The killing of Sam Wood has been treated by every paper in the state so far as we know as a most unfortunate occurrence – except by the Alliance papers. It is painful to note how eagerly they pick up the death of their brother reformer to make political capital out of it. Although he died as he lived, a man of personal enmities, and at the hands of a man whose enmity he had incurred, yet these papers are crying that his taking off came about by the hostility of the “Hessians of the money power,” that “his ceaseless antagonism to the monopolistic element was the real cause of his murder.”
This is worse than bosh. It is an attempt to use the sad end of a comrade’s life so as to make profit out of it. A man who will do that would see his mother’s dead body to be cut in pieces on the dissecting table. Sam Wood died because Jim Brennan hated him. That is the whole story. – The Newton Republican. Reprinted in The Wichita Daily Eagle, Wichita, Kansas. July 2, 1891. Page 4. © Transcribed by Darren McMannis for the Kansas Council of Genealogical Societies, Inc.