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[118] home, to be ready for the Missourians when they came. He himself went in a different direction, for the purpose of obtaining further aid. On the night of the 25th of May, the Doyles, Wilkinson, and Sherman were seized, tried, and slain. This act was precipitated by a brutal assault committed during the forenoon on a Free State man at the store of Sherman, in which the Doyles were the principal and most ruffianly participators. These wretches, on the same day, called at the houses of the Browns; and, both in words and by acts, offered the grossest indignities to a daughter and daughter-in-law of the old man. As they went away, they said, “Tell your men that if they don't leave right off, we'll come back to-morrow and kill them.” They added, in language too gross for publication, that the women would then suffer still worse indignities. What redress could the husbands of these women have received, had they asked the protection of the law? They would have been obliged to seek it from Wilkinson, one of these ruffians, who was the magistrate of the Pottawattomie District! This instance had hundreds of parallels. I do not know whether New England people will be able to vindicate the summary punishment inflicted on these wretches; but I do know that nearly every Free State man then in Kansas, when he came to know the cause, privately endorsed it as a righteous act, although many of them, “to save the party,” publicly repudiated and condemned it. These facts I derived from two squatters who aided
Thayer and Eldridge, 1860.
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