Billy Hawkins: Abducted by Alias!

John Wesley Powell won great fame for descending the Colorado River, yet most of his boatmen, who fully shared his bravery and achievement, have remained barely more than names. Being from Missouri,
I was curious to know more about Billy Hawkins, also known as “Missouri Rhodes.” Virtually the only background story historians told about him was that when he met Powell in 1868 he was going by this alias because of some minor brush with the law back in Missouri. But I have discovered that this story was a case of mistaken identity, and that the truth about Billy Hawkins is far more interesting.
Hawkins did a better job of hiding his identity than he ever expected to, misleading historians for 130 years. His real name was William Robert Wesley Hawkins, but his use of the name “Billy Rhodes” among Powell's men left them thinking that Rhodes was his real middle name. Powell, Stanton, and Dellenbaugh perpetuated this error in their books, and when Powell's most important biographer, William Darrah, tried to research Hawkins' background, this was the name he pursued.
I also used the name William Rhodes Hawkins in requesting Civil War records from Missouri and national archives, but all I came up with was a Confederate Colonel named William R. Hawkins. Considering that our Billy Hawkins fought for the Union, later named a son for Abraham Lincoln, and was far too young to be an officer, this was a poor fit. Then I had the same hunch that Darrah must have had. I requested the name William Rhodes, and back came a record for one William H. Rhodes. It was this record that Darrah used as his background source on Billy Hawkins, first in an 1947 article in the Utah Historical Quarterly, and then in Powell of the Colorado. Later historians, including the otherwise careful Lavender and Stegner, simply trusted Darrah, and so did the descendants of Billy Hawkins, who incorporated Darrah's account into published family histories.
Darrah listed Hawkins as being born in 1841, which would have made him 28 on Powell's trip. Darrah's Hawkins enlisted in the Union cavalry in Boonville, Missouri in June of 1863, but by November the muster roll listed him as “absent under civilian arrest”. By January he was back with his unit, and he was mustered out in St. Louis in May of 1865. There were no details of his crime, and Darrah says: “It is perhaps just as well that no additional facts are included”. Darrah implies that this incident accounts for Hawkins using an alias, but he also implies that this crime couldn't have been serious enough to warrant serious punishment. Darrah doesn't ask why, if this arrest was so minor, Hawkins was using an alias many years later? Darrah omits mentioning that he is talking about a William Rhodes, which would imply that Hawkins committed his offense before he enlisted and was already hiding his identity, though his crime soon caught up with him.
But there were discrepancies that should have alerted Darrah. Rhodes listed himself as married, but the real Hawkins didn't get married until 1873 in Utah. Rhodes listed a birthplace of Webster County, Missouri, but Hawkins, in several Mormon Church records, always listed Gentry County as his birthplace. Most significantly, family records listed Hawkins' birth date as July, 1848, and on this point the Hawkins family refused to accept Darrah's version. An 1848 birth means Hawkins was twenty at the start of Powell's trip, and only fifteen when he enlisted in the Union army. Rhodes' enlistment form measured him at six feet, one and a half inches tall, which is tall for anyone of that time, and especially for a fifteen year old.
If Darrah had pursued the name William W. Hawkins, he would have found a better match. This Hawkins lists his birthplace as Gentry County. He is five feet, five inches tall. He did claim to be seventeen upon enlisting, but it was common for kids to lie to get into the army. This Hawkins gives his current home as St. Clair County. I visited St. Clair county and checked the 1860 census and found a Hawkins family headed by the widow Sarah Hutton Hawkins, with five children. All their names match the names in the family Bible that Billy Hawkins passed to his descendants. The census lists Billy as born in 1848.
Billy's oldest brother, John, enlisted in the Union cavalry in 1861. The Civil War in Missouri, a slave state that remained in the Union, showed the ugliest face of a civil war, with neighbors burning each other down. St. Clair County was near the bloody Missouri/Kansas border and in the thick of the action. General Price's Confederate army pitched winter camp there, and issued a call for new recruits to rally there. A Kansas Union General looted the county seat, Osceola, and burned it down. When Confederate guerrilla leader Bill Quantrill burned down Lawrence, Kansas and massacred its citizens, he said it was in retaliation for Osceola. In response to Lawrence and the aid given to the guerrillas by border Missourians, the Union commander Ewing ordered the border populace evicted, and the refuges flooded into St. Clair County.
