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persuasive abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner was beaten unconscious on the floor of the United States Senate. That act was followed within days by a singularly ugly abolitionist act: John
Brown dragged from their beds and murdered five pro-slavery settlers on the Pottawatomie Creek, to the west of Atchison. The violence in Kansas territory—unrestricted, devastating, widespread—was finally curbed by Governor John Geary, who called in federal troops to stop the Missouri pro-slavery forces, the border ruffians, the Free State marauders, and the thieves who followed in their tracks. Even David Rice Atchison was forced to disband his army. Alfred described the situation to his brother: “The grand jury indicted on an average every other man in the territory all over it—pro-slavery and free soilers all have to catch it. Almost all our citizens are indicted for something or other. I took but little active part in last row and am thus out of the scrape. During the war every man did as he pleased—pressed horses, took provisions, cattle, wagons, teams, etc. and raised the devil generally. Many did it in good faith believing it was all right; others did it for plunder.”
    1857 was the watershed year for the territory, the year the settlers, in a resounding vote, rejected being admitted to the Union as a slave state. In the face of the defeat of their cause, most of the southerners gave up. John Martin, twenty years old, arrived from Pennsylvania, bought The Squatter Sovereign, renamed it Freedom’s Champion, and ran it for the free-soil cause; Samuel Pomeroy, former agent of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, became Atchison’s first mayor.
    Alfred had arrived in October 1855 with little more than the clothes on his back, yet he was so capable and such a hard worker that even against this backdrop of violence and mayhem, he had managed to prosper. “His capital stock was a copy of Blackstone, a genial temperament and an abundance of brains,” a contemporary wrote of him later. So well did he do, primarily in land litigation, that by 1862 he had enough money to buy his land and build his house and marry.
    Mary Ann arranged Amelia’s marriage. She and William Challis had moved out to Atchison from New Jersey in 1857. William was a doctor who gave up his practice to join his entrepreneur brothers George and Luther in buying land and starting businesses in the fledgling town. William’s first task—bringing the first ferry up the Missouri to Atchison and running the ferry franchise that connected Kansas with Missouri—was the first of many he would creditably perform. They started out in a log cabin, but within a short time William and Mary Ann lived in a “handsome” big brick house, at 203 North Terrace on the bluff overlooking the Missouri.
    There is a photograph of Amelia Otis that shows timid, lashless, apprehensive eyes, brunette hair curled carefully, limply, flatly, and very unflatteringly on her head, attired in an ill-fitting dress; she is devoid of brooch, lace, or any adornment. Mary Ann, with whom she had in
common the high forehead and chiseled features of their mother Maria, in contrast, was a handsome woman: there was a vibrancy and assuredness and warmth about Mary Ann entirely lacking in her sister. It is hard to overstate the difference in expression and outlook in these two women so strikingly similar in feature. Mary Ann was vivacious, pretty, outgoing, and a good organizer. Amelia, lacking in confidence, single in her twenties, was clearly in danger of spinsterhood—not just because of her retiring nature but because time was pressing—at her age in those years, most young women were long married. To avoid spinsterhood, she would need the help of her family. And there, as if by Providence, Mary Ann produced her family’s new Atchison friend, Alfred Otis. Alfred was an obvious choice of husband: upstanding staunch churchgoer, already a