AUGUST 21, 1863:
William
“Bloody Bill” Quantrill and 400 bushwhackers destroy Lawrence, Kansas. After
burning and pillaging the town, and raping any number of women, the
bushwhackers assembled approximately 200 male residents of the town, aged 12
and up, and killed them en masse. The
raid had been carefully planned; Quantrill had a list of names of men he
intended to target. Chief among them was Senator James Lane, leader of the
“Redlegs”, who had carried out a bloody raid on Osceola, Missouri in 1861, that
cost 2,500 lives. Lane was not in Lawrence that night. Another, more recent,
motivation was the death of Quantrill’s younger sister, Josephine, in the
collapse of the Kansas City Women’s Jail on August 13th. Most of
Quantrill’s “men” were teenaged boys aged 15-19, who showed no quarter. A great
many of them who survived the war, like the Younger brothers and the James
brothers, went on to be the storied outlaws of the Old West.
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