St. Clair County wasn't the safest place to be a Union supporter, and this is probably why Billy Hawkins slipped across the Polk County line to enlist in the Union army. Crossing this line also placed him outside the jurisdiction of the highly controversial General Ewing, and meant he could go join his brother's regiment, the

15th Cavalry. A few months previously, Billy's mother had died, freeing him of parental obligations, but it seems he waited until the crops were in before enlisting. He took with him a horse that the Union Army valued at $110. Hawkins' regiment patrolled west central Missouri and engaged in minor skirmishes.
In the fall of 1864, General Price made one last attempt to seize Missouri for the Confederacy. From Arkansas, Price's army of 12,000 cavalry troops (including a Union spy named Wild Bill Hickock) headed for the state capital of Jefferson City. Hawkins' regiment rushed to its defense, arriving just one day ahead of Price. Price decided that the capital was too well defended and headed further west, where he was joined by Quantrill's guerrillas, including Frank and Jesse James, who had just finished a massacre and dangled the scalps of Union soldiers on their bridles. Hawkins' regiment went in pursuit, and they were soon joined by a unit including Bill—not yet Buffalo—Cody. They chased Price for 150 miles, engaging him several times. Finally at Mine Creek, Kansas, Hawkins took part in a cavalry charge of 2,600 Union troops against a force twice that size, a charge led by Colonel Benteen, who later became famous at the Little Big Horn. The Union charge shattered Price's forces and ended the Confederate threat to Missouri.
Hawkins' unit wasn't engaged in any military action on February 23, 1865, the day he was arrested for mutiny. The only record of this event is the log of the military prison in Springfield, Missouri, which lists Hawkins as “Confined for mutiny.” Perhaps Hawkins had committed an act of personal rebellion against authority. For eighteen days Hawkins was “confined without order,” which may mean awaiting trial. The next muster roll for his unit lists him as “present,” However, Hawkins received no further pay after his arrest. The implication is that if he was serving without pay, he may have been serving out a sentence, perhaps doing menial labor for his unit, such as cooking, which was what he did on Powell's trip. Hawkins had originally enlisted for twenty months, and the army held him to that contract, discharging him on July 1, 1865. Hawkins must have walked off in a huff with some army gear, for his muster-out form stated that he owed the army $1.61 for “one waist belt, one gun sling, one shoulder sling and plate.”
You can see why Hawkins would have wanted to hide his identity from a Union officer like Powell. If, during the year between inviting Hawkins on his river trip and the launch, Powell had checked into Hawkins' military record, he would have discovered a mutineer and surely refused to take him.
Where did Hawkins get the name Rhodes? Darrah's William H. Rhodes was a cavalryman who fought in some of the same battles as Hawkins, so maybe Hawkins knew him and borrowed his more honorable name. More likely, it came from a famous mountain man named Bill Rhodes, who roamed the west for a quarter of a century, and was in Wyoming during its 1867 gold rush, as was Hawkins. Mountain man Rhodes was killed by Indians in 1868, so the name was free. Of course its possible that Hawkins got into further legal trouble while roaming the wild west after the war. His application for a military pension reveals that he arrived in Leavenworth, Kansas in August of 1865, Denver the next spring, Nevada in 1867, Wyoming later that year, and Colorado by 1868, where he met Powell. But I suspect that Hawkins adopted the alias entirely to prevent Major Powell from checking his past. Ironically, Hawkins' secret may have made a crucial contribution to Powell's success. When the Howlands and Bill Dunn mutinied at Separation Rapid, it may have been important to Hawkins to prove he was no mutineer.
Hawkins got into another ordeal with the military when he applied for a military pension in 1890. At that time, pensions were given only for disabilities suffered in the line of duty. Hawkins claimed he was seriously disabled due to his horse falling on him in 1864, attributing an amazing list of maladies, including asthma, to this accident. The War Department was highly skeptical, as there was no mention of such an accident in Hawkins' record, and the unit surgeon knew nothing about it. It probably didn't help that Hawkins was a mutineer who disappeared with $1.61 of army property rather than properly filing a disability discharge. Hawkins hired a Washington D.C. law firm to pursue his case and for years continued filing affidavits. He must have realized that his fame as a Colorado River superman wasn't consistent with being disabled in 1864, for on one document he claimed that his “simptoms” didn't appear until 1870.
Don Lago