American Indians

American Indian Nations in Douglas County

All lands in the United States were stolen by Europeans who destroyed Indigenous settlements—through genocide and wars, broken treaties and outright fraud, “Christian” missionaries, and white people’s diseases and whiskey. When Missouri became a slave state in 1821, François Chouteau established a fur trading post in present-day Kansas City, Missouri, known as Chouteau’s (later Westport) Landing, and another trading post by Curtis and Ely opened in present-day Kansas City, Kansas the following year. The opening of the Santa Fe Trail expanded trade with Mexico and became a route for US armies to operate military maneuvers from Fort Leavenworth, established by Col. Henry Leavenworth in 1827. As pressures mounted to displace eastern Indian nations for more white settlements across the western frontier, the US government created multiple Indian agencies to negotiate treaties that removed Indigenous peoples to other “reserved” lands. Under President Andrew Jackson, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in May 1830 to negotiate the forced removal of more nations and expand white settlements west of the Mississippi River. Beginning in 1836, the Oregon-California Trail intensified wagon train travel through present-day Lawrence for over 400,000 settlers.

The Kaánze (Kanza or Kaw) Nation

The Kaánze (Kanza or Kaw) people, for which the state of Kansas is named, initially lived in the eastern and northern portions of this territory. In the words of Kaws:

The federal government forcibly transplanted nearly 100,000 people comprising tribes such as the Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandot, Kickapoo, Miami, Sac and Fox, Ottawa,  Peoria, and Potawatomie onto lands claimed by the Kaw and Osage. This action required Kaws to sign treaties whereby vast acreage was ceded to the government in return for  annuities and promises of educational, agricultural, and other forms of material  assistance. Underlying these treaties was the invader’s strategy for rapidly changing the  Kaw from an independent, semi-sedentary people into individual family farmers on the model of white agricultural society in Missouri, Illinois, and other so-called “settled”  states in the east. But the treaties made it clear that during the period of transition the  Kaws would remain in a state of dependency under the watchful and supposedly benevolent scrutiny of their government agent.¹

In 1825, Kaws signed a devastating treaty that reduced their 20 million-acre domain to a 2 million-acre reservation thirty miles wide that began just west of present-day Topeka. But broken promises, white thievery, impoverishment, and epidemics decimated their population. Another 1846 treaty further reduced their lands to a 256,000-acre reservation around present-day Council Grove; but in 1860, the US government stole 176,000 acres and left only 80,000 acres of the poorest land to family heads on insufficient 40-acre plots. Finally, in 1873, the Kaw Nation was permanently removed to 100,137 acres in present-day northern Kay County, Oklahoma, on former Osage lands and did not become a federally recognized tribe until 1959. And they are still here. 

Around 1929, a 28-ton red quartzite boulder, known by Kaws as In ‘zhúje ‘waxόbe (pronounced EE(n) ZHOO-jay wah-HO-bay) meaning “sacred red rock,” was secretly stolen from the waters of Shunganunga Creek near Topeka and moved by crane onto Santa Fe railcar(s) to Robinson Park in Lawrence. This sacred prayer rock was desecrated with a plaque that honored white pioneers for the 75th anniversary of Lawrence’s founding. In 2021, the Lawrence City Commission apologized to the Kaw Nation for the city’s theft and agreed to return it to them. The following year, the Kaw Nation received a $5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to relocate it to Allegawaho Memorial Heritage Park near Council Grove.

Three other Indian nations in present-day Douglas County were also deeply affected at the local level by US government interventions. The Lenape (Delaware), Wandát (Wyandot), and Saawanooki (Shawnee) Nations each experienced much the same pressures and brutal hardships over stolen lands, especially after the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act led Charles Robinson and the Massachusetts (New England) Emigrant Aid Society to claim the townsite of Lawrence (named on October 6, 1854) on Shawnee Reserve lands in Kansas Territory (Fig. 1).²

The Lenape (Delaware) Nation

The Lenape Nation, who originally lived along the Delaware River, call themselves Lenape (len-NAH-pay) which means “The People.” They describe their cultural history as follows:

Our ancestors were among the first Indians to come in contact with the Europeans  (Dutch, English, & Swedish) in the early 1600s. The Delaware were called the  “Grandfather” tribe because we were respected by other tribes as peacemakers since we often served to settle disputes among rival tribes. We were also known for our fierceness  and tenacity as warriors when we had to fight, however, we preferred to choose a path of  peace with the Europeans and other tribes. Many of the early treaties and land sales we signed with the Europeans were in our people’s minds more like leases. The early Delaware had no idea that land was something that could be sold. The land belonged to the Creator, and the Lenape people were only using it to shelter and feed their people. When the poor, bedraggled people got off their ships after the long voyage and needed a place to live we shared the land with them. They gave us a few token gifts for our people’s kindness, but in the mind of the Europeans these gifts were actually the purchase price for the land.³ 

After their forced removal from their northeastern states and then Missouri, Chief William (Kikthawenund) Anderson led his and other families to settle along the fertile north bank of the Kaw (Kansas) River on two million acres west of the Missouri River “permanently” reserved for them by the US government in 1830. Within Douglas County, this Delaware Reserve contained 400 square miles of heavily forested timber that stretched north and east from present-day Eudora, which explains why white settlers named their east-west streets for tree species. Here two bands cleared land and adjusted to farming crops (at Pine Sod Farms) and also hunted buffalo along a northwestern Delaware Outlet. They lived on this vast reserve for thirty-eight years until 1868, when four separate treaties decimated their socio-economic livelihoods.

After serving in the US army during the second Seminole War in Florida (that ended in 1842), Capt. Anderson Sarcoxie (1784-1876), a son of Chief Anderson, joined other bands on the Delaware Reserve.⁴ He warned white settlers about a ravaging flood in 1844 when he paddled his canoe from the north bluffs of the Kaw Valley to Blue Mound south of the Wakarusa River. Yet settlers didn’t believe his legendary story, because no flood had been recorded from that time until the devastating flood of 1903.⁵ For over twenty-five years, Chief Sarcoxie of the Turtle (Pùkuwànko) Clan and his wife Warmemaroqua lived in a prominent Delaware village on a high plateau above Mud Creek along the Leavenworth Road about four miles northeast of North Lawrence. With a commanding view of Mount Oread and the Kaw River bottoms (Fig. 2), this once prosperous village comprised a council house, stables, and twelve to twenty houses that Sarcoxie built for himself, his four sons, and their descendants. These landmark buildings were removed by 1893, their 500-acre farm was enclosed for raising cattle and corn, and around 100 graves in the Delaware burying grounds vanished from sight by 1900.⁶

Accounts of Sarcoxie’s legendary village arose when the US General Land Office declared that a subsequent Act of July 22, 1854 had “extinguished” Indian titles to land, based on Henry Clay’s pre-emption Act of 1841 regarding squatters’ rights.⁷ With the opening of Kansas Territory in 1854, white emigrants began stealing Delawares’ horses and livestock, and John Baldwin, a Missouri squatter, started a flatboat ferry from his claim in north Lawrence.⁸ Even though white squatters caused their troubles, Capt. (Tawhelalen) Ketchum was forced to give up lands in Jefferson and northern Leavenworth and Wyandotte counties, keeping a Diminished Reserve ten miles wide and forty miles up the Kaw River.⁹ In 1858, a US agent arrived on the north bank to persuade Delawares to sell even more land to the government in order to make way for more white settlements. The government presumed that “whether the Indians are disposed to sell or not, they are soon constrained to do so, either by the persuasion of money [or] the annoyance of whites, who take their lands whether or [not], or both the reasons combined.”¹⁰

The 1860 and 1861 exploitive treaties allowed a newly organized railroad company to purchase a right-of-way within a long strip of land that was transferred to the Eastern Division of the Kansas Pacific Railroad (KPR) Company and reorganized as the Union Pacific Railroad. Delawares had to sell 233,000 acres of their land for no less than $1.25 an acre, leaving 80 acres each for 1,250 members (100,000 acres), for the government presumed they came to believe that “the value of their lands will be enhanced by having a railroad passing through their present reservation.”¹¹ One year later, Governor Charles Robinson and his associates defrauded Chief Sarcoxie and his wife of their 320 acres (now Lawrence Regional Airport) on November 2, 1861 and pulled down their ceremonial Big House.¹² Andinawun, son and heir of Rockatoowha and Arsarkarparnaqua (Turkey band) also had to sell 294 acres to local Rep. Sidney Clarke, chair of the US House Committee on Indian Affairs.¹³

