In the days when Kansas was the battle-ground between those men who upheld negro slavery, and those who attacked it, a man named John Brown went from the east to that territory. Several of his sons had already gone into Kansas, and had sent him glowing accounts of it. Many New England families were moving west by 1855, and building homes for themselves on the splendid rolling prairies across the Mississippi. John Brown, however, went with another purpose. The years had built up in him such a hatred for negro slavery that it filled his whole thoughts. Kansas was the field where slave-owners and abolitionists, or those who opposed slavery, were to fight for the balance of power. Therefore he went to Kansas and made his home in the lowlands along the eastern border, near a region that the Indians had named the Swamp of the Swan. There were a great many men in Kansas at that time who had no real convictions in regard to slavery, and to whom the question was one of politics, and not of religion, as it was to John Brown. Those were days of warfare on the border, and men from the south and the north were constantly clashing, fighting for the upper hand in the government, and taking every possible advantage of each other. Five of John Brown's sons had already settled in Kansas when he came there with a sick son and a son-in-law. Early in October, 1855, they reached the home of the pioneers. They found the houses very primitive, small log shanties, the walls plastered with mud. The father joined his boys in getting in their hay, and set traps in the woods to secure game for food. But trouble was brewing in the town of Lawrence, which was the leading city of Kansas. Word come to the Swamp of the Swan that men who favored slavery were marching on the town, intending to drive out the free-state Northerners there. This was a direct call to John Brown to take the field. His family set to work preparing corn bread and meat, blankets and cooking utensils, running bullets, and loading guns. Then five of the men set out for Lawrence, which was reached at the end of a twenty-four hours' march. The town of Lawrence, a collection of many rude log houses, was filled with crowds of excited men and women. John Brown, looking like a patriarch with his long hair and beard, arrived at sundown, accompanied by his stalwart sons armed with guns and pistols. He was at once put in charge of a company, and set to work fortifying the town with earthworks, and preparing for a battle. In a day or two, however, an agreement was reached between the free-state and the slave-state parties, and immediate danger of warfare disappeared. Satisfied with this outcome, Brown and his sons took to the road again, and marched back to their home. There they stayed during the next winter. In the cold of the long ice-bound months, the passions of men lay dormant. But with the coming of spring the old feud smouldered afresh.