The Darkest Period: The Kanza Indians and Their Last Homeland, 1846-1873

The Darkest Period: The Kanza Indians and Their Last Homeland, 1846-1873

by Ronald D. Parks
The Darkest Period: The Kanza Indians and Their Last Homeland, 1846-1873

The Darkest Period: The Kanza Indians and Their Last Homeland, 1846-1873

by Ronald D. Parks

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Overview

Before their relocation to the Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma, the Kanza Indians spent twenty-seven years on a reservation near Council Grove, Kansas, on the Santa Fe Trail. In The Darkest Period, Ronald D. Parks tells the story of those years of decline in Kanza history following the loss of the tribe’s original homeland in northeastern and central Kansas. Parks makes use of accounts by agents, missionaries, journalists, and ethnographers in crafting this tale. He addresses both the big picture—the effects of Manifest Destiny—and local particulars such as the devastating impact on the tribe of the Santa Fe Trail. The result is a story of human beings rather than historical abstractions.

The Kanzas confronted powerful Euro-American forces during their last years in Kansas. Government officials and their policies, Protestant educators, predatory economic interests, and a host of continent-wide events affected the tribe profoundly. As Anglo-Americans invaded the Kanza homeland, the prairie was plowed and game disappeared. The Kanzas’ holy sites were desecrated and the tribe was increasingly confined to the reservation. During this “darkest period,” as chief Allegawaho called it in 1871, the Kanzas’ Neosho reservation population diminished by more than 60 percent. As one survivor put it, “They died of a broken heart, they died of a broken spirit.” But despite this adversity, as Parks’s narrative portrays, the Kanza people continued their relationship with the land—its weather, plants, animals, water, and landforms.

Parks does not reduce the Kanzas’ story to one of hapless Indian victims traduced by the American government. For, while encroachment, disease, and environmental deterioration exerted enormous pressure on tribal cohesion, the Kanzas persisted in their struggle to exercise political autonomy while maintaining traditional social customs up to the time of removal in 1873 and beyond.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780806148458
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date: 01/12/2015
Series: The Civilization of the American Indian Series , #273
Edition description: First Edition
Pages: 336
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Ronald D. Parks is former assistant director of the Historic Sites division of the Kansas State Historical Society and former administrator of the Kaw (Kanza) Mission State Historic Site. He has published numerous articles about the Kanzas.

Read an Excerpt

The Darkest Period

The Kanza Indians and Their Last Homeland, 1846â"1873


By Ronald D. Parks

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS

Copyright © 2014 University of Oklahoma Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4575-4



CHAPTER 1

A NEW HOME FOR THE KANZAS


When the ten men reached the confluence of the Smoky Hill and Republican Rivers, the six Kanzas of the exploring party became apprehensive. Despite the warm June nights, the Indians slept with their leggings and moccasins on and tied their horses at their heads to be ready to run while others kept an overnight watch. In 1847 white people called this place—known today as Junction City, Kansas—Grand Point. The Kanza Indians knew it as Minghoci Oizkanka, or "The Fork Where the Ducks Dwell." A few days before, Kanza scouts had spotted their powerful enemies, the Comanches, near Minghoci Oizkanka. The Kanzas told the party's leader, U.S. Indian agent Richard W. Cummins, that they did not wish to go farther west. Recent events validated the Indians' fears. The previous July the Comanches and Kanzas had battled near the Pawnee Fork (west of present-day Larned, Kansas), both tribes suffering heavy losses. Cummins insisted that the little expedition push farther out into the plains. If detected they would have been cut off easily by the Comanches, although Cummins thought at least some of the Kanzas could have escaped. Not far west of Grand Point, the agent concluded that it was too dangerous to proceed any farther and ordered a halt. After another deliberation, the anxious men retreated east down the Kansas River valley.

The mission of the little expedition was to reconnoiter the proposed new homesite for the Kanzas in the vicinity of present-day Minneapolis, Kansas. To get there, they traversed on horseback a vast grassland expanse over a rolling terrain to about 150 miles west of present-day Kansas City. Here, flanked by a broad, tall grass–covered valley floor, the Solomon River, known by the Kanzas as the Nepaholla, snaked its way from the northwest to the southeast across the prairie landscape. In June 1847, two decades before the arrival of the plow, these grasslands were resplendently green—a new growth of bluestem, Indian grass, and switchgrass mixed with shorter grasses sprinkled profusely with wildflowers, all having been nurtured by a moisture-laden winter of abundant snowfall.

