United States or Iran ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


"Nine-forty-six." "That gives me fifteen minutes. Can I make it?" "Not afoot, and you ain't likely to catch a car. I'll drive you down. I've got the fastest mare in Pottawatomie County." The fact that the G. & M. had been rescued from its poverty and was about to be "developed" was made manifest in Blake City by the modern building which the railroad was erecting on the main street.

A Kansas journalist of 1856, writing in 1879, made this logical assumption: "The opposition press both North and South took up the damning tale ... of that midnight butchery on the Pottawatomie.... Whole columns of leaders from week to week, with startling headlines, liberally distributed capitals, and frightful exclamation points, filled all the newspapers."

His favorite hero seems to have been Gideon, and to assail and overcome the Midianites, a handful against a host, became his dream. At the head of a small group of men, including two of his sons and a son-in-law, he went at night down Pottawatomie creek, stopping at three houses.

It was substantially this plan to which Brown now returned, and he sought aid among those men at the East who had backed the Free State cause in Kansas. He was not known to them, as he has been presented to the reader, as the chief actor in the Pottawatomie massacre, but as a bold guerrilla chief, who had lost a son in the Kansas strife.

Wachique started up, her Pottawatomie blood painting her cheek bones. That instant she was an Indian, not a slave. She remembered everything this petted despot had done to her, and, lifting her bundle, threw it as far as her arms could send it across the water floor of the college. The pitiful little weight sunk with a gurgling sound. "Sit down, woman!" shouted Colonel Menard.

That, throughout the country, the two parties continued on the lines of policy they had chosen may be seen from an illustration. A House committee which had gone to Kansas to investigate submitted two reports, one of which, submitted by a Democratic member, told the true story of the murders committed by John Brown at Pottawatomie.

Finally, in September, 1855, he himself removed to Kansas, became the captain of a band of Free State Rangers, took part in the fight at Lawrence, and in some other affairs, and then, proceeding to the shores of Pottawatomie creek, where several pro-slavery men lived, seized five of them and put them to death.

In 1891, the 868,414 acres of the surplus lands of the Iowa, Sac, Fox and the Pottawatomie-Shawnee reservations formed the new counties of Lincoln and Pottawatomie and increased the extent of some of the old ones.

Thomas W. Barber and Robert F. Barber were farmers, living about seven miles from Lawrence; and on December 6th started with a Mr. Pierson to go home to their families. These were two brothers and a brother-in-law. They were intercepted on their way by J. N. Burns, of Weston, Mo., and Major George W. Clarke, United States Agent for the Pottawatomie Indians. These two men shot Thomas W. Barber.

On the night of May 24, 1856, five pro-slavery men, living on the Pottawatomie Creek, were deliberately and foully murdered by John Brown and seven of his disciples; and, while this massacre caused profound excitement in Kansas and Missouri, it seems to have had no influence east of the Mississippi River, although the fact was well attested.