Three years with Quantrell

John McCorkle was a scout for the notorious William Quantrill, a man whose group of brigands spent their time kidnapping runaway slaves in exchange for reward money in the years before the civil war. McCorkle served briefly in the Missouri State Guard before being captured, swearing an oath of allegiance to the Unionists, and soon after breaking it to join Quantrill’s men. Fighting along the Missouri-Kansas borderland, preying on Unionist sympathisers, this account provides insight into a western theatre of a very different nature than the usual accounts following the exploits of Ulysses S.…