The party had reluctantly probed west up the Kansas River valley because the treaty signed by U.S. commissioners and Kanza chiefs on January 14, 1846, required an assessment of "a sufficiency of timber" in this area. If Cummins's party found a supply of hardwood timber adequate to support the Kanzas in farming, the government would assist the Indians in establishing permanent villages there. Under the treaty scenario, the tribe was to abandon its villages in the Kansas River valley between present-day Wamego and Topeka, and move about one hundred miles west to the Solomon. In their new homes the Indians would continue their traditional forms of subsistence, hunting bison on the adjoining plains and raising corn and other vegetables in the stream bottoms, while nearby groves of oak and walnut would supply sturdy timber for rail fences to protect their fields from marauding livestock. Here, under the protective and benign guidance of an Indian agent, the tribe would be supported by federal financial and infrastructural assistance. Under the tutelage of government hirelings, Kanza children would attend school while Kanza adults learned modern agricultural practices. As the bison herds disappeared, agriculture would supplant the hunt, confinement would replace mobility, and civilization would supersede "savagery." The underpinnings of the government's reservation policy were articulated by the commissioner of Indian Affairs, Luke Lea, in 1850. Filled with "haughty pride," as Lea put it, the Indians considered labor degrading and cared only for war, the hunt, and eloquence in council. In response, the government should subdue the "wild energies" of its untutored wards and train them, Lea said, "to the more ennobling pursuits of civilized life" by means of confinement and control until the Indians were "compelled by sheer necessity to resort to agricultural labor or starve." To this end, each tribe should be assigned a permanent home of limited extent that was well adapted to agriculture, and here the tribe "should be compelled constantly to remain" until it demonstrated improvement.

Implicit in Lea's statement are assumptions shared uncritically by almost all policy makers and many members of the general public in the mid-nineteenth-century United States. Civilizations existed within a hierarchical "chain of being," with white Christians at the apex and others arranged at various lower positions. As an enlightened people, Euro-Americans bore the responsibility of guiding the benighted "savages" into the "ennobling pursuit of civilized life" before the oncoming tide of white immigration destroyed them. Obviously, due to their ignorance, racial inferiority, and overweening pride, the Indians could not govern themselves. Therefore, the U.S. government, in order to fulfill its altruistic aim of elevating its misguided, undisciplined, and childlike charges, would have to resort to compulsion. Above all, it was necessary to confine the wandering tribes. Once fixed into place, the Indians could no longer elude the administration of civilizing agents such as government-funded bureaucrats, teachers, missionaries, tradesmen, and farmers. The installation of Euro-American ways into the hearts and minds of the Indians would dissipate primitive beliefs and customs, and Indians would assimilate into the dominant society as educated, property-owning, Christian tillers of the soil.

What the Kanzas or other Native people thought of this program designed for their "improvement" was of little consequence to policy makers. Fortunately for our purposes, a record exists of an unidentified Kanza chief stating the advantages of Indian life over Euro-American while addressing U.S. military officers in 1818. Though the translation of the chief's talk is laden with the conventional expressions of the Romantic Age, the Kanza speaker addresses the issues of confinement and compulsion, illuminates for his audience the limits of the chiefs' authority, and conveys why the disciplined Euro-American way of life is so unappealing to him:

Father—your young men are prescribed within certain bounds. Not one of them can pass that chain of sentinels without your permission. Thus ever within your power you govern them with ease. But my warriors[,] impatient of restraint as the wild horse in the toils of the hunter, brook no controul. Free as the air which they breathe, light and impetuous as the Antelope, they bound Mountains and moor in pursuit of pleasure which nature has ordained they should enjoy. To confine them to one vally would deprive them of their subsistence; they would pine and die in penury and want.

... Should we then who are Lords of the Forests quit the pleasures and the adventures of the hunt, and like you, confine ourselves to one solitary valley, to practice discipline and subordination ... No, father.


Seven years later, in 1825, Kanza chiefs journeyed to St. Louis where in the office of Superintendent of Indian Affairs William Clark they signed a treaty establishing the tribe's first reservation: a thirty-mile-wide tract extending from near present-day Topeka about three hundred miles west to the headwaters of the Smoky Hill River, a point about forty miles inside modern-day Colorado's eastern border. The reservation would be home to about sixteen hundred Kanzas. The eastern one-third of this reservation—two million acres of rich and productive Kansas River valley land—would be ceded by the Kanzas to the United States in the treaty of 1846.

