The so-called Battle of the Spurs took place about 7 miles (11 km) north of Holton, Kansas, near Netawaka, Kansas, on January 31, 1859. Abolitionist John Brown, together with J. Kagi and Aaron Dwight Stevens, was escorting a group of 11 escaped slaves from the slave state of Missouri to freedom in Iowa.
The Mexican-American War (1846–1848) grew from the annexation of Texas (1845) and a disputed border between Texas and Mexico at the Rio Grande. President James K. Polk ordered US troops under General Zachary Taylor into the contested zone; after a skirmish that killed American soldiers, Congress declared war in May 1846. US forces won a series of engagements — Palo Alto, Monterrey, Buena Vista — before General Winfield Scott led an amphibious landing at Veracruz and an overland campaign to Mexico City, which fell in September 1847. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (February 1848) transferred California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming to the United States in exchange for $15 million and assumption of $3.25 million in claims — roughly 525,000 square miles, a 67 percent expansion of US territory. The war's outcome immediately reopened the slavery question: the Wilmot Proviso, debated throughout the war, proposed banning slavery from any territory acquired from Mexico, foreshadowing the sectional crisis of the 1850s.
Minor; no confirmed deaths
Content adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Wikipedia source.
Aubrey generates in-depth historical research for any location in the US, drawing on NRHP records, battlefield archives, census history and geological data to tell the full story of a place.