All kinds of strange stories in the 2nd Colorado Cavalry. When Quantrill's former sub-leader Andy Blunt was killed in about March 1864 and "was laid out," as Missourians say, in somebody's house near Greenton in southwest Lafayette County, a passing squad of the 2nd Colorado Cavalry stopped by and looked in. One of the "Mountain Boomer" troopers recognized Blunt's face and said he served with the man on the frontier in or near Colorado Territory a few years before, and that he was in some close scrapes with the dead man. Now, "Andy Blunt" was a "nomme de guerre" or fake name, and Blunt studiously never let his comrades in Quantrill's band known his real name, nor his reason to use a false name. The guerrillas heard that Blunt served in the U.S. Army sometime in the past out West, but nobody mentioned any details. Blunt came to Quantrill about early 1862 or summer 1862, and nobody knows where he was before that. Blunt took his secret identity to the grave with him, but that Colorado trooper shed a little light on Blunt's past in just that passing remark. Warren Welch, the Quantrill man who lived in the Greenton neighborhood, happened to hear the remark when the Colorado patrol stopped by. Strange, but true. I just wish I knew more of the story.

Bruce Nichols