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By Root 1621 0

the Jenkinses’, and Mr. Bisket rode in from Lawrence and told them. Mr. Bisket being a single man, and not all that certain about his vocation, whether speculator, farmer, or merchant, he spent a lot of time riding from place to place and pursuing his avocation, which was talking politics. It didn’t hurt that he was helpful; he had never built much on his own claim, only split a few logs, but his friends’ places were full of his contrivances. While he worked, he talked. Over the subsequent days, he was like our own private newspaper.

The story was that a Free State man named Dow had been shot "forty times" in the back by a Missourian, his neighbor, named Coleman. In the morning, Dow and a friend of his, named Branson, had driven Coleman off the land they were disputing about, and then in the afternoon, some friends of Dow’s found his body by the side of a road down near Hickory Point, some ten or twelve miles south of Lawrence, and so about fifteen south of us. It looked as though Coleman had pursued Dow and shot him down. This murder provided the perfect occasion for the officials of the state government to demonstrate that holding office rendered them responsible to all the citizens of the territory. But of course, no one expected such an outcome.

Free Staters thought nothing of the so-called sheriff, just as they thought nothing of all the other "state officials." These "duly constituted" authorities, from the governor on down, were creatures of the slave power that had stolen the original elections, instituted the gag law, and rammed through a proslave constitution modeled on Missouri’s. There were no laws in Kansas that didn’t contaminate the very word "law," and no officials that weren’t partisans. The sheriff was a proslave partisan who used such authority as he had to harass and oppress Free Staters. As a southerner, his philosophy was that he wanted to do it, he ought to do it, and therefore he was going to do it—and what couldn’t be done by persuasion could more easily and amusingly be done by force. Coleman was a rich man from Missouri, and Dow and Branson were typical Free Staters—men of moderate means and independent habits. The sheriff knew what side his bread was buttered on without even thinking about it. No one knew Dow—he was new in the country—but he was a Free Stater, and his death quickly became an example of what they would do to all of us, under the guise of authority, if we didn’t stop them.

The Bushes and the Jenkinses considered all the men of the southern party, top to bottom, to be liars and proud of it, either owing to the fact that their slave system was based on the lie that Negroes weren’t human, meaning that southerners couldn’t tell the difference between a truth and a lie, or owing to their determination to force the system upon others, which meant that they knew the difference and dissembled by design. Free Staters believed nothing that the other party said about Dow or his murder, assumed their every word and action was intentional deception. Was this true back in the States? I didn’t know. I’d come to think that before I came to K.T. I’d known nothing at all and that everyone still back there continued in that same state of ignorance.

The night of Dow’s murder, the sheriff, an infamous little tyrant named Jones, stayed up in Leavenworth and did nothing. Folks in Lawrence were appalled but not shocked. That the southerners who styled themselves "state officials" would let one of their own go scot-free after killing one of ours was something all my friends declared they’d expected all along. Even so, it rankled. By Saturday night, a lot of people in Lawrence had decided they weren’t going to stand for it anymore. Some men went down to Hickory Point—Mr. Bisket and one of the Smithsons among them. Thomas, whose fund of pugnacity had been used up by the incident at the Jenkins claim, stayed home but prowled our cabin and yard the whole evening. Of course, we heard all about it the next day.

"Those boys said Coleman shot poor Dow in self-defense," said Mr. Bisket. "They just looked us