A bandit. The name was playfully adopted by the party which started on April 5, 1849, from Galesburg, Ill., for California. See Alex. Majors, ‘Seventy Years on the Frontier,’ ch. xvii. (1893). Some years afterwards it came to be used only in a bad sense.
1861. We are soldiers, not thieves or plunderers or jayhawkers.—Proclamation of Gen. James Lane, Oct. (Bartlett).
1862.
| Guess she must a-had Secesh beaux | |
| And gone to Jayhawker parties from her youth up. | |
| This bangs the Dutch of St. Louis, | |
| And they kin swear some. | |
Knick. Mag., lix. 392 (April). |
1862. Then comes a third party who are called May-walkers or Jayhawkers, but more properly they are bucanneers or land-pirates, and they rob everybody that is left after the Union and Secession parties have done their worst.—Brigham Young, July 6: ‘Journal of Discourses,’ ix. 320.
1862. There can be no doubt that the party found are a gang of jayhawkers,… a part of the jayhawking band led by Madison.—Rocky Mountain News, Denver, Aug. 28.
1864. To rid that section of country of deserters and Federal jayhawkers, as they are termed (i. e., robbers and murderers), with which the country is infested.—Gen. Price’s report, ‘Southern Hist. Soc. Papers,’ vii. 211 (1879).
1865. Jay-hawkers, cut-throats, and thieves.—Pall Mall Gazette, No. 143. (N.E.D.)
1867. Found all the settlers justifying the ‘Jayhawkers,’ a name universally applied to Montgomery’s men, from the celerity of their movements and their habit of suddenly pouncing upon an enemy.—A. D. Richardson, ‘Beyond the Mississippi,’ p. 125. (N.E.D.)
1876. Jeff. Thompson, with his few “Jayhawkers,” galloped around the town occasionally, and once brought in a Yankee cavalryman too Dutch to give any account of himself.—‘Southern Hist. Soc. Papers,’ i. 337.
1888. When only a youth, he was connected with what is known as the jayhawker war, that raged on the borders of Kansas about twenty five years since.—St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Jan. 20 (Farmer).
1888. [In Texas, down to 1866,] jay-hawkers, bandits and bush-whackers had everything their own way for a time.—Mrs. Custer, ‘Tenting on the Plains,’ p. 260.
1893. Every man suddenly discovering that somebody has jayhawked his boots or his blanket.—C. C. Nott, ‘The Tale of a Goblin Horse,’ Scribner’s Mag., xiii. 381/2.
