[jalexand42]

Well-known jayhawkers include Lane and Charles "Doc" Jennison. Jennison's vicious raids into Missouri were thorough and indiscriminate, and left five counties in western Missouri wasted, save for the standing brick chimneys of the two-storey period houses, which are still called "Jennison Monuments" in the areas. Lane and his band of militants wore red gaiters, earning them the nickname "Redlegs", or "Redleggers". This moniker was often used interchangably with the term "jayhawkers," although it was sometimes used to refer specifically to jayhawkers who refused to join units officially sanctioned by the U.S. Army. Guerrillas on both sides of the Missouri-Kansas border achieved some measure of legitimacy through sanction from the Federal and Confederate governments, and the bands who scorned such sanction were typically even more vicious and indiscriminate in their methods than their bureaucratically recognized counterparts. Even within Kansas, the jayhawkers were not always popular because, in the absence of federal support, they supplied themselves by stealing horses and supplies from farmers.

Jayhawker bands waged numerous invasions of Missouri and also committed some of the most notorious atrocities of the Civil War, including the Lane-led massacre at Osceola, Missouri, in which the entire town was set aflame and at least 9 of the male residents killed. The sacking of Osceola inspired the 1976 film The Outlaw Josey Wales, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. Jayhawkers also were accused of engineering the collapse of a jail in Kansas City in which female relatives of bushwhackers were incarcerated by Union sympathizers because of their connection to pro-Confederate guerrillas. These two incidents were prior to the Lawrence Massacre in Lawrence, Kansas, led by William Quantrill and his band of bushwhackers.




Nice choice of a mascot KU for a band of murdering idiots who burned down a jail full of WOMEN. THAT is why Quantrill burned lawrence.

[censored] Kansas.