No longer do those two arch-rivals play football. They did for almost a century, but they quit some years ago, the Paola High School having grown to almost twice the size of Osawatomie. Things got a little out-of-hand towards the end, Paola winning twenty of the last twenty-two gridiron tussles, the last one a blow out--73-20. That was 2013, the very last game.
Since 1920, the Osawatomie/Paola game was the Super Bowl, the game no one missed, the big one that shut down both Kansas towns and most all the countryside. For 93 years it went on.
But the rivalry got started long before that, if you read the history. For a time in the 1850s, those two burgs did a whole lot more than mount great passing games. Kansas was bleeding in the 1850s. Just about everyone opening up the sod on the new state's eastern edge did so because they wanted to fight, wanted to win, sometimes at all costs.
Back then, it was the Free-Soilers vs. the Border Ruffians, the abolitionists vs. the slavers; the sides couldn't have been much different. The abolitionists were New Englanders, Puritans at heart, if not in confession, men and women dedicated to righteousness, sworn into God's army to end slavery. Some wanted a new life, but around Osawatomie especially, most newcomers arrived because Congress had ruled that whether Kansas were slave or free would be decided by those who lived there. Some came west--John Brown among them, the John Brown--because they were doing the Lord's work, fighting the curse of slavery.
When you're south of Kansas City some time, stop at Osawatomie, Ground Zero of the Bleeding Kansas of the 1850s. Follow Main Street all the way through town to a park where you can't miss an odd, old stone edifice that encloses the log cabin John Brown--"Osawatomie Brown"--used as headquarters during the twenty months he spent at war in "Bleeding Kansas.
The enemy Border Ruffians were equally determined, even if they invoked God's name a good deal less than the holy abolitionists. They were Southern folks, determined to protect a treasured way of life from the Yankees they hated. Once upon a time, neighboring Paola, just down the road, was populated heavily by Border Ruffians.
On August 30, 1856, a couple hundred or more Southerners rode into Osawatomie, intending to burn out the New Englanders, then keep on riding to Topeka and Lawrence and leave the whole region in flame. First, they shot John Brown's son Frederick dead. Then, a couple dozen armed abolitionists tried to hold them off, but their numbers were pitiful, more meager than their bravery. Soon the Free-Staters, out of ammo, scattered, and the Slavers torched most every building in town.
There was more terror in Bleeding Kansas, more blood in the neighborhood, more killing, some of it--much of it--cold-blooded on both sides. All of that right there in the countryside. That old cabin looks far more comfortable than it likely was.
Some historians claim what happened in little Osawatomie, and throughout the border region, was the opening salvo of what became the Civil War. It's hard to argue with that assessment, even though Beauregard didn't fire on Ft. Sumter until April 12, 1861, almost five years later.
You can see John Brown's hat there in the cabin--the one he was wearing at Harper's Ferry; and his saddle, and a broad portrait of the man, a likeness nothing at all like the wide-eyed fanatic who jumps off the mural in the Kansas State Capital.
All the John Brown things are in the back room of the cabin, a back room once hidden from view, frequently--if the stories can be believed--a temporary stop on the Underground Railroad. If you stand there, even for a moment, try to imagine what simply can't be imagined, especially if you're white.
For almost a century, when the Osawatomie Trojans took the field against the Paola Panthers, the fiery rivalry grew out of differences far older than oldest discolored cup in either school's trophy case. After all, Paola's roots were slave, Osawatomie's were free. Yankees and Rebs right there, neighbors in eastern Kansas.
Maybe it's a good thing they don't take each other on anymore. Either way, some old bloody fights may well a blessing to forget.
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