CHAPTER XXVI.

The men that had settled in Kansas were generally poor, and few had any reserved fund from which to draw their support, but were literally dependent for their daily bread on their labor day by day; and to take away the horses of such a man was literally to take the bread out of the mouths of his children.  Free State men and Pro-slavery men had each in turn been thus despoiled and compelled to flee the Territory; or if they remained they were paralyzed and unfitted for work.

But the spring and summer of 1857 had brought a new order of things.  Gov.  Geary had put an end to these disorders, and the presence of S. C. Pomeroy and other Free State men in Atchison was an additional guarantee of peace and security.  As a result the Kansas squatters had gone to work with a will.  Old things had passed away, and all things had become new.  There did indeed remain a chronic state of disorder in Southeastern Kansas; but this was local and exceptional.

But religious and thoughtful men looked far beyond this question of what shall we eat and what shall we drink, and wherewithal shall we be clothed?  Intemperate habits were growing fast on the people.  Coarse profanity and ribald speech were becoming so common as to be the rule and not the exception.  Fathers and mothers began to tremble when they thought what their boys were coming to; and this turned their thoughts to the question of schools and churches.  Then all the denominations simultaneously began their work.  A church was organized at Leavenworth by our brethren, in which S. A. Marshall and W. S. Yohe were the leading members.  Dr. Marshall had formerly been a resident of Pennsylvania, and W. S. Yohe was from the South, a slave-holder, a man of considerable wealth, and of eminent personal excellence.

The church that had been built up in 1855 at Mt.  Pleasant had fallen to pieces in the troublous times, and was now reorganized at what has come to be known as “The Old Union School House,” a place that has been hallowed to precious memories, because of the great revival that took place under the labors of D. S. Burnett in the year 1858.

The brethren that lived along the valley of the Stranger Creek and its tributaries, and that had met to worship two years before under the spreading elms that lined its bottoms, now organized themselves into a church at a village called Pardee.  This ambitious little town was located on the high prairie; but it shared the fate of many other Kansas towns, equally aspiring and equally ill-fated.  When the railroads were built they followed the courses of the streams, and it was left out in the cold; but for a time it was the center of social, political and religious influence in the county outside of Atchison.