Olathe and the Border Wars

The word Olathe comes from the Shawnee language and is understood to mean beautiful. In eighteen fifty-seven, when Dr. John T. Barton and his associates staked out this town at the geographical center of Johnson County on the Santa Fe Trail, they chose a name that suggested peace. What followed was anything but.

Olathe was founded in the middle of Bleeding Kansas, the years of guerrilla violence between pro-slavery and free-state settlers that preceded the Civil War by nearly a decade. The town attracted abolitionists and free-state settlers, which made it a target.

Just after midnight on September seventh, eighteen sixty-two, a band of about one hundred forty Confederate guerrillas under William Clarke Quantrill rode into Olathe. Quantrill's Raiders were the most feared irregular force on the western border, a coalition that included future outlaws Frank James and Cole Younger. They killed several men including two brothers who had just enlisted in the Kansas militia, held the remaining townspeople in the public square at gunpoint, and looted homes and businesses for hours before riding back into Missouri.

Olathe recovered. The Santa Fe Trail that ran through it had made the town commercially essential, and commerce proved more durable than terror. By the time Kansas achieved statehood in eighteen sixty-one, the year before the raid, Olathe had already been incorporated twice, because the legal chaos of Bleeding Kansas had disrupted the first attempt.

Today Olathe is the fourth-largest city in Kansas. The James B. Mahaffie farmstead, completed in eighteen sixty-five, still stands here. It was the first stagecoach stop west of Westport on the Santa Fe Trail, and it offers a direct material link to the violent, hopeful years when settlers were gambling everything on which way Kansas would fall.