(Anticlimactically, the two teams tied with a score of 3 to 3.) ![]() It worked: More than 9,000 spectators returned to Columbia, Missouri, for the game. In an effort to bolster attendance (and ticket sales) back at the Tigers’ stomping grounds, the university’s football coach came up with a brilliant idea: Invite alumni to “ come home.” Coach Chester Brewer’s idea was to turn the game into a multi-day event complete with pep rallies, a parade, and a bonfire. The two teams continued competing on neutral territory until 1911, when new conference regulations required that games be played on college campuses. In 1891, the University of Missouri Tigers and the University of Kansas Jayhawks held their first rivalry game in Kansas City, Missouri, which was halfway between the schools’ home turfs. Hard-held resentments between the two states didn’t die though - instead they spilled over into sporting events. Kansas ultimately became a free Union state in January 1861, though the violence continued until the Civil War’s ceasefire four years later. The plague of violence during the time period is often referred to as Bleeding Kansas, describing the state’s startlingly high number of fatalities. (For some, the argument was based on the immorality of slavery for others, it was a chance to compete with plantations for available land.) Heated sentiments turned into massacres, burnings of entire towns, and guerrilla warfare attacks on abolitionist and pro-slavery settlements in both states. ![]() Pro-slavery residents of Missouri argued that citizens who moved to Kansas territory should be able to settle the land with any enslaved people they already owned, while anti-slavery groups argued that no slavery of any form should exist in the state-to-be. Starting in 1854, the two states were involved in a series of violent conflicts, deemed the Border War, that centered on the spread of slavery into Kansas. ![]() While soldiers weren’t pausing the war for pigskin, ongoing hostility between Kansas and Missouri before the war’s official start ignited a cutthroat rivalry that later spread from the battlefield to the football field. How Homecoming Began Credit: Hy Peskin Archive/ Archive Photos via Getty Imagesīelieve it or not, the tradition of homecoming has ties to the American Civil War.
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