The Kanzas had compelling reasons to reduce the size of their reservation. On January 23, 1844, the two principal Kanza leaders, Hard Chief and Fool Chief, wrote a letter addressed to "My Father" stating the tribe's willingness to sell a forty-five-mile-long section on the east end of the reservation. On a modern map of Kansas, this segment of the reservation extends from Topeka to near Manhattan. Describing their tribe as "very poor and needy," the chiefs said their tribe's next annuity payment—$3,500 as stipulated by the 1825 treaty—would be their last, and $1,500 of this would go to cover debts owed to their trader, Frederick Chouteau. The Kanzas ordinarily paid their traders' debts with robes upon returning from a hunt, but the winter hunt of 1843–44 had been unsuccessful. Poverty and debt created an urgency to generate cash, and the fastest way was to sell tribal land. The chiefs' asking price was $61,000.

The tribe's predicament was compounded by one of the most horrific floods in Kansas history in the summer of 1844. Kanza women farmed plots of corn, potatoes, beans, melons, and other vegetables on the bottomlands of the Kansas River. That summer the valley overflowed from bluff to bluff, the flood sweeping off all of the Indians' fencing, houses, and crops. Another flood in late spring the next year destroyed the Kanzas' early crops. Later that summer sickness struck the villages, killing about two hundred people, two-thirds of them children. At the same time a disease, characterized by swelling under the chest, killed many of the tribe's horses and area deer and raccoons. Reeling from these disastrous events, the Kanza chiefs assembled on January 14, 1846, at Mission Creek just west of present-day Topeka were eager to make a deal.

Sitting across the table from the chiefs were the two Indian Office bureaucrats who drafted the treaty document: Kanza agent Cummins and his St. Louis–based supervisor, Superintendent of Indian Affairs Thomas Harvey. Nineteen Kanza chiefs and headmen signed the treaty, the order of signature indicating hierarchical status. The first Kanza listed was Kihigawahchuffe, or Hard Chief, the principal chief of the tribe. Among the signatures appearing on the 1846 treaty document were those of men who were to play prominent roles in the tribe's future, Ishtalasea and Seth Hays. The fourth Kanza listed, Ishtalasea, or Speckled Eyes, would succeed Hard Chief, and Hays, one of the eight witnesses to sign the document, would soon operate a trading post at Council Grove.

Two million acres, the 104-mile-long eastern section of the reservation, were ceded to the United States effective May 1, 1847, at the rate of ten cents per acre. In exchange, the Kanzas received eight thousand dollars each year in the form of "annuities," interest payments on the initial payment of $202,000. Other treaty provisions required the government to spend annually one thousand dollars on the tribe for education and one thousand dollars for agricultural assistance. Additionally, the Indian Office would erect a mill near the new Kanza villages, provide a blacksmith, and send a sub-agent to reside among the Kanzas and oversee the tribe's farming operations and "general improvement."

The sticking point in negotiations was where to relocate the tribe. It was presumed that the Kanzas would establish their villages near the eastern boundary of their newly truncated reserve, the same locale the Cummins party was supposed to survey to determine sufficiency of timber. But the Kanzas would not settle this area for the same reason that Cummins had not reconnoitered it: doing so would have delivered the overmatched tribe into the jaws of their implacable enemies. Not just the Comanches, but more prominently the Pawnees and Cheyennes, powerful tribes hostile to the Kanzas, contested this area as their bison hunting grounds.

The U.S. government could not fulfill its treaty obligations in 1847 because it could not protect the Kanzas at the proposed place of resettlement. The new eastern margin of the reservation was over 140 miles from the nearest military post, Fort Leavenworth. Coauthor of the treaty Richard Cummins summed up why his own plan would not work: "The Camanches & the Pawanees, to say nothing about other tribes, have been at war with the Kansas for a long time. Either of these tribes greatly out number the Kansas, the country left them by their session is occupied a portion of almost every year by these tribes, particularly by the Pawanees [and] without constant protection the Kansas could not live their." The proposed Kanza homeland was virtually unexplored by Americans. At that time no viable wagon road extended from present-day Kansas City to the Solomon River valley, and such a road would have been necessary to effect communication and supply linkage between the Office of Indian Affairs and its Kanza charges. Finally, Indian Office officials never addressed the imposing, if not impossible, task of securing, then retaining the required agent, blacksmith, farmer, and missionary/teacher for deployment at this isolated and precarious post.

