Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler

Topeka and Manhattan were settlements made by men from free States, and with an eye single to making Kansas a free State. There was no town located on the Mi

itory would go; and I thought that no considerations of personal danger ought to hinder, t

a national notoriety in this struggle now going on in Kansas; and both were leading members in the Atchison town company. Dr. Stringfellow was deputed to act as editor-in-chief of the Squatter Sovereign, a paper at that time started in Atchison; but the editor was Robert S. Kelly. Bob Kelly, as he was popularly called, was a born leader among such a population as at that time filled Western Missouri. The towns along the Missou

and muscular, with fair complexion and blue eyes, and was the natural chief of the dangerous men that were drawn to him by his personal magnetism. Moreover, he p

He gloried, like John Randolph, of Roanoke, in being descended from. Pocahontas, and that he therefore had Indian blood in his veins. Born and reared on the frontier, tall, muscular, and raw-boned, an utter stranger to fear, a dead shot with pistol or rifle, cool and self-possessed in danger, he had become known far and near as a desperate and dangerous man when meddled with. But he had bee

ties of Missouri. But in Western Missouri the percentage of Disciples was perhaps larger than in any other portion of the United States, consequently I had brethren on

citizens, but by an outside invasion. With pain and shame, and bitter resentment, my neighbors told me how they had driven their wagons to the place of voting, on the prairie, and hitched their horses to their wagons, and were quietly going about their business, when with a great whoop and hurrah, which frightened their horses and made them break loose from their wagons, a company of men came in sight, and with swagger and bluster, took possession of the polls, and proceeded to do the voting. Meantime whisky flowed like water, and the men, far gone in liquor, turned the place into a bedlam. In utter humiliation

n from the State of Missouri grew sick at heart. It was a deep, unspoken, bit

d that shall fairly express the real sentiment of the people, if

were born to the lowly lot of toil, and the negro has made labor a disgrace. Neither ourselves nor our children have had opportunity for education, and the negro is the cause of it. Moreover, an aristocracy

ethren in Southeastern Iowa. Bro. Kirkham was raised in a slave State. He said: "When I was a boy I had never thought of slavery as being wrong. There was a black boy in the settlement named Jim. Jim was so good-

leep. I thought I would crawl slyly up to him, and spring suddenly on him, and frighten him. I did so, but Jim was not asleep at all, but lifted up his head with

ting enmity to an institution that will

e high and mighty Atchison Town Company, or the editorial staff of the Squatter Sovereign, or the pui

g farewell, to

te of man: To-d

es of hope, to-

lushing honors

omes a frost, a

nks, good easy

is a-ripening-

he falls,

t this time in the Squatter Sovereign, will show what a

Y IN K

slave population is gradually increasing by the arrival of emigrants and settlers from the slave States, who, having an eye to making a fortune, have wisely concluded to secure a farm in Kansas, and stock it well with valuable slaves. Situated as Missouri is, being surrounded b