Bleeding Kansas at Fort Scott: Two Hotels, Two Sides, 1854–1861

Fort Scott is the only National Park Service site that was directly caught up in "Bleeding Kansas" — the years when the fight over slavery in the West turned the territory into a battleground.

Who decides: the Kansas-Nebraska Act

The young nation was split over whether slavery would spread into the new western territories. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 created Kansas and Nebraska Territories, opened them to settlement and left it to the settlers' popular vote whether each would become a free or slave state. People on both sides poured into Kansas to tip the vote.

Three camps

The quarrel soon became violent — killing, destruction and intimidation that gave the era its name.

A town and its countryside at odds

In 1855 the fort's buildings were sold at auction and became the new town. The townspeople were mostly proslavery; the farms around them were mostly free-state and abolitionist. The split was visible on the old fort's square itself, where two hotels faced each other:

Montgomery and his raiders attack Fort Scott Keith Rocco, artist.  NPS owns rights.

Raids

By 1858 the hard-liners of both sides had converged on the area. James Montgomery, a committed abolitionist, led free-state forces in raids on Fort Scott, a refuge for Border Ruffians — the most extreme proslavery men.

• In one raid Montgomery tried to burn the Western Hotel.
• Another raid killed John Little, a former deputy marshal.

Soldiers came back to Fort Scott again and again to restore order. Each time they stayed until the violence died down — and each time it started again once they left.

How it ended

By the time the strife faded in 1859, nearly 60 people had been killed and hundreds terrorized across Kansas Territory. The antislavery side won: Kansas joined the Union as a free state on January 29, 1861. By then, the violence that had been contained in Kansas was about to engulf the whole country.

Bleeding Kansas, a segment of the site's film Fort Scott Movie — Dreams and Dilemmas. NPS film.

Sources

Based on "Growing Pains — Kansas in Chaos," Fort Scott National Historic Site, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Pictures an earlier version of this page left out were restored on 2026-09-26. The Park Service's film, lost when the page was imported, is restored from its page (2026-09-27).