Eventually, two sawmills illegally depleted Delaware timber for railroad tracks, a toll bridge across the Kaw in 1863 (that redirected wagon trade from the Santa Fe road), and poles for telegraph lines to north Lawrence, not to mention innumerable cabins for white claimants.¹⁴ After finishing KPR tracks on November 26, 1864, an excursion train arrived from Wyandotte on November 28 and regular train service began on December 19—ironically with Delaware-named stations Sarcoxie, Fall Leaf, Journeycake (Stranger/Linwood), and Lenape—extending eastward. Over the next two years, the railroad company sold nearly 200,000 acres of Delaware property at prices far below actual values and made huge profits without investing their money.¹⁵

After the Civil War, when 170 Lenape men (out of 200) returned from serving in the Kansas Indian Guards for the US army, they discovered even more white thievery of their invaluable resources. In July 1866, the US government negotiated two treaties with the Delaware and Cherokee Nations. The Delaware treaty on July 4, 1866, involved Captain John Connor, Captain Anderson Sarcoxie, and Charles Journeycake, chiefs, and James Ketchum, James Connor, Andrew Miller, and John Sarcoxie, councilors (Fig. 3). This confusing treaty required tribal members to give up their Kansas lands and move to lands of their choosing in Indian Territory (Oklahoma) with an allotment of 160 acres for each family. For those who refused to move, they would be forced to relinquish their Lenape affiliations and become US citizens and their land would be held in severalty (separately) by the US Secretary of the Interior.¹⁶ Leaders chose to purchase a ten-by-thirty-mile tract of land (192,000 acres) in the northeastern territory from the Cherokee Nation, who had been forcibly removed there from Georgia during their tragic Trail of Tears in December 1838.¹⁷ But under Articles 15 to 17 of the Cherokee treaty with delegates of Chief John Ross, Delawares were given two options for moving to Cherokee lands: either abandon their tribal affiliation and become Cherokee citizens or preserve their tribal government without becoming Cherokee citizens.¹⁸

Ultimately, in order to preserve their cultural nation, 985 Delawares ceded their Kansas Reserve lands to the US government and moved to Indian Territory in 1867.¹⁹ Capt. Fall Leaf (Panipakuxwe) held out for six months until 1868, noting that 730 members refused to join the Cherokee Nation. Having served in Co. D of the 2nd Kansas Indian Guards during the Civil War, he petitioned General James Blunt for thirty-four destitute and starving members who had not yet received any promised payments.²⁰ The Delaware Tribe of Western Oklahoma finally achieved federal recognition in 1958 and officially changed their name to the Delaware Nation in 1999.

Around nineteen to twenty-six Lenape families (e.g., Ketchum, Ziegler) with fifty-six children decided to stay in North Lawrence and become US citizens.²¹ And their descendants are still here. For their “Return to Kansas” on July 10, 2013, this Delaware group purchased 87 acres of their original lands north of I-70 just east of the North Lawrence interchange. The following year, ten tribal leaders visited their historic property and other extant sites in the area with Professor Josh Fall Leaf, who teaches at Haskell Indian Nations University.²²

The Wandát (Wyandot) Nation

The Wendat, or People of the Islands, were the last eastern nation to relocate here, given their cumulative distrust of so many broken treaties. Known as Huron by the French, they originated around the Georgian Bay in Ontario, Canada, and after bloody wars and disease, they dispersed to Detroit, Michigan and to Upper Sandusky, Ohio. Even though they were fully acclimated within white society by 1828, William Walker Jr. (1800-1874), among others, finally agreed to relocate to Kansas in a treaty signed on March 17, 1842—with one major stipulation. In Article 14, the US government agreed to grant any land by patent west of Missouri (640 acres or one square mile), “not already claimed or occupied by any person or tribe,” to 35 Wyandots “by blood or adoption” and their heirs. “The lands hereby granted to be selected by the grantees, surveyed and patented at the expense of the United States, but never to be conveyed by them or their heirs without the permission of the President of the United States.” These “floating” grants came to be known as Wyandot Floats.

