T. H. Gladstone, The Englishman in Kansas, pp.
41- 42.
It was on that night that I first came in contact with the Missourian patriots.
I had just arrived in Kansas City, and shall never forget the appearance of
the lawless mob that poured into the place, inflamed with drink, loaded with
the indulgence of the vilest passions, displaying with loud boasts the "plunder"
they had taken from the inhabitants, and thirsting for the opportunity of repeating
the sack of Lawrence in some other offending place. Men, for the most part of
large frame, with red flannel shirts and immense boots worn outside their trousers,
their faces unwashed and unshaven, still reeking with the dust and smoke of
Lawrence, wearing the most savage looks, and giving utterance to the most horrible
imprecations and blasphemies; armed, moreover, to the teeth with rifles and
revolvers, cutlasses and bowie knives, -- such were the men I saw around me.
Some displayed a grotesque intermixture in their dress, having crossed their
native red rough shirt with the satin vest or narrow dress-coat pillaged from
the wardrobe of some Lawrence Yankee, or having girded themselves with the cords
and tassels which the day before had ornamented the curtains of the Free State
Hotel. Looking around these groups of drunken, billowing, blood-thirsty demons,
who crowded around the bar of the hotel, shouting for drink, or vented their
furious noise on the levy without, I felt that all my former experiences of
border men and Missourians bore faint comparison with the spectacle presented
by this wretched crew, who appeared only the more terrifying from the darkness
of the surrounding night. The hotel in Kansas City, where we were, was the next,
they said, that should fall; the attack was being planned that night, and such,
they declared, should be the end of every place which was built by free state
men, or that harbored "those rascally abolitionists." Happily this
threat was not fulfilled.