One item that I noted was the contention that no Confederate rams had bow guns at the time of Plum Point Bend. This caused me to go back and look at Walke's sketches preliminary to the NH 2049 image reproduced on p. 104, which itself was published in Walke's
Naval Scenes and Reminiscences. Here is the wash drawing that (presumably) formed the basis for the later image:
(from the US Naval Academy collection)
Both this and the finished image were produced years after the war, on the basis of sketches Walke made during the war.
Going back a step further, it appears that Walke composed the image as a midpoint of the action he'd sketched midwar... sort of an "in-between" interposing between figures "No 8" and "No 9":
Now, the
Price's bow gun appears to be present on all of these sketches (I think; it's not perfectly clear in some cases), but even though the original top-down sketches were made during the war, they were done
after the Battle of Memphis-- in fact, after Vicksburg, for that matter, but before Walke left for the command of
Sacramento; I speculate they were done while he was on leave after leaving the Western Rivers in the late summer / fall of 1863.
So it seems reasonable to me that Walke remembered the
Price's bow gun from Memphis and likely assumed it had been present at Plum Point Bend-- where he wouldn't have actually been close enough for a clear view of her.
Speculation, but interesting...
(Odd random detail: some of the numbers in the "No. 8" sketch appear to be written backwards. But not all of them. I'm not sure what to make of that.)