From the Lawrence Daily Journal-World for Aug. 21, 1911:

“Forty-eight years ago Lawrence experienced the most trying day in the history of this city when William Clark Quantrill with his band of blood-thirsty guerillas rode into the town at sunrise and left it a few hours later a mass of smoking embers and with a large number of her citizens murdered and the bodies lying about the streets. Only the day before Lawrence was a thriving little frontier town, 9 years old, and the most important of the free or anti-slavery towns in the west, but it took this band of murderers and robbers but a couple of short hours to destroy all of this that had taken so long to build up. Lawrence had long been active in the anti-slavery cause and had been the refuge of a band of free-booters who, sheltered by the Union cause, had made repeated raids into the Missouri towns, pillaging them and bringing back horses and cattle to Lawrence, where they were often sold at auction. This band was known as the ‘Red Legs,’ and it is probably due to their work that Lawrence was destroyed…. It will perhaps never be known just how many of the citizens lost their lives on that day, but it is generally conceded that the number is about 180. Quantrill lost but one man, who was apprehended by a small band of farmers, brought into the city and shot; later he was tied to a horse and the body dragged about the streets of the town. The rest escaped back into Missouri and it is said that about 80 of them are still living. Their leader, himself, has been lost track of. There are wild rumors that he is still alive, but this is not generally believed…. What Quantrill did was so brutal that he has stood forth in history as the arch fiend. No poetry has been written about him, no effort made to give him any heroic qualities. He is simply a devil…. It is a day to mourn for the dead. It is a sorrowful anniversary day, one that brings no pleasant thoughts even after the lapse of nearly half a century.”