The Kansa Indians And The Census Of 1843 Kansas

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.

After their first contacts with whites in the seventeenth century, the Kansa Indians began migrating from the eastern United States to what is now eastern Kansas, by way of the Missouri Valley. Settling in villages mostly along the Kansas River, they led a semi-sedentary life, raising corn and a few vegetables and hunting buffalo in the spring and fall. It was an idyllic existence-until bad, and then worse, things began to happen. William E. Unrau tells how the Kansa Indians were reduced from a proud people with a strong cultural heritage to a remnant forced against their will to take up the whites' ways. He gives a balanced but hard-hitting account of an important and tragic chapter in American history.

This book shows that without the cooperation of the"mixed-bloods," or part-Indians, dispossession of Indian lands by the U.S. government in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would have been much more difficult to accomplish. The relationship between the Métis and the loss of Indian lands, never before fully explored, is revealed in Unrau's study of Charles Curtis, a mixed-blood member of the Kansa-Kaws. Curtis is best remembered as Herbert Hoover's vice-president, but he also served in Congress for more than 30 years. A successful lawyer and Republican politician, Curtis had spent his early years on a reservation but grew up comfortably and fully integrated into the white world. By virtue of his celebrated status, he became the most important figure in the debate over federal Indian policy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the Indian expert in Congress, Curtis had significant power in formulating and carrying out the assimilationist program that had been instituted, particularly by the Dawes Act, in the 1880s. The strategy was to encourage reservation Indians to reject communal life and reap the rewards of individual enterprise. Central to these developments were questions of ownership, land claims, allotments, tribal inheritance laws, and what constituted the public domain. The underlying issues, however, were Indian identification and assimilation. The government's actions—affecting schools, the federal courts, Indian Office personnel, allotment and inheritance laws, mineral leases, and the absorption of the Indian Territory into the state of Oklahoma—all bore the mark of Curtis's hand.

Miner and Unrau show Kansas at midcentury to be a moral testing ground where the drama of Indian inheritance was played out. They related how railroad men, land speculators, and timber operations came to be firmly entrenched on Indian land in territorial Kansas.

"Census and land of those Shawnees whether native or adoption who have or have had made for them, the selections of two hundred acres of land each, to which they are entitled under the 2nd Article of the treaty made with that tribe on the 10th May 1854.".

The first volume in the series State Bibliographies, this book provides comprehensive coverage of secondary materials on Kansas history and also includes useful references to major archival and manuscript collections. Although excellent specialized bibliographies have been published, this volume is the most complete compilation of historical and related materials for the state. Its broad and diverse scope ranges from standard political and economic studies to social and environmental histories, to local studies, and to regional studies with special significance to the state. The volume is divided into sections on prehistory; indigenous population; early exploration; territorial period; statehood; Kansas since 1898; agriculture; economic life; transportation; cultural life; education; science and medicine; social history; general histories and reference guides; local and county history; historiography materials; and historic sites. Entries include informative annotations designed to aid the novice and the scholar. The volume is thoroughly indexed by author and subject and includes the only existing index for all the major articles appearing over the past 125 years in the Kansas State Historical Society's major publications.