Trekking the Swope Park Blue River for the underground railroad

By Don Bradley

Sunday morning, cloudy and brisk, the trail near the Blue River is muddy and squirrels rustle the thick brush.

The man with the rugged boots and walking stick stops his uphill plod and turns around.

“Right here,” he says, gesturing upward to the craggy rock overhangs in Swope Park.

“This is what they saw. This would have reminded them of Kentucky.”

Runaway slaves.

The man, Erik Stafford, a local teacher, writer, poet and historian, believes the park that Kansas Citians associate mostly with the zoo and Starlight Theater would have been the natural route for slaves fleeing Jackson County farms to get to freedom in Kansas in the years leading up to the Civil War.

He thinks there should be a sign or plaque, something to mark the route.

“It’s documented,” Stafford says. “I’m not making this up.”

 He believes it enough that he started giving the “Swope Park Blue River Underground Railroad Trek”, a 3-mile hike to show what the route would have been like “through the eyes of a runaway slave.”

He tells the story of one such slave, and it was documented in an 1870 Spring Hill, Kan., newspaper article about the origin of the naming of Negro Creek, a waterway that runs through Leawood and Overland Park.

According to the article, a slave who in the late 1850s had “run off” from an eastern Jackson County farm had been tracked down and surrounded across the line into Kansas. The slave then took a knife “and cut his throat from ear to ear.”

“He did that rather than be captured and returned to slavery,” Stafford says. “That’s why they called it Negro Creek. There is another incident in which a runaway was caught on the west side of what is now Swope Park.”

He doesn’t have to convince Diane Mutti Burke, a history professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and author of “On Slavery’s Border: Missouri’s Small Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865.”

Slavery was much different on small western Missouri farms than the large plantations in the Deep South. Farms in Jackson County may have had only a few slaves, but the yearning for freedom would still have been there, Mutti Burke said. And unlike the journey of hundreds of miles from Mississippi to the north, it would have been a tempting sprint to escape a Jackson County farm to get to free Kansas.

“They would have stayed off the roads and stuck to the creeks and the woods,” Mutti Burke said. “Waterways would have thrown off scents for dogs and that’s why they would have used the Blue River.”

Stafford, 54, a husband, father and grandfather, knows most people’s perception of Swope Park does not fit with the legacy of slavery. He remembers going there with friends when he was in high school.

“We’d dance and have car shows, we came here to have fun,” he said. “We had no idea what went on here 150 years ago.”

But now he does know and he thinks it’s important for people in Kansas City to know that part of its history. That’s why he added the Underground Railroad Trek to his Kansas City Tour Company that he started a few years ago. He also provides tours detailing Kansas City’s history of jazz, the mafia and the Civil Rights era.

But it is the Swope Park one that he thinks will catch on and draw new interest.

On a recent Sunday morning, 10 a.m. sharp, Stafford was waiting at the hike starting point off Oldham Road at the Wudchuk Run Trail Head. Only one ticket-buying hiker that day (the Chiefs were playing an early game in Germany).

Stafford leads the way up the trail. He talks about the migration of slavery from Appalachia into western Missouri. He talks about the 1820 Missouri Compromise which allowed Missouri to enter statehood as a slave state and Maine to enter as a free state.

Missouri was surrounded by four free states, more than any other slave state. That led to many confrontations between “pro-slavery border ruffians” and “anti-slavery free-staters.”

Many Missouri slaves escaped with help from the Underground Railroad, often arriving in the river town of Quindaro, now part of Kansas City, Kan.

Quindaro has a plaque.

Stafford wants one to mark his version of the Swope Park route.

On the hike, he throws out a lot of names familiar to Kansas City history: Wornall, Jackson, Oldham, Johnson, Boone, etc.

“People need to know the truth about all those names they see on street signs and school buildings around here,” he said.

Then he paused a moment.

 “You know, black people in Kansas City come to Swope Park. They go to the zoo and Starlight and other things.

”But I’m out here a lot and I never see black people on these trails. Not alone.”