The Baxter Springs Massacre

On October sixth, eighteen sixty-three, one of the Civil War's most brutal guerrilla ambushes unfolded on this ground near Baxter Springs, Kansas. Union General James Blunt was escorting a party of roughly one hundred men, including musicians, clerks, and soldiers, toward his new headquarters. William Quantrill, the notorious Confederate irregular, had been camped nearby with several hundred raiders.

When Quantrill's men disguised themselves in captured Union uniforms and swept in from the south, the small escort was caught completely off guard. More than one hundred ten Union soldiers and civilians were killed, many of them executed after surrendering. Blunt himself escaped only by riding hard from the field.

The attack came about six weeks after Quantrill's massacre at Lawrence, Kansas, and cemented his reputation as the most feared guerrilla leader on the western border. A small fort and cemetery here mark the site of that terrible October morning.