Battle of the Spurs

The people Brown was guiding north had come out of Missouri with him. On December 20, 1858, he led a raid there that freed 11 enslaved people, took two white men captive and carried off horses and wagons, and the governor of Missouri offered $3,000 for his capture, the reward the posse at Straight Creek hoped to collect. Brown started north on January 20, 1859, with J. H. Kagi and Aaron Dwight Stevens among his men, and the standoff came on January 31. The party went on to Detroit and crossed by ferry into Canada.

What the plaque says

Battle of the Spurs One witness to this event later wrote that it was "no joke" to attack old John Brown. The abolitionist inspired such terror that in January 1859, about 1.5 miles north of here, a U.S. marshal fled at the mere sight of him. Brown, escorting 11 slaves to freedom along the Under- ground Railroad, was discovered in a cabin on Straight Creek. Marshal John Wood hid in a nearby stream crossing with about 35 deputies, while Freestaters marched overnight from Topeka to support Brown. Even with reinforcements Brown's party was outnumbered two to one, but he defiantly ordered his men to ford the creek. "Scarcely had the foremost entered the water," one man recalled, "when the valiant marshal mounted his horse and rode off in haste." Another remembered: "The closer we got to the ford, the farther they got from it." Mocking the posse's retreat, a newspaperman dubbed this the "Battle of the Spurs." Brown and his party reached Iowa unharmed. Erected by the State of Kansas

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Prairie Peoples Park (Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation) — 18 mi
  The Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation's powwow grounds west of Mayetta, on the reservation the band held when most Potawatomi in Kansas took allotments and the promise of citizenship.

More markers nearby

• First REA Project in Kansas — 14 mi
• The Lane Trail — 25 mi
• Battle of Hickory Point — 29 mi