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By Root 1696 0

indeed discovered the voting. The night before, they had attacked the farm where it was to take place, and in the morning, before our husbands got there, they’d attacked a party of voters heading out to the farm. There were so many Missourians that the Free Staters ran off for fear of their lives and never got to vote at all. Shortly after Thomas and Charles got to the farm, the Missourians came around for the second time that day and shot off their guns into the air and vowed to break up the ballot boxes "and a lot of heads into the bargain" and to "hang some black abolitionists" or "throw ’em out onto the ice," but the Free Staters gathered inside shot off their Sharps carbines and drove them away. No one knew how many Free Staters were prevented from voting or chased away, but all those who got through swore they’d done so at peril of their lives. Our husbands decided to stay the night—everyone was sure that members of a group who styled themselves the "Kickapoo Rangers" would attack the farmhouse—but after a while, a man, his son, and his nephew decided to hazard a dash for home. These three did get chased, and trapped in a fence corner. The man and one of the boys had to try and hold off the "Rangers," while the other boy ran back to the farmhouse for help. Thomas and Charles were in the house, and they happened to be the only two with Sharps rifles, as all the other Lawrence men had left. Charles, who was a better shot than Thomas, agreed to go out with the party of rescuers, who were in the charge of a Captain Brown, still another Brown, a man of thirty-five or so, well liked by all the Leavenworth people, who was a committed Free Stater.

Not long after that, the two parties converged. The Free Staters were on the verge of driving off the proslave party, when a larger party of these Kickapoo Rangers arrived. Now there was what I suppose would qualify in Kansas as a bona fide battle. Brown on his side drew up his men in a line, and the others did, too. The firing commenced, and Charles said that he had never been so scared in his life, even when he was taken prisoner by the Missourians during the "war" and threatened with hanging. After a while, the Missourians got into some houses nearby and fired at the Free Staters, who were in the open. Captain Brown made Charles lie down behind a snowbank and keep firing with his Sharps carbine, while the others went more slowly, muzzle-loading after each shot. Pretty soon, though, the Free Staters themselves retreated to some of the nearby buildings, and then the battle petered out, as no one’s rifle had enough range to do much damage in these circumstances. Brown had the men retreat to the cabin where the election had taken place and where Thomas still was, with some other men and the ballot box. Two of the Free Staters were hit and slightly wounded. About the Missourians, they were soon to find out.

The cabin was crowded, and after a while men began to agitate to leave, both to get back to the safety of their own homes and to remove the ballot box to a safer place. Finally, Captain Brown decided to take a buggy and a wagon and seven men and try to get back to Leavenworth. Thomas and Charles resolved to wait until morning and come on to Lawrence, as they had the mail with them and no need to go back to Leavenworth.

As they were making their way down the road, Captain Brown and his men passed another wagon but ignored it. Then, coming around a curve in the road, they saw two more wagons and were surrounded and taken. These, again, were the Kickapoo Rangers—there is a town up by Leavenworth called Kickapoo, and it is full of the lowest sort of characters—and they took away the weapons of all our men and dragged them off to a local store where the owner sympathized with the slave power, all for the sake of working to death a little Negro boy of some ten years.

Now was when the real horror commenced, for the Kickapoo Rangers were drunk as they could be, and instead of destroying the ballots and paroling the men, which is what they said they were going to do, the southerners