Baxter Springs: Quantrill's Last Massacre

On the morning of October sixth, eighteen sixty-three, a column of Union soldiers approached a small fort on the Missouri-Kansas border, flying what appeared to be a Federal flag. They were not Union soldiers.

The men riding under that flag were William Quantrill's guerrillas, roughly four hundred strong, wearing captured Union uniforms. The fort they were approaching was Fort Blair, near the settlement of Baxter Springs, Kansas. Inside, about one hundred soldiers and a small garrison held the post. When Quantrill's men opened fire, the fort's defenders scrambled to resistance. A second Union column, about one hundred men escorting Major General James Blunt and a military brass band, arrived on the road behind Quantrill at almost exactly the same moment.

Blunt mistook the guerrillas ahead of him for Union cavalry out on drill. By the time he understood what was happening, Quantrill's men were already among his column.

What followed was not a battle. It was an execution. Quantrill's raiders shot down every man they could reach, including soldiers trying to surrender, including men already wounded and lying on the prairie. Johnny Fry, who had been the first official westbound rider of the Pony Express just three years earlier, died on that road. Major Henry Curtis, son of a Union general, died there. The military band that had been riding with Blunt was killed almost to a man.

When it was over, more than one hundred Union soldiers and civilians were dead. Blunt, who had managed to escape, would never hold a significant command again. Quantrill and his men rode south into Texas for the winter.

The Baxter Springs Massacre was the bloodiest guerrilla action of the entire Kansas-Missouri border war, a conflict that had been burning since the eighteen fifties, long before Fort Sumter. In Kansas, the war was not about states' rights in the abstract. It was personal, and it was savage, and Baxter Springs was its culmination. A small monument now marks the site on the edge of what has become a quiet Kansas town along the old Route Sixty-Six corridor.