Quantrill's Raids and the Military Road

This was border war country. In the spring of eighteen sixty two, the Confederate guerrilla William Clarke Quantrill raided the little town of Aubry, just east of here. On one March morning his men killed three townsmen, looted the stores, drove off horses, and destroyed whatever they could not carry.

Union soldiers hunting the raiders camped again and again along the old military road running from Fort Leavenworth down to Fort Scott. That road later became Metcalf Avenue. The cycle of raid and retaliation pulled local men into the fighting.

A young Kansas settler named Bill Anderson later rode off to join Quantrill, and would earn a fearsome reputation of his own as Bloody Bill. The worst was still to come the next year, when Quantrill burned Lawrence and killed more than one hundred fifty men and boys.