Pardee Butler - Famous Episodes

Famous Episodes

Kansas in the 1850s was a territory with strong sentiment on both sides of the slavery issue. Butler obtained a claim to 160 aces of land, twelve miles from Atchison, on the banks of the Stranger Creek. His great-great-grandson farms the land to this day. In June, Butler preached the first sermon in Kansas by a Christian minister.

By the middle of August Butler had built a cabin and stopped in Atchison on his way back to Illinois to fetch his family. It was there that the rafting episode took place on August 18, 1855. In addition to Butler’s first-hand account of the episode in his Recollections, Cutler's History of the State of Kansas discusses the episode in his chapter on the border ruffian warfare.

While in Atchison Butler went to the offices of the Squatter Sovereign to get some extra copies to show his friends in Illinois. Butler was waited on by Robert S. Kelley and took the opportunity to announce his free-state views. Kelley organized a meeting that night and the next day Kelley and his cohorts accosted Butler and demanded he sign a string of resolutions denouncing free State men. He refused. A large crowd gathered. Matters were debated. Eventually ....

a vote was taken upon the mode of punishment which ought to be accorded to him, and to this day it is probably known but to few persons that a decided verdict of death by hanging was rendered; and furthermore, that Mr. Kelley, the teller, by making false returns to the excited mob, save Mr. Butler’s life... the pro-slavery party decided to send Mr. Butler down the Missouri River on a raft.

A raft was constructed of two logs, a flag placed on the end of the raft, Butler ordered to take his place on the raft, and the whole was towed by a skiff to the middle of the Missouri river and set adrift. As the raft departed the bank Butler declaimed:

Gentlemen, if I am drowned I forgive you; but I have this to say to you: If you are not ashamed of your part in this transaction, I am not ashamed of mine. Good-by.

Butler cut off the flag and using the flag staff as a paddle made his way to the Kansas shore. The rafting episode was widely publicized and made clear that “... the country was full of men that were ready to fight.”

The following spring on April 30, 1856 Butler passed through Atchison on his way back to his homestead from more preaching in Illinois. He was spotted by Kelley and was again soon the target of an angry mob who wanted to shoot or hang him. After much discussion a punishment of tarring and feathering substituted. Butler’s account of this episode appeared in several papers of the times.

The passions of which Butler was a victim continued to ferment in Kansas and the rest of the country and soon led to the Civil War.