A day or two before the election the whole Missouri border was astir. Horses were saddled, teams harnessed, wagons loaded with tents, forage, and provisions, bowie-knives buckled on, revolvers and rifles loaded, and flags and inscriptions flung to the breeze by the more demonstrative and daring. Crossing the river-ferries from the upper counties, and passing unobstructed over the State line by the prairie- roads and trails from the lower, many of them camped that night at the nearest polls, while others pushed on fifty or a hundred miles to the sparsely settled election districts of the interior. As they passed along, the more scrupulous went through the empty form of an imaginary settlement, by nailing a card to a tree, driving a stake into the ground, or inscribing their names in a claim register, prepared in haste by the invading party. The indifferent satisfied themselves with mere mental resolves to become settlers. The utterly reckless silenced all scruples in profanity and drunkenness. [Sidenote: Nov. 29, 1854.] On election morning the few real squatters of Kansas, endowed with Douglas's delusive boon of "popular sovereignty," witnessed with mixed indignation and terror acts of summary usurpation. Judges of election were dispossessed and set aside by intimidation or stratagem, and pro- slavery judges substituted without the slightest regard to regularity or law; judges' and voters' oaths were declared unnecessary, or explained away upon newly-invented phrases and absurd subtleties. "Where there's a will, there's a way," in wrong and crime, as well as in honest purpose and deed; and by more dishonest devices than we can stop fully to record the ballot-boxes were filled, through invasion, false swearing, riot, and usurpation, with ballots for Whitfield, the pro-slavery candidate for delegate to Congress, at nine out of the seventeen polling places--showing, upon a careful scrutiny afterwards made by a committee of Congress, an aggregate of 1729 illegal votes, and only 1114 legal ones. This mockery of an election completed, the valiant Knights of the Blue Lodge, the fraternal members of the Social Band, the philanthropic groups of the Friends' Society, and the chivalric Sons of the South returned to their axe and plow, society lodge and bar-room haunt, to exult in a victory for Missouri and slavery over the "Abolition hordes and nigger thieves of the Emigrant Aid Society." The "Border Ruffians" of Missouri had written their preliminary chapter in the annals of Kansas. The published statements of the Emigrant Aid Society show that up to the date of election it had sent only a few hundred men, women, and children to the Territory. Why such a prodigious effort was deemed necessary to overcome the votes and influence of this paltry handful of "paupers who had sold themselves to Eli Thayer and Co." was never explained. CHAPTER XXIII THE BOGUS LAWS