Border War

The Border War. MU vs. KU. Or Arrowhead Armageddon as Fox 4 News stupidly puts it. We here in Kansas City could never have predicted that this rivalry would have such high stakes as the game tonight does. The series is tied at 53-53-9 since the teams first faced each other in 1891. So not only will one team destroy their rival's ambitions of a national championship this season, they will also go one up in the alltime series after this historic tiebreaker game. A Wall Street Journal article and several local articles have invoked the bloddy history of the civil war skirmishes that took place just before and during the Civil War. Kansas was largely an anti-slavery territory, and Lawrence was the epicenter of the abolutionist ambitions of the state's residents. The Kansas-Nebraska Act laid the groundwork of the border war by declaring that the inhabitants of the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska would decide by vote whether the new states would allow slavery or not. Pro-slavery Missouri residents began pouring into Kansas and established pro-slavery outposts in Leavenworth and Atchison. Anti-slavery organizations from New England recruited heavily armed emigrants to settle Kansas and established free-state settlements in Topeka, Manhattan and Lawrence. The proslavery forces won, but abolitionists created a shadow government. John Brown then came to Kansas and skirmishes began. "Border ruffians", the name given to Missourians who illegally voted in the Kansas elections, would march on Kansas and burn the Free State Hotel while also ransacking businesses and homes. Brown retaliated by leading an attack on a proslavery settlement, which resulted in the hacking of five men to death with broadswords. By the time the border war ended in 1859, 59 people had been killed in the skirmishes and "mini-wars." Kansas would eventually enter the Union in 1861 as a Free State, but not after the damage had been done and resentment built up for the savage violence committed by both sides.
Flash forward to today, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article sites a Misouri man "whose great, great grandfather had been murdered on his farm, apparently by a Kansan.
"And when he was telling me this story, he said, 'And we think we know who did it,' " said Rafiner, noting that the suspected descendants lived just miles away."
KU athletic director Lew Perkins claims that the Arrowhead crowd will be 70-30 percent in favor of KU, a claim that MU associate athletic director Mark Alnutt hotly disputes. The game is technically a "home game" for KU, which means it had a greater percentage of tickets to sell to its fans than Missouri, but the Chiefs also had 29,000 tickets to sell, and MU fans claim to have taken a large percentage of those. Many media outlets are claiming that KU fans outnumber MU fans 3-1 in the Kansas City area, where the border war takes on even greater significance given the intermixing that is forced to take place here.
The jokes fly back and forth between the two schools. One KU t-shirt witnessed recently declares, "My coach can eat your coach on and off the field." Another I picked up from that same St. Louis Post-Dispatch story has Mark Mangino lost in Kansas City, so he goes to a gas station to ask how to get to 435. The attendant responds, "skip a few meals."