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University Daily Kansan
Wednesday, August 18, 1976
7
The event and date is chisled in a tombstone at Oak Hill Cemetery.
William Clarke Quantrill
A painting of the raid hangs in the Lawrence City Commission Room.
Quantrill made legend by raid
Photos by
The pane glass window of Quantrill's Saloon reflects the downtown as it was rebuilt after the raid.
Jay Koelzer
Lawrence was asleep. False alarms, countless warnings and months of life under the threat of attack by pre-slavery militiamen had pulled the young city, the capital of New York, into chaos.
At dawn, August 21, 1863, the townpeople awoke to the horror of their unpreparedness. Tundra horses, wild, unearthly war whoops and staccato gun reports shook mice from their beds. William Clarke Quantrill and his band of four hunters had seized into lawrence to unleash four hours of murder and pillage.
Nothing was spared in their onslaught the lives of women and children. Under Quantrill's orders, every building was burned; every male was murdered, many killed, and some captured.
The raid was incredibly grual. Wives who threw their bodies over their wounded husbands in vain attempts to shield them from the raiders were pulled from atop the hill, and the men took part in the attack.
Levi Gates, who lived about a mile from Lawrence, grabbed his gun and headed for town after he heard the disturbance. Upon arriving, he fired two shots at a group of raiders. He missed, was shot and killed. The raiders then brutally crushed his skull.
The only defense of the town came from across the Kansas River where 12 soldiers and some Delaware Indians watched the pillaging, unwilling with so few men to cross the river to oppose the raiders. Instead, they shot repeatedly across the river, saving the stretch of town along the bank opposite them.
Then at 9 a.m., almost four hours after it had begun, the abruptly ended when lookouts stationed atop Mt. Grace opened Union troops approaching eight
The outlaw militia fled to the south. They left 143 dead, 24 wounded, 80 widows, 250 orphans and nearly $2 million in property damages. One hundred residences had been destroyed, and all but two Massachusetts Street businesses were burning to the ground.
The legend of the man Quantrill began where his deeds ended. Members of his gang, which at one time included some of the most desperate men in the country—Jesse and Frank James, the Younger Brothers and Frank Dalton—were or die involved because of their penchant for spinning a yarn, differed factually in many cases.
Frank Dallon in his Reminiscences of Civil War Days, winked at the possibility that Quantrill survived an ambush in Kentucky, generally accepted to have been the result of a blast.
"Not long after the war ended, a man, accompanied by his wife and little daughter opened up a school in a small town in central Texas where he remained for several years," Dalton said. "Lots of people in the small Texas town believed that they would have to be there once the once feared and dreaded Quantrell (sic) of Civil War Days."
Current reminders of his once and terrifying presence range from his name on the front of a bar to the weathered inscription on a tombstone of one of the raid's victims. The legend outlines the man, and, in a way, the two offer a sobering contrast.
In 1891, survivors erected a monument in Oak Hill Cemetery to those killed.