He is remembered in Kansas history for being set adrift on the Missouri River on a raft by pro-slavery men for his abolitionist beliefs.

In 1839 the family moved to the Sandusky Plains in northwestern Ohio where Pardee met his future wife Sibjl [sic] Carleton.

He developed quinsy (an abscess of the tonsils) that caused him to give up preaching and move to Cedar County, Iowa in 1850 to improve his health.

Butler obtained a claim to 160 acres of land, twelve miles from Atchison, on the banks of the Stranger Creek.

[4] By the middle of August Butler had built a cabin and stopped in Atchison on his way back to Illinois to fetch his family.

While in Atchison Butler went to the offices of the Squatter Sovereign to get some extra copies to show his friends in Illinois.

The rafting episode was widely publicized and made clear that "... the country was full of men that were ready to fight.

[8] The passions of which Butler was a victim continued to ferment in Kansas and the rest of the country and soon led to the Civil War.

He spent much time writing and lecturing on temperance, both before and after the passage of a Prohibitory Amendment to the Kansas state constitution.

On September 19, 1888, as Butler was dismounting a colt that refused to be bridled he was kicked in the right foot crushing the ankle.

There is a family story about Pardee Butler and Abraham Lincoln that is related by Heywood Broun in one of his It Seems to Me columns that appeared in the New York Graphic in March 1936.

He wrote the free soil constitution for the State of Kansas, and in the eyes of some historians he is identified as the actual founder of the Republican party.

"Butler was active in the presidential campaign of 1872 speaking at the Republican State Congressional Convention at Lawrence and serving as an elector.