A joint committee of the Louisiana general assembly issued a report in 1869 on the “Conduct of the Late Elections and the Condition of Peace and Order.” Within their report, the committee detailed Bossier Massacre which began at Shady Grove Plantation, the land where Mike Woods Pool sits today. Entitled “The Massacre in Bossier Parish, September 21, 1868,” the section details the events that led to the murder of at least one hundred and sixty-two individuals. It is worth quoting this section at length. The committee wrote,
This wholesale murder originated by the act of a strange white man at Shady Grove firing, without provocation, at an old colored man who was sitting peaceably in his house. The colored men arrested the criminal and were proceeding to deliver him over for trial to the civil authorities, when he was recused by a band of white men.
This man went off and brought back with him an armed crowd of one hundred white men, who commenced an indiscriminate slaughter of the colored people, women were killed while pleading for their husbands, men were butchered in their houses; and while quietly at work in the fields a man was hung to a tree and left there for three days; ministers of the gospel were dragged out and beaten, and forced to promise not to preach again. A colored man was butchered in cold blood for the crime of being “too much of a radical” for his butchers; a bowie knife was plunged through his shoulder to his heart, till the blood spurted about his head, and he fell dead on his back. The colored men were then forced to kneel and look into his eyes, and he was left on the side of the road as a prey for buzzards. Two women were hung by the roadside with lariat ropes.
As the rage for blood grew more intense, hundreds of white men, inflamed with liquor, assembled to prosecute the foul work still further. A United States Marshal came with some troops from Shreveport, and begged them to desist, offering to arrest all colored men against who there might be charges, and turn them over to the parish authorities; but in he words of this officer, ‘the white citizens of Bossier seemed determined to hunt the colored people in the swamps themselves,’ and as the officer ;well knew that they would shoot every colored man they found with arms,’ he withdrew and left them to prosecute their ‘negro hunt,’ at will. This massacre lasted three or four days. The total killed with one hundred and sixty-two (162). Total otherwise outraged, seven (7). At the ensuing election the parish of Bossier gave one vote for ‘Grant and Colfax,’ out of nearly two thousand (2000) registered Republican voters. Their work was well done.