hand, who was supposedly more heinous than Livingston ever thought about being, receives not one mention in the Official Records--not one. There is one brief mention of a horse thief named Boler in the Taney County area that may refer to Bolin but nothing specifically about Alf Bolin.
Because Bolin was not particularly infamous, very little was written about him until after he died, and because of this lack of a written record, it's hard to go back and disprove the legend. In at least one instance, though, the legend can be discredited by available written records. Bolin is usually blamed (or given credit for) the murder of Old Man Budd in southern Christian County. Written records at the Missouri State Archives show that this incident occurred during the late summer or early fall of 1861, and the leader of the gang who committed the murder was not Alf Bolin. Bolin may have been among the gang, but he was not its leader.
The main reason Bolin became so legendary and notorious after his death was the way he died and what happened to his body postmortem. He had the misfortune (or the good fortune one might say if he was aiming for immortality) to get his head chopped off.

Alf Bolin Yet Again

I've written several times previously (four to be exact)on this blog about Alf Bolin, the notorious bushwhacker who operated in the Taney County area during the Civil War. Nearly every time I've written about Bolin, whether on this blog or elsewhere, I have lamented the lack of verifiable information about him, especially information pertaining to events prior to his death. I have recently learned, however, thanks to a book entitled Christian County Memories by the Old Record Collector, Wayne Glenn, that there is a little more about Bolin that is known for sure than I had previously been aware of. For instance, Glenn demonsrates in his book that the 26-year-old Alford Bowling of the 1860 Stone County census (whom I had previously thought could possibly be our man) is, in fact, the notorious bushwhacker. He and his siblings, except one married brother, were living with their widowed mother at the time. Glenn's book also identifies eight or nine specific murders that Bolin was known or thought to have been involved in. Although the author relies to a certain extent on reminiscent histories or memoirs written many years after the war, most of the evidence presented seems credible. Another important tidbit that I learned from the Glenn book was that the name of the Confederate-sympathizing woman who double-crossed Bolin and set him up to be killed in order to gain the freedom of her husband was named Cordelia Richards. Her name was not Mrs. Foster, as many post-war reports claimed, although Foster was her maiden name. She was also related to the Laytons of Layton's Mill, where Bolin often hung out, in that her sister was married to a Layton and Cordelia and her husband lived on land owned by the Laytons. Despite this new information about Bolin, I still maintain that he was not nearly as notorious in life as he became after death. Bolin almost certainly did not kill anywhere near the forty men he is said in legend to have killed, and it cannot be proved even that he or his gang committed all of the murders mentioned by Glenn. And even if the Bolin gang did kill all of them, it is probable, as the author points out, that Bolin did not personally kill all of them by himself. At any rate, though, I definitely recommend Wayne Glenn's Christian County Memories book for anyone who would like to learn more about Alf Bolin. You can order it directly from him by sending a check for $13 (that price includes shipping)to Wayne Glenn, PO Box 827, Nixa, MO 65714.

Murder of Thomas Budd

I have mentioned before that the murder of Thomas Budd is one of the crimes often attributed to notorious Taney County guerrilla Alf Bolin. Budd is usually referred to as "Old Man Budd" and his age given as about eighty years old in the legendary accounts, but he was actually only about fifty-five years old at the time of his death, which no longer seems particularly old to this aging writer. According to the legend, Budd had made a trip from Christian County into Taney County to get a load of corn, was on his way back home, and had just crossed the White River when he was waylaid by Bolin's gang. He was supposedly forced to get out of his wagon and wade back into the river, where he was shot several times, and the current carried his body away after he was dead.
It may be true that Budd had ventured into Taney County from Christian County when he was killed, but the 1860 census lists him as living in Taney County. At any rate, he lived close to where southwest Christian County borders Taney County, in the present-day vicinity of Spokane. About the only other things that are known with some degree of certainty about this incident come from a statement given by Jacob Aleshire to a Union provost marshal.
Although the exact date of the document is unknown, the murder happened, according to Aleshire, sometime near the end of September 1861. Aleshire, who himself lived in southwest Christian County, said that Budd was at his house when about thirty men under David Jackson came to the house and took Budd away. Aleshire's statement is somewhat contradictory in that he first seems to say that Jackson himself was in charge of the band that came to his house. This cannot be true, however, since David Jackson was killed at Forsyth in July of 1861 during the skirmish in which Union general Thomas Sweeny ran the Southern forces out of town. Aleshire later says that Dan Hilliard was in command of the men who took Budd away. At any rate, Aleshire makes no mention whatsoever of Alf Bolin. It's quite possible that Bolin was among the band, but he almost certainly was not its leader.
Aleshire said that three days after Budd's abduction, he and some other men went out and found Budd's body on Camp Creek in Christian County (near present-day Highlandville) about a quarter of a mile from Green Gideon's place. The body had been burned and disfigured, the ears and nose having been cut off. Aleshire complained that, in addition to kidnapping and killing Budd, the gang also stole some store goods and some clothing from him and his family, including some shoes and a table cloth that belonged to his daughter. They also took Budd's horse and saddle.

Odds & Ends

First I need to append an addendum to my recent post about Pleasant Hope and Pin Hook. I said in that post that I had recently read a newspaper article in an 1872 Springfield newspaper mentioning that the new town of Pleasant Hope was situated near where Pin Hook used to be. Apparently, however, Pleasant Hope was not all that new in 1872, because just a day or two ago I ran onto another piece in a different Springfield newspaper, this one from late 1865, just a few months after the Civil War ended, in which Pleasant Hope is mentioned as a stop on a mail delivery route from Bolivar. So, I still don't know exactly when Pleasant Hope began as a town, but apparently its forerunner, Pin Hook, predated the Civil War.
A reader responded to my recent post about Alf Bolin agreeing that a lot of what has been handed down about Bolin is probably untrue or exaggerated and saying that he would like to see a post dealing with what we do know to be true about Bolin. So, that is something I have in mind for the future. There's actually not a whole lot about him that can be proved, but I'll see what I can come up with.
I'm happy to report that it was announced this past weekend at the Missouri Writers' Guild annual conference that my Wicked Joplin book won first place in the Best Book category of the guild's annual contests. My Civil War Springfield book took second place in the Major Work Award category (the guild's most prestigious award), and I also won a second place in the Best Article category for my story about the Joplin Spook Light that appeared in the Mysteries of the Ozarks, Vol. 3.