A SQUATTER'S IMPROVEMENTS.
Missourians began the settlement of Kansas. June, 1854, Leavenworth[2] was laid out two miles below the fort of that name. Another town was also begun twenty-five miles farther up the Missouri, and named for Senator Atchison[3] of Missouri. These two, with St. Joseph on the north and Kansas City on the south, not only controlled all the river-front of Kansas, but the roads leading into it as well, as St. Joseph and Kansas City were the established starting-points for crossing the plains, from which the great overland routes diverged. Missouri settlers also shortly began a third town, in the Kansas Valley, to which they gave the name of Lecompton,[4] and soon made it the capital of the Territory.
Thus the North entered the conflict to obtain control of Kansas under every disadvantage which remoteness, prior occupation, or unyielding determination to exclude all who did not favor slavery, could bring into it.
STREET, KANSAS CITY, 1857.
New England was the focus of anti-slavery thought and action, to which the rest of the North undoubtedly looked for leadership. It was, therefore, in New England that active steps for throwing free-State settlers into Kansas first originated. This was effected through an association known as the New-England Emigrant Aid Company,[5] which was the parent or forerunner of many similar ones subsequently organized throughout the free States. The New-England Company acted with much method. It formed little colonies which were put under competent leaders, were furnished with farming-tools, and even took out saw-mills for the making of new settlements. Some colonists took their families along with them, but most of the first comers were single men whom the desire to see Kansas a free State, rather than a thoughtless spirit of adventure, took from the orderly communities of the Far East. To this work they confidently went forth accompanied by the prayers and good wishes of their friends and neighbors, though as little used to the rude encounter with border men and border life as the two kinds of civilization each presented in itself were removed one from the other.
LAWRENCE, KANSAS.