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Kentucky, Clark's band was "to be relied upon equally with the best of any guerrilla band, Quantrill's not excepted."
Guerrilla leaders usually acted independently of each other, but on occasion they cooperated for a few days on a larger venture. On one of these forays, Quantrill led a raid on a tollgate just west of Bradfordville, Kentucky. When the rear of his forces was heavily attacked by Federal Cavalry, Clark led a countercharge which drove off the troops. In the fight, however, his horse was downed and he was pinned beneath it. As Union soldiers rushed back for the kill, he was rescued by Frank James and Frank Younger. Jerome Clark was respected and accepted as an equal and able fighter by these men.
One major reason for his success as an irregular was that he left nothing to chance where possible. He did his own reconnaissance and espionage in order to learn the location of Federal troops, supplies, enemy plans, tempting targets, and those who were trying to capture him. He did this as Sue Mundy, a pretty young woman, and no one penetrated his deception. One of his men has left this account of him as Miss Mundy: ". . . a quiet, soft-spoken dandy, with his hair in love-knots six inches long, a hand like a school-girl, and a waist like a woman . . . As a spy he came and went as a wind that blew. So many were his shapes and disguises, so perfectly under control were his speech and bearing, that in some quarters his identity was denied. . . His smooth, open, rosy-cheeked face made almost any disguise easy of encompassment. His iron nerve carried him easily through many self-imposed difficulties that without it extrication could not have come through a regiment of cavalry."
Clark allowed his hair to grow to the respectable length for women of that day, as was also done by many others including Generals Custer and Pickett. One of his contemporaries has written, however, that "beneath an exterior as effeminate as a woman of fashion, he carried the muscles of an athlete. His long hair in battle blew about as the mane of a horse. The dandy in a melee became a Cossack; in desperate emergencies a giant." His success in the creation of Sue Mundy is the reason Northern Army dispatches customarily referred to him by his feminine name. Most of the time they did not know whom they were fighting, what the leader looked like, whether he was man or woman, or even if Clark and Mundy were the same person. For this reason the reports of
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