978-1-4222-3326-9

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Lower Plains: Kansas, Nebraska

town down and killed almost 200 peo- ple. The most significant military battle to occur in Kansas was the Battle of Mine Creek. Fought in October 1864, this was one of the largest cavalry bat- tles of the war. It was a decisive loss for the Confederates and one of the last major battles fought west of the Mississippi River. The decades after the Civil War were boom years for Kansas. In 1860, Kansas’s population was just over 100,000. By 1880, the population had reached one million. Most of the set-

successful. Kansas entered the Union as a free state on January 29, 1861, becoming the 34th state. Less than three months later, however, the Civil War broke out. The slavery issue, which had split “Bleeding Kansas” into warring factions, was now tearing apart the nation as a whole. Most of the fighting in Kansas was guerrilla warfare . Deadly raids across the Kansas-Missouri border continued to occur. Once again, the town of Lawrence was a target. On August 21, 1863, confederate guerrillas led by William Clark Quantrill burned the

This drawing, published in a magazine in 1863, shows the attack on Lawrence by Quantrill’s Confederate raiders during the Civil War. Quantrill planned the attack in retaliation for Union attacks on pro-slavery towns in

neighboring Missouri. More than 180 civilians—most of

Lawrence’s adult male popula- tion—were massacred during the raid, and much of the town was burned.