Record Data
Source citation
Sara Tappan Doolittle Lawrence Robinson, Diary of Sara Tappan Doolittle Lawrence Robinson, January 23, 1856, Kansas: Its Interior and Exterior Life, 4th edition, Boston, MA: Crosby, Nichols & Company, 1856, p. 366.
Type
Diary
Date Certainty
Exact
Transcriber
Michael Blake
Transcription date
Transcription
The following text is presented here in complete form, as it originally appeared in print. Spelling and typographical errors have been preserved as in the original.
-- More messengers are in from Easton; men driven from their homes upon peril of their lives, and with continued threats of violence. They come to Lawrence, as to a city of refuge. Mr. Sparks is now in peril from bands of armed Missourians. Some twenty-five men go up from here and Topeka. One man, who came down to notify the people here, escaped from a band of twelve men in hot pursuit, -- something after Gen. Putnam's mode, of revolutionary memory, -- by leaping over a precipitous bank, while the enemy did not dare follow. While they were looking for a smoother descent, he had time to escape. After Mr. M. had been obliged to leave his home, some of the ruffians went to his house, asking "if they could come in to get warm." Mrs. M. replied, "they could do so by giving her their guns." As they sat by the fire, they told her "they had killed her husband." However, she gave no credence to it.
Major Robinson, of Tecumseh, died to-day. He has been ill most of the time since the invasion of Lawrence, the disease having been contracted from exposure at that time. For some time he was sick at the Cincinnati House; but there is little room there for sick people, and no quiet; and the noble woman, who has sacrificed much for the cause, in the exposures of last winter and this, and the constant absence of her husband, offered her cabin, under the shadow of the hotel, as a place of rest and quiet to the sick stranger. The unconsciousness of disease was upon him much of the time, and when his mind was dull to things about him, far-away scenes were fresh in his memory, and friends he had long loved were ministering by his bedside. He talked much with his mother, when clouds darkened his mental vision. He said to her, "Take off my shoes, mother, for I am tired and weary, and I cannot travel further." So, with this sweet consciousness of loved friends around him, his life's journey closed.
Major Robinson, of Tecumseh, died to-day. He has been ill most of the time since the invasion of Lawrence, the disease having been contracted from exposure at that time. For some time he was sick at the Cincinnati House; but there is little room there for sick people, and no quiet; and the noble woman, who has sacrificed much for the cause, in the exposures of last winter and this, and the constant absence of her husband, offered her cabin, under the shadow of the hotel, as a place of rest and quiet to the sick stranger. The unconsciousness of disease was upon him much of the time, and when his mind was dull to things about him, far-away scenes were fresh in his memory, and friends he had long loved were ministering by his bedside. He talked much with his mother, when clouds darkened his mental vision. He said to her, "Take off my shoes, mother, for I am tired and weary, and I cannot travel further." So, with this sweet consciousness of loved friends around him, his life's journey closed.