Description
"The Kansas Narrative of John Doy of Lawrence, Kansas - A Plain, Unvarnished Tale" - - (Researcher's note: Due to the numerous references to Platte County, only selected excerpts have been indexed.)
Chapter XII Allen Pinks p. 65-66 (Chapter XII is devoted to Allen Pinks, this is only an excerpt) - - But it is time to say something about Allen Pinks, one of the funniest fellows I ever met with, and one who contributed greatly to our amusement, and to relieve the ennui of our long imprisonment in the iron box.
We found him in Platte City jail when we entered it, and soon appreciated his good qualities. He was very bright and intelligent; very kind to us, and alleviated our sufferings in various ways.
He was quite a light colored mulatto, of about 20 years of age, born at Pittsburg, in Pennsylvania; his grandmother being a German woman, as he informed me. He had been cook and head waiter on board of steamboats on the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, and had last been paid off at St. Joseph, Missouri.
From there he started for Leavenworth, walking down the Missouri bank of the river with a white man, who had been on board the steamboat with him. At the Rialto Ferry, he was stopped by the ferryman on suspicion of being a fugitive slave, and lodged in Weston calaboose till he was transferred to Platte City jail.
Thinking that his free papers were wearing out, he had left them with a free colored wagon-builder at Independence, Missouri. As it was for the interest of those concerned in detaining him, that he should not prove himself free, he could get no one to send to Independence, though only thirty miles distant, and ascertain whether his assertions were true or false, and would certainly have been sold for his jail fees and consigned to hopeless slavery, had he waited for the working of the law, which appears to be different in every county of the State, and to agree only in the fact that it is everywhere interpreted to suit the slave dealing gentry.
(Researcher's note: In January 1859 abolitionist John Doy agreed to take a group of 13 African American Kansans north to Iowa on one leg of the Underground Railroad. Dr. Doy and his group were then captured 12 miles north of Lawrence by a group of Missouri slave hunters which included Weston Mayor Benjamin Wood. Doy and his 21 year old son, Charles, were transported back to Weston, Missouri and placed in jail. He was later transferred to the Platte City jail and then to the St. Joseph, Missouri, jail. Along the way they were displayed in the streets and hounded, beaten and nearly hanged. He was charged with a federal offense of "slave stealing” and awaited a sentence of hard labor or death. In jail after a second trial that found him guilty, ten men went from Lawrence to St. Joseph in July 1859 and broke Doy out of jail. He returned to Kansas and later wrote a 137-page narrative describing in detail his experiences in Platte County, Missouri.)Date(s) of Creation
1/1/1860
