General M. Jeff Thompson

"The great Missouri swamp fox, the Marion of this revolution - you must know I mean General M. Jeff Thompson - was in town yesterday. I cannot say he is in town; like the Hibernian's flea, he seems to be here, there, and everywhere all at once. As he stepped leisurely over some barrels on the landing, I would not have know him but for the inevitable white handled Bowie knife, which he carries as no other man carries a knife, stuck perpendicularly in his belt on the middle of his back; for he now wears a genteel regulation uniform, befitting a general. His old slouch white hat and feather, bobtailed coat, short pants and rough boots, which made look more like a cattle drover than a gentleman, and in which he did his earliest deeds of daring, have been laid aside, and now he has really a military look. Let me picture this man to you.

Imagine a tall, lean, lank, wiry looking customer at least six feet high, and as slender as a pair of tongs; a thin, long head, with a very long nose; what you would call a hatchet face; thick yellow hair, combed behind his ears and bobbed off short, displaying a very long and thin neck; face healthy and ruddy, without a vestige of beard or mustache; some thirty or thirty-five ;years of age; light pale blue eyes with friendly and benevolent expression; a placid well-shaped mouth, with a half-smile always playing about the corners; a little stoop shouldered; slightly bandy-legged from much riding on horse back; easy and graceful in his movements, as well on foot as in the saddle; mild voiced and unassuming in a crowd; full of rough soldier language in his talk; his manner and tone of voice the same to all, from major-general down to a negro; imagine such a person as this, I say, and you will have a pretty correct idea of the famous Jeff Thompson. He is about the last person you would take for Jeff Thompson, after forming your idea from what you had heard of him.

He is perpetually full of fun and never gets to talking without setting all around him to laughing; it is believed, indeed, that he fights chiefly for the fun of it. The camp is full of Jeff Thompson's jokes or rather the odd dialogues he has had with friends and enemies"

by Captain Israel Gibbons, late of the editorial corps of the New Orleans Crescent, in a letter from Columbus, Kentucky as published in the "History of the First and Second Missouri Cofederate Brigades 1861-1865 by R. S. Bevier; published by Bryan, Brand and Company 1879