He lived to see the overthrow of the slave power, which he hated with all the intensity of his nature.  He also witnessed the revolution in Kansas as to the liquor power.  The files of the Champion for the spring of 1885, have an account of a notable meeting in the court-house at Atchison of the friends of law and order.  The friends of the saloon, for nearly five years after prohibition was the law of the State, had ignored the law, and challenged its enforcement.  This convention was the first general gathering of the citizens of Atchison County to protest against this lawlessness, and demanded that the officers of the law close the saloons.  Pardee Butler was one of the leading spirits in the convention.  Many will recall his fiery speech of that day.  He spoke of the thirty years of his life in Kansas, and of the great events that had happened.  He then denounced the actual rebellion then in existence, and called for its suppression.  That convention was the beginning of the end of the downfall of the organized saloon power in Atchison.

Pardee Butler was in sympathy with good men in every good cause.  While a born controversialist, and strong in his convictions, he was glad to work with Christians of any name in building up the kingdom of God in the world.  He identified himself heartily with the Sunday-school work, and was anxious that everything should be done for children and youth, not only to make them believers, but good men and good citizens.  I agree heartily with what Noble Prentis has recently said of him:  “We knew him well in his later years; a brave and earnest man; full of ideas for making this world better, and confident that they would succeed.  He has gone to the company of those who, on every field for these hundreds of years, where the battle for the sacred rights of man was to be fought out, have cried, ’O Lord, make bare thine arm!’ and have bared their own.”

MANHATTAN, KAN., October 26, 1888.

Footnotes: 

[1] When they were making the raft father noticed that one of the logs was sound and the other rotten.  They fastened them together by nailing shakes—­shingles—­from one to the other.  Some one remarked that the nails would pull out the first time the raft struck a snag.  Then they said they would drive in long wooden pins.  But father noticed that the long pins were driven into the sound log, while the ends on the rotten log were only fastened by the nails.

One of the logs of which the raft was made was much longer than the other, and on the end of the longer log they put the flag.  And over the rough swift current father walked the dizzy length of that single log and took down the flag.  Mother still keeps that flag as a precious relic.  Several years ago one of the men engaged in that mob ran for office in Northern Kansas.  His opponent borrowed the flag, to use in the campaign, and returned it in good order.  But we have since learned that he had several copies of it painted, and that one of them is now in the rooms of the Kansas Historical Society, in the showcase with John Brown’s cap, and is shown as the veritable flag that was on Pardee Butler’s raft.