On a warm, moonlit night in mid-June 1865, three days prior to Beau and Carlotta Wells’s scheduled departure, an unsigned note was attached to a door at the main entrance to the vigilance committees’ headquarters in a small community called Quiet Creek, located about fifteen miles west of Pine Grove City, Kentucky. The note asserted that a fugitive slave named Beau Wells had returned to the plantation that he’d run away from in 1860, purchased the farm, married his former master’s widow, and that he and his wife, Carlotta, could be found residing at his newly acquired estate. Beau and Carlotta’s outright defiance of the moral code enraged the vigilantes, and all hell broke loose!