Quantrell is the name of a depredator in Kansas who, at the head of some thirty men armed with Sharpe’s rifles and navy revolvers, has made himself a terror of the whole region, neither the loyal men nor the secessionists claiming him to belong to them. His men are mounted on the best horses in the country. He makes his camp in the timber of the bottoms, and can travel twenty miles through the brush in hog paths unknown to any save his own men. – Every few days he robs the mail, and steals both stage coach and horses. Some mounted volunteers from Kansas City recently had a hunt for him, and succeeded in killing six of his men and driving him thirty miles southwest, but he returned a few days after with more men and again robbed the mail, killed two Union men, and jayhawked all the Union stores at Westport, two miles from Kansas. Quantrell is a tall, well proportioned, light haired man, wears a long handsome mustache, and like Cleveland, has his sweetheart to travel with him. “Nancy Slaughter,” as she is called, is the daughter of a prominent citizen of Blue Spring, and has the reputation of being a widow of the “grass” sort. She is a very stylish Amazon and sits her horse like a queen.
– Published in The Davenport Daily Gazette, Davenport, Iowa, Thursday Morning, March 6, 1862, p. 2
