An anthropological report on the Mexican Kickapoos from the 1970s reveals some of their struggles to adapt as well as their struggles to adhere to traditional ways. According to this report, there were no cattails within fifty miles of the El Nacimiento village. To build their wickiups in the traditional way, Kickapoo women had to travel by train to Cuatrociénegas, 150 miles to the southwest. There they hired a truck to take them another twenty-five miles or so to swamps where cattails grew.59 That Kickapoo women went to such lengths to gather cattails generations after their ancestors had left the lakeshores and marshes of the Midwest hints at years of extraordinary perseverance in an unfamiliar clime.
The Kickapoos who chose to move did so in part to secure land, but the more they moved, the more tenuous their claims became. “All were intruders,” said an 1841 history of Texas in reference to the Kickapoos and other native newcomers, “who took advantage of the weakness of the authorities, and the confusion which reigned in Mexico [in the 1820s], to ‘squat’ upon a fertile soil.”60
Given the costs of moving, why did some Kickapoos choose to resettle far from other members of their nation, in the dry reaches of northern Mexico? Ironically, some of the things that might seem to have made Mexico unattractive—such as its aridity and history of intergroup violence—actually added to its appeal. The terrain might have been forbidding, but that meant a thinner, less settled population. The region might have been torn by violence, but that led Mexican officials to welcome the Kickapoos, in hopes of using them as buffers like the Spanish had. In sum, the wildness of northern Mexico offered the Kickapoos a chance to live their lives without as much meddling from Indian agents. The freedoms they found in Mexico explain why U.S. anthropologists in the 1950s held up the Mexican Kickapoos as the “best preserved” Algonquian group, and thus Coahuila as the optimal place to learn about the traditional cultural practices of northern woodlands peoples.61
Six men standing in front of a winter lodge in the Kickapoo village in Nacimiento, Mexico, in 1910. Dry and scrubby hills can be spotted in the background. Unable to obtain birch bark as readily as their ancestors had in the Great Lakes area, Kickapoo women relied more heavily on cattail canes, obtained at some distance.
National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Catalog Number PO1824.
Prominent among the freedoms found in Mexico was the freedom of mobility. The Mexican Kickapoos did not need passes to leave their communal lands, granted to them by the Mexican government. They could hunt more widely in the surrounding hills, and, indeed, hundreds of miles away in places like Durango and Tamaulipas.62 And they could raid Texan ranches with less danger of pursuit.
A photograph of the Kickapoo village near Múzquiz, in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila, taken by a member of a 1954 anthropological expedition sponsored by the Milwaukee Public Museum.
Kickapoo Village, Mexico, 1954, negative number #35 17-21, courtesy of the Milwaukee Public Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
BORDER LIBERTIES
Texans living along the border complained that the Kickapoos, sometimes in association with Lipan Apaches, frequently crossed the Rio Grande to “pounce upon the frontier.” They would then drive their booty of horses and cattle back to their refuge in Mexico.63 Even as the Kickapoos living in Kansas were winning praise for their agricultural pursuits (seen as all the more remarkable by their agent because they “were never known to labour before”), those in the borderlands were carving out a more fearsome reputation.64 According to an 1871 report, their raids were so frequent “that stock raisers in many instances have been compelled to abandon their ranches and drive their cattle into the interior for safety.”65
What particularly enraged the Texan ranchers was the Kickapoos’ impunity. There was much truth to their critics’ livid claims that the Kickapoos “care little for boundary lines.”66 But when it came to raiding, the Kickapoos cared a lot about boundary lines, because the international border protected them from retaliation. Rather than restraining them, the border opened up new spatial possibilities—until the U.S. Cavalry went after them, that is.