When discussing the proposed treaty, the Kanza chiefs protested that "they could not live on the Kansas River or its watters, any where west of the Grand point," because there was no timber there "except cotton wood & some very short scattering timber of other kinds." In response, Cummins and Harvey inserted into article five of the treaty this qualifier: "the President of the United States shall be satisfied that there is not a sufficiency of timber, he shall cause to be selected and laid off for the Kansas a suitable country, near the western boundary of the land ceded by this treaty, which shall remain for their use forever" [my italics]. In fact, in the area proposed for Kanza resettlement, today's Ottawa and Lincoln Counties, the banks of the Solomon River and its tributaries, including Salt and Pipe Creeks, were timbered with scattered groves of hardwoods such as bur oak and walnut. Government officials did not know this, but the Indians did, having hunted here for generations.

During the summer of 1847, Cummins investigated at least two more alternative reservation locations: the country adjacent to the western boundary of the Shawnee Reservation in present eastern Dickinson County and the divide between the Kansas and upper Neosho valleys in present northern Morris and southern Geary Counties. Both locations, the Kanza agent declared, lacked sufficient timber for agricultural purposes. What then, to do? "I then examined," wrote Cummins, "the country known as the Council Grove on the head waters of the Neosho."

Although their villages had been situated in the Kansas River valley since at least the late eighteenth century, the Kanzas had long maintained hunting camps in the Council Grove area and near the Santa Fe Road in present eastern and central Kansas. In 1807, explorer Zebulon Pike was informed by his Indian guides that he was entering Kanza hunting territory when approaching the Cottonwood River, about forty miles southwest of Council Grove. In early August 1825, U.S. official George C. Sibley intended to meet with Kanza chiefs at Council Grove, but as the tribe was hunting bison to the west, his party parleyed with Kanza chiefs a few days later on Turkey Creek near present-day McPherson, Kansas, seventy miles west of Council Grove. At this time the Kanzas, as had their Osage allies a few days before in Council Grove, signed a treaty guaranteeing safe passage for wagon trains and providing a right of way to Santa Fe in exchange for eight hundred dollars worth of cash and merchandise.

Throughout the 1830s and early 1840s, travelers on the Santa Fe Trail reported friendly encounters with the tribe in that vicinity. One afternoon in late November 1845, a small group of Kanza men rode into a camp of freighters at the Big John Creek crossing of the Santa Fe Road two miles east of Council Grove. The Indians invited James Josiah Webb and companions to visit their village two or three miles downstream. Here a "swap" would take place, Webb trading a blanket coveted by one of the Kanzas for a pail full of honey. The next morning the freighters enjoyed a sweet breakfast in a Kanza lodge, dipping a spoon fashioned from part of a buffalo horn into a wooden bowl filled with honey, and passing the spoon back and forth "Indian fashion." Afterward, one of the Kanzas warmed a honey-filled rawhide bag in front of the fire, occasionally kneading it, then filled a pail to be carried on horseback to the Big John Creek campsite, where that evening Webb once again indulged in copious amounts of honey, in consequence suffering a stupendous bellyache.

The tribe suffered intensely during the two-year interim between signing the Mission Creek treaty in January 1846 and their final relocation to Council Grove, a period when they were essentially homeless. Described by their agent as "very poor and indigent," Kanza bands scattered across the territory, a long-established survival strategy employed in times of extreme need. In early February 1846, some of the tribe arrived at their Fort Leavenworth Agency (located four miles west of Westport, Missouri, just inside the present Johnson County line) in a destitute condition. According to Cummins, the Kanzas had "nothing to eat, and were the most greedy people for provisions I ever saw, the little meat I gave them only served to make them howl and beg for more; it was painful to my feelings that I could not give them enough to do them some good." Anticipating that the Indians would be compelled to subsist on roots and the sap of trees, Cummins supplied the tribe with 1,818 bushels of corn, 2,513 pounds of bacon, and 466 pounds of fresh pork. The desperate Kanzas brought bags for provisions and as many horses and mules they could find, and left with as much corn as their animals could bear. Those men and women without pack animals departed with packs on their own backs. In late February Cummins reported some improvement in Kanza health and spirits. At about the same time, they visited their neighbors, the Sac and Fox Nation, who, seeing the Kanzas' distress, gave them about fifty guns, seventy horses, and a considerable quantity of clothing, blankets, household goods, and calico fabric.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Darkest Period by Ronald D. Parks. Copyright © 2014 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations,
List of Tables,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
1. A New Home for the Kanzas,
2. One of the Most Difficult Tribes,
3. White Men Now Living amongst Us,
4. This Unfortunate and Neglected Tribe,
5. Endless Trouble and Quarrels,
6. Some Were Decidedly Improved,
7. In No Condition to Compete with Their Formidable Enemies,
8. The Darkest Period,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,

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