History

Kansas from 1854 - 1861 was the scene of a bitter struggle to determine whether the territory should enter the Union as a free or a slave state. The principle of popular sovereignty embodied in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which created the territory, provided that this decision should be made by a vote of the people. Consequently, free-state and proslavery adherents became rivals for majority control, and strife and bad feelings resulted.

Numerous instances of lawlessness occurred. Men were attacked, beaten, and occasionally killed, often for no reason except their views on slavery. In Linn and Bourbon Counties, on the eastern Kansas border, raids were frequently carried on by opposing factions.

This situation continued through 1857 and 1858. On one occasion a leader of the free-state group rode into Trading Post, which had become a rendezvous for a proslavery gang, and--so the story goes--cleaned out the headquarters by dumping several barrels of corn whiskey into the road. Then he notified the proslavery people to leave the territory. No one was hurt and no property was destroyed, except the whiskey.

A leader of the proslavery faction was Charles Hamilton, a native of Georgia who had come to the border area in 1855 to help make Kansas Territory a slave state. After Hamilton and his friends were forced to leave, he is reported to have sent back word to other proslavery sympathizers "to come out of the territory at once, as we are coming up there to kill snakes, and will treat all we find there as snakes." Shortly thereafter he kept his word.

On May 19, 1858, some thirty men under Hamilton's leadership crossed into Kansas. They arrived at Trading Post in the morning and then set out on the road back toward Missouri, capturing eleven free-state men along the way. None of these men was armed, and it was said that none had taken part in the fighting. Most were former neighbors of Hamilton and had no thought that he meant to do them serious harm. However, they were hurried along and into a defile surrounded by the mounds that characterize the area. There they were herded into line, and Hamilton's men formed another line on the side of the ravine.

To his men in line, Hamilton gave the order to fire, sending off the first shot himself. The victims fell. Then Hamilton dismounted his firing squad to finish the job with pistols.

Five free-state men were killed; Hamilton and his gang departed swiftly for Missouri. Only one of them paid the official penalty for the crime; William Griffith of Bates County, Missouri, was arrested in the spring of 1863 and hanged October 30. Hamilton returned to Georgia, where he died in 1880.

Intense excitement followed the massacre. The nation was horrified, and John Greenleaf Whitter wrote a poem on the murder, "Le Marais du Cygne," which appeared in the September 1858 Atlantic Monthly.

Locally, wrathful indignation accompanied feelings of shock. John Brown, arriving at the scene toward the end of June, built a "fort" some 220 yards south of the ravine. It was reported to have been two stories high, walled up with logs and with a flat roof. Water from a spring ran through the house and into a pit at the southwest corner.

The land on which the fort was built belonged to Eli Snider, a blacksmith. Later he sold it to Brown's friend Charles C. Hadsall, who agreed to let Brown occupy it for military purposes. Brown and his men withdrew at the end of the summer, leaving the fort to Hadsall.

In later years Hadsall built a stone house adjoining the site of Brown's fort, enclosing the spring within the walls of the first floor. In 1941 the Kansas legislature authorized acceptance of the massacre site, including Hadsall's house, as a gift to the state from the Pleasanton Post, Veterans of Foreign Wars. In 1961 it provided funds for the restoration of the building, and in 1963 the entire property was turned over to the Kansas Historical Society for administration. A museum was established in the upper floor of the building in 1964.