Project Scroll Research Note 2026-05: The Kentucky raiders' bail and wagon: what the Licking Valley Register reported in September 1847

Accounts of the Kentucky raid on Cass County, Michigan, in August 1847 give the raiders' bail as $2,600, and tell that the abolitionists rolled the raiders' wagon into Birch Lake. The papers of 1847 tell it differently. A letter from Niles, written within days, gives the bail as three thousand dollars. The raiders' own home paper, the Covington Licking Valley Register of 17 September 1847, puts it at "something over four thousand dollars" in all, and says that the wagon, its wheels taken, "was then delivered up." As far as we can find, the $2,600 first appears in the county history of 1875, and the Birch Lake story in the 1930s. Project Scroll Research Note 2026-05, version 1. The note sets out the record quoted, where it is held, what it changes, its limits, and what was searched before calling it new. Web version: projectscroll.com/discoveries/notes/2026-05/.