For the first time since 2011, the University of Missouri Tigers and the University of Kansas Jayhawks are prepared to square off on the gridiron this weekend.
This will be the first time the rivals have faced off since the Mizzou left the Big 12 conference for the SEC, and it's the longest the teams have gone without playing football since the rivalry began in 1891.
But there's a long and complicated history of violence that predates the games — and even the Civil War.
Jay Sexton, director of Mizzou's Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, has been teaching the history of the Kansas-Missouri border disputes for many years, and is a proud KU alum.
He said the sports rivalry, which is a sort of continuation of the Missouri-Kansas conflict, is really more of an invention of the late 19th century, when universities were becoming more important community and cultural institutions.
"That's the anchor I would put for the emergence of the rivalry. It's part of this national story of football university rivalries," Sexton said. "All of these rivalries try to invent reasons for, like, why Princeton and Yale should totally hate each other, or whatever it might be."
Sexton added that there is a long a history of violence between the two states, but the rivalry — good versus bad, Tiger versus Jayhawk — is a bit oversimplified.
"The football game is all about trying to reduce the motives to the most simple common denominator," Sexton said. "To airbrush out of the complex historical record the majority of the people to just have a few kind of extreme examples stand in for one side's football team, and so it's actually creating a very blinkered and distorted way of understanding the border war itself."
Sexton said beginning in the 1850s and throughout the Civil War, guerilla-type violence between groups called the Missouri Bushwackers and the Kansas Jayhawkers went back and forth across the border.
Prior to the onset of the war, Missourians tried to influence Kansas elections to determine if the state would allow slavery, as Missouri did.
"It started with the initial sacking of Lawrence in May of 1856 when you had a group of pro-slavery ruffians crossing the border from Missouri. Now, this wasn't the perspective of all Missourians," Sexton said. "It was a minority position in Missouri to be pro-slavery in this way, but they wanted Kansas to be a slave state. They were afraid that if Kansas was anti-slavery, that it would destabilize slavery in Missouri."
But as time went on and the Civil War began, the violence grew.
"It's not controlled. It's not the same kind of bureaucratic process that governs troop movements that you see in the East," Sexton said. "Missouri and Kansas are literally the Wild West, and that's why the violence is so bad."
In 1861, Kansans burned Osceola, Missouri, to the ground.
Two years later, General Order No. 10 was issued by Union army commanders based in Kansas. It targeted the “Shewackers,” the women who supported the Missouri Bushwackers by making food, tending to the wounded and more.
Sexton said many of these women were arrested and incarcerated near the town of Westport, near Kansas City. Tragically, the jail collapsed, killing or permanently disabling many of them.
In response, the Missouri Bushwackers rode into Lawrence in August 1863, murdering about 150 men and boys.
"The Lawrence massacre is one of the bloodiest and most savage acts of butchery towards innocent civilians in American history," Sexton said.
Just four days later, General Order No. 11 was issued by the Union Army, which forced Missourians in four counties of western Missouri — Bates, Jackson, Cass and Vernon — to abandon their homes or face the consequences.
Soon after, Union troops went through the area, destroying property, burning communities to the ground and executing opposition.
Sexton said it's important to remember that the sports rivalry cannot be simplified to good versus bad. He said much of the conflict across the border was less ideological and more about retribution.
"We're so quick today to try to categorize historical actors and to place their objectives or their motives in a tightly defined, neat little box that we can understand," Sexton said. "But when you start to actually get into the nitty gritty, you realize that just doesn't work."
Today, Sexton said, there's still no singular monument to commemorate the lives lost. There's no annual ritual to grapple with the ugliness of the conflict. Instead, the main way these tragedies and these many years of border conflict are commemorated has been a football game.
"It's kind of funny because, for a long time, neither team was very good at football. So, the stadiums weren't always full, but, you know, there was a hatred there," Mark Godich said. "The football was bad, and the fact that the rivalry still thrived speaks to the hatred there was between the two programs, the two schools, the two states."
Godich is a retired Sports Illustrated editor and the author of the book "Tigers Vs. Jayhawks: From the Civil War to the Battle for No. 1," which tells the story of the 2007 football battle between the rivals at Kansas City's Arrowhead Stadium.
He said the MU-KU rivalry is the second oldest college sports rivalry west of the Mississippi — after only Wisconsin-Minnesota, which began in 1890.
Godich said throughout the programs' histories, the rivalry was of utmost importance. In the 1970s, Mizzou coach Al Onofrio, who had an overall winning record, was fired because he had gone 1-6 against KU.
But then, Mizzou made the decision to leave the Big 12, the conference they shared with KU, and join the Southeastern Conference, or SEC, and the two rivals played their final conference football game in 2011.
"It was bad for the rivalry," Godich said. "Missouri wanted to keep playing a rivalry. I mean, Kansas, understandably, didn't like the fact Missouri bolted, and so, you know, it took them a while to get over that."
But this year, the football rivalry is being revived as the Tigers and Jayhawks face off at Mizzou's Faurot Field in Columbia.
Godich said he isn't sure how much today's students really know about the rivalry, but believes it won't take them long to catch on.
"It's the only rivalry in college sports, where, you know, we went from bloodshed to lining up on the athletic field against one another," he said. "There's no other rivalry can say that."
The game kicks off at 2:30 p.m. Saturday, and there are already more MU-KU football games scheduled in the years to come.