On December 14, 1843, the generous Lenape Nation formally ceded and granted 23,040 acres of their Kansas lands in the far eastern corner of their reserve to their Wyandot friends.²³ During his visit to the United States the previous year, Charles Dickens traveled to Upper Sandusky to meet with their white Indian agent and recorded the following:

It is a settlement of the Wyandot Indians who inhabit this place. Among the company at breakfast was a mild old gentleman [John Johnston], who had been for many years  employed by the United States Government in conducting negotiations with the Indians,  and who had just concluded a treaty with these people by which they bound themselves,  in consideration of a certain annual sum, to remove next year to some land provided for them, west of the Mississippi, and a little way beyond St. Louis. He gave me a moving account of their strong attachment to the familiar scenes of their infancy, and in particular  to the burial-places of their kindred; and of their great reluctance to leave them. He had witnessed many such removals, and always with pain, though he knew that they departed for their own good. The question whether this tribe should go or stay, had been discussed among them a day or two before, in a hut erected for the purpose, the logs of which still lay upon the ground before the inn. When the speaking was done, the ayes and noes were ranged on opposite sides, and every male adult voted in his turn. The moment the result was known, the minority (a large one) cheerfully yielded to the rest, and withdrew all kind of opposition.²⁴

On July 12, 1843, 664 people (including 150 children under age ten), weeping over leaving their beloved buried members, began their long journey, traveling by steamboat from Cincinnati to Westport.²⁵ While camping along the Missouri River, between 60 to 100 members died of typhoid and were buried in what became the Huron Cemetery (located at 7th and Minnesota in downtown KCK) with 100 more burials added the following year.

Pressured by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, leaders initiated and signed yet another treaty on January 31, 1855, in which they agreed to dissolve their tribal status and to allow literate members (419 out of 555) to become US citizens. Although the US government took their lands in severalty, Article 9 reaffirmed the status of Wyandot floats granted in 1842.²⁶ Three contested and modified floats in Sections 25, 36, and 31 were located in present-day Old West Lawrence (roughly between 7th and 9th and Michigan and Missouri Streets). James H. Lane also entered the fray over these land disputes and murdered Gaius Jenkins in the process in June 1858.²⁷ 

William H. R. Lykins, one of the first white, proslavery squatters, bought the floats of Robert G. Robitaille (1804-1879), who had located and filed his claims in April and June 1855.²⁸  Samuel C. Pomeroy purchased William Tennery’s float for $800 on June 28, 1855 that Charles Robinson filed on December 3, 1856. In November 1855, Dr. Johnston Lykins (William’s father) and Kersey Coates bought the floats of Joel P. Walker (1813-1857), including Section 21 (northwest of Lawrence just west of the river) by 1857 (Fig. 4). Walker’s floats were later subdivided among other white settlers.²⁹

In 1856, the settlement of Quindaro, meaning “bundle of sticks” (a metaphor for “strength through numbers”), was named after Nancy Quindaro Brown, Chief Adam Brown’s daughter. Organized by Joel Walker, Charles Robinson, and Samuel N. Simpson as an Underground Railroad station, the Quindaro Freedman’s School was created in 1865 and later became Western University for Black students, with Charles H. Langston as its principal in 1872. In 1867, when Wyandots refused to pay illegal taxes on this property, the land was seized and sold at a sheriff’s auction, and a majority of Wyandots (about 300) moved to 20,000 acres in Indian Territory.³⁰ In 1999, the Wyandot Nation of Kansas joined the Wendat Confederacy, in part to protect and preserve the Huron Cemetery, named a National Historic Landmark in 2016.³¹ Wyandotte County owes its legacy to the Kansas Wendats whose descendants are still here.

The Saawanooki or Shawanoe (Shawnee) Nation and Henry E. Smith

According to his 1891 obituaries, “Henry Smith was probably on Kansas soil before any other man in Lawrence. He came to this country, then inhabited only by Indians, long before Kansas was even a territory. . . . Henry also lived among the Indians for several years and was then known by the name of Choteau.”³² Born enslaved in Kentucky sometime between 1822 and 1831, reports indicate that he came to this area in 1840 and vouched for Chief Sarcoxie’s story of the great 1844 flood while working as a “blacksmith for the Indians.”³³

Henry Smith [a well-known courthouse janitor] was close on to seventy years of age at his death although he did not know himself his true age, nor does his old mother who  survives him. Born under the bans of slavery and owned by a chieftain of the Shawnee  tribe of Indians who resided in north Douglas county and contiguous territory in the 20’s and 30’s and even later, Henry Smith was contemporary with Blue Jacket, the old chief of the Shawnees who afterward proved his friend when Smith, with the help of the City Clerk [Amos G.] Honnold [1887-91] and others, proved up his headright [to property] under the rules adopted by the Shawnees which gave slaves a headright with other members of their tribe.³⁴

It is not clear exactly when and how Smith first met Shawnee peoples and how he came to this area. At some point, he or his family could have escaped human bondage from Kentucky across the Ohio River and lived with Shawnee residents in Ohio. Various bands of the Shawnee Nation began relocating to northeastern Kansas in 1826; Shawnee Prophet Tenskwatawa arrived with his band in 1828. But which particular “chieftain of the Shawnee tribe” “owned” Smith and later befriended him? Shawnee Chief Joseph Parks (1794-1859), of questionable Shawnee-European heritage, conducted the Hog Creek band from Ohio to Kansas in 1833. He owned an unknown number of enslaved persons on his 2,000-acre farm located a half mile south of the Shawnee Methodist Mission (and Manual Labor School in present-day Fairway, KS), founded and superintended by Rev. Thomas Johnson (1802-1865), another slave owner, in 1830. 

