Part 7, Note 45

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Weekly Austin Republican, May 6, 1868; Reports of Louis W. Stevenson, April 30, 1868, June 30, 1868, August 31, 1868, all in Barry A. Crouch Collection (Ms. 41), Archives of the Nesbitt Memorial Library, Columbus. The last contingent of troops which assisted the Freedmen's Bureau agent in Columbus left town on March 1, 1868. The Columbus chapter of the Ku Klux Klan seems to have been organized shortly thereafter. If indeed the Klan was responsible for both the lynching of Bowen and the robbing of Ridge, one must wonder if Bowen was lynched by mistake. The principal factors against that proposition are that Bowen was in the custody of the mob for a considerable time; and that when he was taken from the jail, the jailor conversed with him, calling him, he said, by name (see Houston Daily Times, September 12, 1868).