for the arrest—but Coppoc was not to be found. His friends promptly received news of the last requisition. That night, with his stanch friend, Thaddeus Maxson, Barclay was conveyed in a sleigh to Mechanicsville, accompanied by a well armed guard. Coppoc and Maxson took the night train on the Northwestern road for Chicago, where they staid several days with a trusted family of colored friends. They went on to Canada and remained until the Virginia officer left for his home. Learning that his late companions, Owen Brown and F. J. Merriam, were staying in Ashtabula County, Ohio, Barclay and his friend Maxson joined them and the little party staid several weeks at the town of Dorset. They were always well armed and ready to defend themselves day or night.
The young man who so narrowly escaped death the second time, was not to be intimidated by dangers. Barclay Coppoc never ceased his war upon slavery. Early in the summer of 1860 he went to Kansas and aided some Missouri slaves to freedom. When the Civil War began, he hastened to join the Union army and was commissioned Lieutenant in the Fourth Kansas Volunteers, commanded by the gallant Colonel Montgomery of Kansas War Fame. Lieutenant Coppoc was sent to his old home in Iowa to secure recruits. On his return with them he met his death on the 30th day of August, 1861, from the burning of a railroad bridge by Missouri guerillas, precipitating the train he was on eighty feet into the Platte River. A large number were killed and wounded. Lieutenant Coppoc’s body was taken to Leavenworth and buried in Pilot Knob Cemetery. On a soldier’s monument erected at Tipton, near his old home, by the patriotic people of Cedar County, to the memory of its citizen soldiers who gave their lives for their country in the Rebellion, is inscribed the name of Barclay Coppoc.
The Maxson house near Springdale is still standing. Carefully preserved on the wall are the names of John
