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Where It Is and How It Began
Marmaton sits on the Marmaton River in Bourbon County, Kansas, about seven miles west and north of Fort Scott — the federal garrison whose presence shaped everything that happened in this corner of Kansas in the 1850s and 1860s. The town was organized in 1858 and quickly became the first county seat of Bourbon County, an honour it would hold only a year before Fort Scott took the designation back. It was a town born in the particular chaos of Bleeding Kansas, in the years when Missouri and Kansas were fighting each other's settlers by proxy and the ground between them was the most dangerous borderland in North America.
Fort Scott itself was the organizing fact of the entire district. The United States Army had established the fort in 1842 to manage the Indian reservations just west of the Missouri state line, and when the reservations were dissolved and the land opened for settlement after 1855, the fort became the centre of a new civilian county that took shape almost overnight. Settlers came from both the North and the South — free-soil emigrants from New England and the upper Midwest, determined to make Kansas a free state, and pro-slavery settlers from Missouri, equally determined to make it the opposite. They arrived at the same time, on the same ground, with irreconcilable intentions. The violence that followed was not incidental to the settlement of Bourbon County. It was the settlement of Bourbon County.
Bleeding Kansas on the Marmaton
The border war that newspapers called Bleeding Kansas was, in Bourbon County, intensely local. The men doing the raiding and the burning and the occasional killing were not distant armies — they were neighbours, or near enough to it, men who knew the roads and the river crossings and which farms had horses worth taking. Pro-slavery forces from Missouri crossed into Kansas to vote in fraudulent territorial elections, to intimidate free-soil settlers, and to burn the homesteads of men who had voted wrong. Free-soil settlers from Kansas crossed into Missouri to do much the same, sometimes in retaliation, sometimes in preemption.
Marmaton, sitting three miles west of the Missouri line, was in the middle of all of it. The families who settled there in 1858 were choosing to live in contested country, and they knew it. Some had come precisely because they had strong opinions about Kansas statehood and were willing to fight for them. Others had come simply because land was available and opportunity was the word being used to describe it, and found themselves caught in a political crisis that had no safe position. Fort Scott, seven miles east, was theoretically a Federal presence that provided some security. In practice the fort's garrison was too small and too distracted to stop the raids that came across the Missouri line whenever the temperature of the border war rose.
The Marmaton Massacre, October 1864
By October 1864, the formal Civil War had been going for three years, and the border country had been living through its own version of it since before Fort Sumter. The Confederate guerrilla forces that operated in southwest Missouri — men under commanders like Allen Matthews, operating outside the formal Confederate military structure but loosely coordinated with it — had been raiding into Kansas for years. What happened at Marmaton on the night of October 22, 1864, was one of those raids reaching its most violent conclusion.
Around sixty men from Newton County, Missouri, came into Marmaton without warning, moving off the main roads to avoid detection. They burned two stores, a dwelling house, and the Methodist Church that stood at the centre of the community's civic life. Ten men of Marmaton were taken prisoner, marched outside of town, and lined up to be executed. Six were shot dead. Four escaped into the surrounding darkness. It was not a battle — it was a massacre of civilians by an armed force that had left the road to find an undefended town and do exactly what it intended to do.
The aftermath was swift and complete. The guerrillas fled westward into the Cherokee and Osage territories, expecting refuge. Instead, the Osage refused them passage and attacked. In the fighting that followed, Allen Matthews, Major Courcey, and every man in the raiding party died. Three days later, on October 25th, Union forces decisively defeated Confederate General Sterling Price at the Battle of Mine Creek, forty miles to the north. Price's Kansas raid — the last serious Confederate offensive in the trans-Mississippi West — was broken. The war in this part of the country was effectively over.
For the families of Marmaton, the massacre had come at the end of three years of increasing violence, and its aftermath — the burning, the dead neighbors, the destroyed church — was absorbed into the particular silence that communities use to hold grief they cannot yet process. The Fosters, who had rented the Parly Foster place three miles west of Marmaton after fleeing Missouri in 1862, were living within hearing distance when the guerrillas came. Andrew had enlisted two years earlier. His mother and father and younger brother Francis were among the civilian population who lived through that brutal night.
The 1865 Kansas State Census captures the household in its aftermath with a spare clarity. Garrett Foster — Jarrett's name as it was often spelled — appears at age sixty-nine, still listed as a farmer. Dorcas is sixty-two, keeping house. A.J. Foster, twenty-two, carries beside his name the notation "2nd Kansas Battery" — still in uniform in the months before his August discharge, counted among the household as though he had never left it. Marion, nineteen, is home. Immediately following the Foster entry on that same census page: the family of Elisha Hornbeck, almost certainly connected to the Hornback family that Martha Foster would marry into — the frontier assembling its futures in the margins of government forms.
Fort Scott and Its Relationship to Marmaton
Fort Scott was Marmaton's big neighbour, and the relationship between them was the relationship between a county seat and an outlying settlement — the kind of thing that runs on commerce and rivalry in roughly equal measure. Fort Scott had the garrison, the court, the federal contracts, and the institutional gravity that determined which town in a new Kansas county was going to become permanent and which was going to be temporary. Marmaton had briefly been county seat itself, in 1859, but Fort Scott took that back, and the town settled into being what it always more naturally was: a river-crossing community on the Marmaton, serving the farms on either side of it.
The road between Fort Scott and Marmaton was one of the routes that supply trains used moving south toward the Indian Territory — a road that Confederate guerrillas targeted and Union escorts travelled. It was a road that made Marmaton a waypoint, and waypoints in contested country are always dangerous. After the massacre and the end of the war, Fort Scott grew into a proper Kansas city — the county seat, the railroad hub, the commercial centre that turned Bourbon County from a border battleground into a farming district. Marmaton receded. It is now a small community on the Marmaton River, its history largely preserved in the historical marker at the massacre site and in the memory of the families who descend from those who lived through 1864.
Marmaton Today
Marmaton is small — a community of a few dozen people on the Kansas plains, its name still attached to the river and the township that bear it. The historical marker commemorating the 1864 massacre stands at the site where the six men were killed. Fort Scott, seven miles east, operates as one of the most completely preserved frontier forts in the country, a National Historic Site maintained by the National Park Service, its 1840s buildings giving visitors an unusually direct encounter with the fort as it actually was. Bourbon County farmers still work the same bottomland along the Marmaton River that the first settlers broke in 1858, and the river still runs westward to its confluence with the Little Osage, indifferent to the weight of what happened along its banks.
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