Baxter Springs

On October 6, 1863, a small but brutal clash unfolded near what is now Baxter Springs, Kansas, an engagement remembered as the Baxter Springs Massacre rather than by its formal name, the Battle of Baxter Springs. William Quantrill commanded a sizable force of pro-Confederate bushwhackers, roughly 400 strong, known as Quantrill's Raiders. That autumn they were moving south through Kansas on the Texas Road, heading toward winter quarters in Texas. Along the way they seized and killed two Union teamsters who had set out from a modest Federal outpost, Fort Baxter, also known by many as Fort Blair. The raiders then launched an assault against this fort, only to be driven back and forced onto the open prairie. There they turned on a separate Union column, striking it with such force that almost no one in that unit lived through the encounter.

Fight at the fort

Splitting his command in two, Quantrill assigned himself one column while placing David Poole, a subordinate, in charge of the other, with Fort Baxter as their target. Poole's men moved down the Texas Road and ran into a group of Union soldiers, the majority of them African American. A running fight ensued, with Poole's men killing several of the troops before the survivors made it to the safety of Fort Baxter, a structure built of earth and logs. Roughly 25 cavalrymen and between 65 and 70 infantrymen of the United States Colored Troops held the post.

When Poole's men assaulted the fort itself, the defenders managed to repel them. Leading that defense was First Lieutenant James Burton Pond, whose actions that day earned him the Medal of Honor. His citation states that on October 6, 1863, serving with Company C of the 3d Wisconsin Cavalry at Baxter Springs, Kansas, Pond commanded two cavalry companies when guerrillas several times his strength caught him by surprise. He rallied his men regardless, pushed the attackers back beyond the fortifications after a hard fight, then went outside the works by himself and fired a howitzer three separate times, an act that threw the enemy into disorder and forced their withdrawal.

Credit for keeping the flag flying over the fort belongs in part to the 2nd Kansas Colored Infantry, whose members helped steady the federal defenders during the engagement.

Aftermath

Blunt lost his command in the wake of his failure to protect the column, though his removal proved short lived and he returned to duty before long. Those loyal to the Union branded the killings a massacre, and the clash at Baxter Springs stood as a grim example of the brutal border warfare that plagued Kansas and Missouri. Reinforcements arrived at Fort Baxter for a time, yet as 1863 drew to a close, the Union Army withdrew its men to the more heavily fortified Fort Scott. U.S. forces did not simply walk away from the fort; they tore it down first, stripping it of anything usable so the enemy could not turn it to their own purposes. Quantrill and Anderson kept clashing over how the fighting along the Kansas-Missouri border should be waged, and by 1864 their disagreement led them to divide their forces, confining the bushwhackers to operations within Missouri alone.

In the years that followed, Baxter Springs grew into the earliest cattle town Kansas had known, serving as a stop along the route cattle drives took toward markets and rail lines to the north. Its population had climbed to roughly 5,000 by 1875.