Thanks, Kirby. Based on your suggestions, I nosed around Connelly's works a bit more. Connely also had a note in his "Quantrill and the Border Wars" on the origin. In part, he stated, "The Pat Devllin ficitin perpetrated in Andreas' History of Kansas was never worth any serious considerations...One of them (the 49ers) claims that the word originated with them, but his explanation of its origin is as ridiculous as that given by Pat Devlin." There are a couple of ways to interpret this statement. One is that Connelly viewed the whole Devlin story as ridiculous. However, the Devlin story appears in a number of the traditional sources: Andreas's history in 1883, Sprng's history in 1885, and (with more detail than the others) Robleys Bourbon County history in 1894. Even before these, the story appears in a 1877 Burlingtin (Iowa) Weekly Hawkeye article. The earliest I have found, and what I consider to be the most authoritaitive, is the 1868 Cournat article I cited in my original post. Based on all of these references (some of which I assume Connelly had to be aware of when he published Quantrill in 1910), I wonder if Connelly was dismissing the enitre Devlin story, or instead was dismissing Devlin's story of the origin of the term ("a bird in Ireland..."). Does anyone else think a devil-may-care Irishman may have had a bit of the gift of gab? In my opinion, the most plausible explanation of the origin of the term AS IT APPLIED TO THE KANSAS STRUGGLES is that Devlin adopted the term from some unknown source, told his yarns around, and things took off when he told it to a newspaperman that could recognize a ctchy phrase when he heard one. Why did it stick to the free-staters? Well, the Border Ruffians already had a nickname.