Sending in the cavalry was a last-ditch option that followed a number of other attempts to control the Mexican Kickapoos, starting with efforts to entice them to go to the Kickapoo reservation in Kansas. Prodded by threats that the “citizens of Texas” would take matters into their own hands, thereby sparking “serious difficulties” with Mexico, in 1868 the Committee on Indian Affairs commissioned an agent named Stephen S. Brown to meet with the Kickapoos living near Múzquiz, Mexico. Believing that the Mexican Kickapoos were principally Kansas Kickapoos who had gone south only three years earlier, the committee charged Brown with persuading them to “consent to their removal to some portion of the United States.” Adding to their hopes that this consent would be forthcoming was the conviction that the Kansas Kickapoos who had accompanied No-ko-what to Mexico in 1865 had become so “dissatisfied with their condition and prospects” that half of them had attempted to return to Kansas in 1866. All but forty turned back when their ponies gave out, and of the forty, only fourteen arrived at the Kickapoo agency in 1867. The report did not note what had happened to the other twenty-six who did not turn around, nor did it comment on the prospects of removing the Kickapoos “who had been living in that country for some twenty years past, and who were the remnant of a large number who had some sort of a contract with the Mexican government to serve it against the Comanches.”67
Brown arrived in Santa Rosa only to find that many of the Kickapoos were out “on the war path.” Despite this inauspicious start, he finally managed to meet with some Mexican officials and Kickapoo men. In the course of these meetings, Brown discovered that the Kickapoos had divided up their camps, to avoid being “gobbled up” by invading U.S. forces or extradited to the United States by Mexican officials. These camps, Brown reported, were so isolated that their localities were “unknown.” Brown castigated the Mexicans for having “neither the material means the physical nor the moral power to control—to civilize—to support and keep these people in subjection.” Instead of tracking them down in their wilderness haunts, the Mexicans seemed to regard the Kickapoos with favor. To Brown’s horror, when the warriors returned “flushed with triumph” from their raids, the townspeople of Múzquiz greeted them with “the ringing of Bells.” (Such evidence of community support may explain why Texas vigilante groups hesitated to go after the Kickapoos themselves.)68
The gap between Brown’s desire for subjection and the Kickapoos’ desire to avoid being gobbled up did not augur well for the talks. Although the Kickapoos were, according to Brown, in a state of destitution, when he pressed them to relocate, they said they would rather “arrange and determine all questions between them and the U.S.” with a delegation of their own people. Adding to Brown’s frustrations, the Kickapoos “occupied the time . . . on questions about the country and the Indians at home.” Given his conviction that the Mexican Kickapoos were Kansans, Brown could not understand why they had so many questions about Kansas. When pressed to go “back to your own lands,” one old man told Brown that “god is my Captain, the world my camping ground, and I am at liberty to go where I choose.”69
Brown returned to the United States. The Kickapoos continued to raid. Texan ranchers continued to insist that the Kickapoos be removed to Kansas, claiming that their foes were “very anxious to return to their old home” but were afraid to pass through Texas without protection.70
The U.S. government did not give up. In 1870 Congress appropriated $25,000 to remove the Mexican Kickapoos to Kansas.71 The following year, John D. Miles, the Kickapoo agent in Kansas, traveled to Mexico with three Kickapoo men (Nokowhat, Parthe, and Keoquark) and an interpreter in hopes of persuading the Mexican Kickapoos to “return to their reservation in Kansas, and again become wards of our government.”72 Miles reported that a Mexican spy from Piedras Negras had alerted the Kickapoos to his impending arr
ival in Santa Rosa. He also noted that “several squads were out on the ‘Chase,’ including Wah-pah-kah [this is one of several spellings that occur in the records], one of the principal chiefs.” Whether there was any relation between these two happenings, he did not say. The Kickapoos remaining in Santa Rosa seemed “delighted to meet their Kansas brothers,” who slipped away from their escorts to visit the Kickapoo village in Nacimiento without any Indian agents or infantry members to monitor them. Miles hired messengers to inform the absent Kickapoos of his visit and his desire to meet with them in council. About a week later, Wah-pah-kah returned to Santa Rosa and acceded to Miles’s desire to meet with “our Kickapoo brothers.”73
