Trading Post, Kansas

The tiny community of Trading Post gave its name to two of the most violent episodes in Kansas history, separated by six years. On May nineteenth, eighteen fifty-eight, a proslavery raider named Charles Hamilton marched eleven free-state settlers from near here into a ravine and shot them. Five died; five survived by feigning death.

It was the bloodiest episode of the Bleeding Kansas period and prompted John Greenleaf Whittier's elegy and John Brown's fortification of the area that summer. Six years later, on October twenty-fifth, eighteen sixty-four, Confederate General Sterling Price's retreat from Westport brought his rear guard back through this same area. Union cavalry under Colonels Benteen and Philips struck them here at the Marais des Cygnes crossing, capturing a hundred men and two cannon, before driving south to the larger rout at Mine Creek.

The original trading post itself dated to the eighteen forties, a fur-trade stop established at the Marais des Cygnes River crossing.