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inflexible purpose. Every energy of this remarkable man was henceforth concentrated upon the work that he religiously believed he was ordained to accomplish. During his career in Kansas Brown made the acquaintance of many courageous young men, who recognized in him a leader, able, tireless and fearless. Some of them served with him in the Kansas War and several of them enlisted in his desperate raid at Harper’s Ferry. John Brown made five trips through Iowa while he was engaged in the Kansas conflict. He learned the location of many of the stations on the “Underground Railroad,” and met many Iowa men who were aiding fugitive slaves on the way to freedom.
In 1856, Richard J. Hinton (author of “John Brown and His Men”), with a band of young men on their way to Kansas, marched from Iowa City. They took with them from the arsenal 1,500 muskets. The key had been left on Governor Grimes’s desk, where Hinton found and “borrowed” it to open the arsenal door. When they reached Kansas, Rev. Pardee Butler took charge of the muskets and delivered them to the Free State leaders. Mr. Butler was a well-known Christian minister from Posten’s Grove, Iowa, who had settled in Kansas in 1854. He was an active and influential Free State leader and had lately been seized by a band of forty armed “Border Ruffians” at Atchison, placed upon a rude raft made of three logs and sent adrift on the Missouri River. His face was painted black and he was warned that if he ever returned he would be killed. But Pardee Butler was not to be intimidated and, managing to reach the shore some miles down the river, he returned home and never ceased his work of making Kansas a free State. George B. Gill, Barclay Coppoe, Jeremiah G. Anderson and Charles P. Moffett, all young men from Iowa, took an active part in the Kansas War. Some of them served under John Brown, in Kansas, and all enlisted in his Harper’s Ferry expedition.
