The die was cast: John Brown left for Kansas. Instead of sending the money and arms, says his son John, “he came on with them himself, accompanied by his brother-in-law, Henry Thompson, and my brother Oliver. In Iowa he bought a horse and covered wagon; concealing the arms in this and conspicuously displaying his surveying implements, he crossed into Missouri near Waverly, and at that place disinterred the body of his grandson, and brought all safely through to our settlement, arriving there about the 6th of October, 1855.[14]”
Chapter Twelve
An Avenging Angel brings the fury of the storm
“Did you go out under the auspices of the Emigrant Aid Society?” they asked John Brown at the trial four years after.
“No, sir,” he answered grimly, “I went out under the auspices of John Brown, directed by God.”
The settlement was a romantic place. Red men gliding by in their swift canoes had seen stately birds in the reedy lowlands of eastern Kansas and called the marsh the “swamp of the swan.” Here, on the good lands that rose up from the dark sluggish rivers, John Brown and his youngest son, Oliver, drove into the Brown colony.
“We found our folks in a most uncomfortable situation, with no houses to shelter one of them, no hay or corn fodder of any account secured, shivering over their little fires, all exposed to the dreadful cutting winds, morning, evening and stormy days.”
On November 23, 1855, Brown wrote to his wife:
“We have got both families so sheltered that they need not suffer hereafter; have got part of the hay secured, made some progress in preparation to build a house for John and Owen; and Salmon has caught a prairie wolf in a steel trap. We continue to have a good deal of stormy weather—rains with severe winds, and forming into ice as they fall, together with cold nights that freeze the ground considerably. Still God has not forsaken us.”[15] He did not tell her he had been down with fever.