November 2024

There were some incredible moments in the Tom-Tom rivalry football game between the Paola Panthers and the Osawatomie Trojans.Paola and Osawatomie met on the gridiron 94 times from 1920 to 2013.Drums were made for each team as trophies to honor the Indian heritage of both communities.

The main motivation for the guerrilla war that earned Kansas Territory the nickname “Bleeding Kansas” was politics.The pressing issue of 1854 was whether slavery should spread into the new territories of the West, and Kansas Territory proved to be the stage on which the violent political drama was primarily played out.The end goal of both pro- and anti-slavery militants was to either intimidate voters to vote for or against Kansas entering the Union as a slave state or expel any voter from Kansas Territory that was determined to vote for the opposite of how the militants on both sides of the slavery issue wanted to see come to pass in Kansas.Both pro- and anti-slavery guerillas used the same strategy and tactics, and both sides of the issue were equally violent and destructive in their effort to intimidate voters into voting for their desired outcome.There is a temptation to try to find a “good guy” and “bad guy” on this front in regard to the violence, thievery and destruction that was wrought by guerillas of both sides of the slavery issue during “Bleeding Kansas.” But, realistically, both sides of the issue had equal amounts of blood on their hands when it came to employing violence and other forms of immoral behaviors to intimidate voters who were either neutral or were pro- or anti-slavery.A frightening reality of the guerrilla war over slavery in Kansas Territory was that it was often neighbor versus neighbor.