The Marais des Cygnes massacre is perpetrated…
May 1858 CE
The Marais des Cygnes massacre is perpetrated by pro-slavery forces, in Bleeding Kansas, on May 19, 1958.
A free-soil leader had ridden into Trading Post, a rendezvous for a proslavery gang, in early 1858, and—so the story goes—cleaned out the gang's headquarters by dumping several barrels of corn whiskey into the road, then notifies the proslavery people to leave the territory.
One of the proslavery leaders, Georgia-born Charles Hamilton, had come to the border area in 1855 to help make Kansas Territory a slave state.
After the forced departure of Hamilton and his friends, he reportedly sent word to other proslavery sympathizers “to come out of the territory at once, as we are coming up there to kill snakes, and will treat all we find there as snakes.”
Some thirty men under Hamilton's leadership cross into Kansas on May 19, 1858, arrive at Trading Post in the morning, then return toward Missouri, capturing along the way eleven unarmed free-state men, most of whom are former neighbors of Hamilton.
Hurried along and into a shallow defile surrounded by the mounds that characterize the area, they are herded into line as Hamilton's riders form another line on the side of the ravine.
Hamilton’s initial shot is followed by a volley from his men; he then dismounts his firing squad to finish the job with pistols.
Hamilton and his gang depart swiftly for Missouri, leaving five of the free-state men dead in the place known as Le Marais du Cygne. (One of the gang, William Griffith of Bates County, Missouri, will be arrested for the crime in the spring of 1863 and hanged on October 30. Hamilton will return to Georgia, where he will die in 1880.)
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