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By Root 1807 0

gave way to one upset after the other. Sheriff Jones’s deputy, an illiterate who was nevertheless fully armed and eager for any pretext, persisted in trying to arrest everyone involved in the Branson rescue. Sometimes he had the dragoons with him, in which case he would stop people but then let them go if he found nothing against them. Most times he didn’t have the dragoons with him but had other men, men who spoke in the accents of the deep south and looked like roughs, but not entirely like our Ruffians. We all knew they were bringing men in from the south, especially from the hot-blooded places like South Carolina. Thomas and Frank got stopped every day or so. Frank finally got a little pass from the deputy that read: "Let this man pass I no him two be a Law and abidin Sittisin." Well, these were our duly constituted officials. As New Englanders, and generally well educated, the citizens of Lawrence were especially galled to be insulted and arrested by fools and ignoramuses who couldn’t contain their glee (spitting and staggering from tobacco and drink) at getting over New Englanders.

What was the most outrageous insult? One followed right after another. Some days after the shooting, one of their judges, Lecompte, called a grand jury in Lecompton, the town they’d named after him, and Lecompte instructed the jury about exactly who would be found and indicted as a traitor. Of course, all of our leaders were to be indicted—everyone, from former Governor Reeder to Governor Robinson to Senator Lane, who was in any way responsible for keeping Lawrence moving safely forward. They all escaped, decamped, pursued our interests elsewhere. Reeder hid out in Kansas City for two weeks, then managed to find a steamer that would take him down the Missouri; Governor Robinson got detained at Lexington, Missouri, and was held under arrest. Mrs. Robinson went to plead his case in the east. Jim Lane got off to Iowa, a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment, especially among the Quakers there. All the leaders who weren’t arrested were looking for money or support outside of Kansas—that seemed now to be our only hope.

And there was more—the Missourians kept stealing our horses and mules. Charles’s mules and one of his horses got taken, and he and Thomas and two other men had to go find them. It took two days, and in the end they found only the horse and one of the mules. I was terrified that Jeremiah would be taken, but we kept him in town as much as possible—it was more usual for horses to be taken on the roads outside of town, or from claims. This was one of the reasons we ended up staying in Lawrence past our departure date, then way past our departure date. Jeremiah was so appealing and so obviously of value that he would certainly call attention to himself and to us. Better, in spite of our best plans, to take refuge in the populous melee of town. Three days, Thomas and Frank and I walked out to the claim early in the morning and back in the evening, to plant our seed. But there was no tending it. If it must come up, it would; if we were to get anything from it, we would. That was our only plan at that point.

Well, a lot of things happened, I can’t list them all, and at any rate, all of them were swallowed up by what happened next. Sometime in mid-May, on the eleventh or twelfth, I think, the grand jury, so called, announced its findings. The next day, the federal marshal issued a proclamation, all toward Missouri, of course. The news proclaimed was that the marshal needed a "posse of law-abiding citizens." What they were going to do was buried in some sort of legal rigmarole, but we knew what they wanted to do—band together, get their weapons, and clear us out: hang us, shoot us, burn us, knife us, get rid of us. The only question, for Thomas and me, was where we would endure the attack—alone on our claim, with one horse, one man, one woman, and one boy, not to mention four carbines and a hundred rounds, or in Lawrence with our allies.

May can be a lovely time in Kansas, or so I was told. I only lived one May there, and it was a wet one.