Chief Pascal Fish Jr. (1804-1893) came to Kansas around 1830 and worked as a blacksmith and gunsmith assistant at Fort Leavenworth in 1837. Sometime in the early 1840s, he moved to Eudora (named after his young daughter or “yaⁿdurǫʔ in Wandat) and obtained 1,172 acres of land. He operated a ferry on the Kaw River, turned his two-story home into the Fish Hotel for travelers, ran a grocery store with a blacksmith shop, cultivated corn and wheat, and never touched whiskey as a Methodist minister.³⁵ In 1857, he sold over 770 acres of his land to several Germans, and the town of Eudora was chartered in 1858. Although Chief Fish was opposed to slavery, he may have employed some people in connection with Johnson’s school.³⁶

Although genealogies are somewhat confusing, Smith’s contemporaries could have been relations of George Blue Jacket (Nawahtahthu) (1802-1867), a son of the great Chief Blue Jacket and chief of the Wapaughkonetta (Wapakoneta) band, who lived near present-day Lima, Ohio and came to this area in 1832. George’s brothers included Henry (Tetotu) (1812-1855) and Rev. Charles Blue Jacket (Kalwe) (1816-1897), a chief from 1861 to 1864. George’s sons were Charles (Matamea) (1831-1907), William George (1838-1861), and James (1851-1874). In 1855, three Blue Jacket brothers (George, Henry, and Charles) operated a ferry across the lower Wakarusa River southwest of Lawrence known as Blue Jacket’s Crossing.³⁷ Picking up on Smith’s story:

Henry Smith was a body servant to General Rucker, then commanding the frontier division of the United States troops whose business, more than anything else, was to protect from the ravages of the hostile Indian tribes the thousands of traders and more than thousands of gold seekers who were continually crossing the continent overland. Henry Smith proved himself not only a faithful body servant, but a valuable friend to General Rucker as he saved the lives of many people by his activity and bravery . . . .³⁸

General Daniel H. Rucker, first commissioned in the US Army in 1837, served at Fort Leavenworth from July 1840 to October 1842, when Smith reportedly first came to Kansas. Smith could have followed Rucker in any number of “Indian campaigns” on the western frontier for any number of years. Although his whereabouts remain unknown during the 1850s, he fathered a daughter Lou Ann in 1856 with his wife Minerva in Missouri (per 1865 KS Census). Then, in 1863,

Henry Smith was enlisted in the state militia under the call of Governor [Thomas] Carney and served with merit for over a year, being especially valuable in work which  required not only quick and prompt execution, but care in detail. Thoroughly trustworthy, and as bright as he was true, he made himself valuable.³⁹

Meanwhile, on May 10, 1854, the US government decimated and reduced Shawnee lands from 1.6 million acres to 160,00 or 200,000 acres several miles east of Lawrence and Franklin with an allotment of 200 acres for each member (Fig. 5). When Kansas became a “free state” in 1861, white settlers demanded more Indian removals, even as many “Loyal Shawnees” fought loyally for the Union during the Civil War. When they returned to Kansas, they received no compensations for their service and discovered that 130,000 acres of their lands had been granted and sold to white settlers, leaving only 70,000 acres for themselves. These “Absent Shawnees” could either remain in Kansas on only 20,000 acres as US citizens by 1865 or relocate to Indian Territory. In 1869, 722 Loyal Shawnees moved to Cherokee reserves and became known as “Cherokee Shawnee” citizens. The Shawnee Nation finally earned its own sovereignty in 2000, and in April 2022, the nation received a grant to begin preserving the Shawnee Mission School in Fairway, Kansas, and the sacred Shawnee Indian Cemetery (near Nieman Road and W. 59th) was returned to its rightful owners.

Anyone who resides in Douglas County must never forget the legacies left by the Kaw, Lenape, Wendat, and Shawnee Nations.