Despite their delight in meeting with the Kansas Kickapoos, the Mexican Kickapoos had mixed feelings about returning to a place where some had never lived. According to Miles, “quite a number of them, particularly the squaws, expressed a positive determination to go back with us.” Others did not want to leave. Miles blamed their obduracy on “local influences” who worked to “buy up Chiefs and head men,” so as to keep the Kickapoos as their defense against “marauding bands of Indians.”74
Wy-mo-sho-na, “the oldest chief in the Nation,” emerged as the leader of those who would stay. The younger negotiator, Wah-pah-kah, expressed some interest in departing, but he said he would need assurances “that the land was good, and where it was to be located, and how much was to be given them, and who their neighbors were to be.” He asked if he could take a delegation to see it. But no money had been allocated for scouting purposes, perhaps because U.S. officials stubbornly persisted in seeing the issue as a matter of repatriation “to their proper reservation in Kansas.” Wah-pah-kah’s proposal to select thirty of his leading men and secretly travel from Mexico to Kansas without an escort came to naught when Miles said he could give him no assurances of safety in his travels or government recognition upon arrival.75
In the final council meeting, all the Kickapoos declined Miles’s proposition, “asking to be let alone where they are.” Miles ended his report on the venture by blasting the Mexican government. It ought to be held responsible for all depredations committed on the frontier of Texas, he wrote, because he would have succeeded were it not for its “very tangible and substantial interference” with his efforts. Like Brown two years earlier, Miles returned to the United States with no Mexican Kickapoos in tow. The Mexican Kickapoos returned to the United States on their own, but not to Kansas, at least according to the reports that continued to implicate them in cross-border raids.76
THE LIMITS OF SOVEREIGNTY
When appeals to the Mexican minister of foreign affairs proved no more effective than appeals to the Kickapoos, the U.S. military took action, knowing that Mexican officials had refused to publicly authorize an anti-Kickapoo incursion but with some unofficial assurances that the Mexican government was unlikely to seriously complain.77 Guided by Seminole Negro Indian Scouts, a cavalry company led by Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie marched eighty miles into Coahuila in May 1873, in search of Kickapoos, Lipans, Potawatomis, and Mescalero Apaches. After traveling all night, they reached the Kickapoo settlement near Santa Rosa at dawn.78
They burned it to the ground and then proceeded about a quarter of a mile to a Lipan village, which they also destroyed. Mackenzie reported killing nineteen people and wounding two more, but these were just the casualties his men were able to count before beating it hastily back to Texas. They brought with them their prisoners: a Lipan chief and forty-one women and children, mostly Kickapoos, some lashed with lariats to their ponies. Fearing that they would escape if kept close to the Rio Grande, Mackenzie sent them under “strong guard” to San Antonio, recommending that they “be kept in a corral” until they could be further removed.79
The U.S. agent charged with peaceably removing the Kickapoos from Mexico was in Saltillo, the capital of Coahuila, at the time, awaiting an audience with the governor. He was shocked to learn of this turn of events. Fearing that it would make the remaining Kickapoos even more resistant to removal, he relayed their desire to have the captives restored to them in Mexico. He also reported that the chiefs had said, “with much truth and justice,” that they had ceased their raiding and had been “innocent of any depredation upon citizens of the United States.”80 Colonel Mackenzie regretted that the Kickapoos had suffered more than the Lipans, who he thought were the greater offenders in cross-border raids, but he insisted that they had to take the consequences for their unsavory associations.81
Having captured some Kickapoos, the U.S. government faced the problem of what to do with them. In authorizing the incursion, the commissioner of the Office of Indian Affairs had called for the Kickapoos’ immediate removal to the Kickapoo reservation in Kansas.82 But having been eaten away by white settlement, the Kansas reservation had become too small to absorb the Mexican Kickapoos. That left Indian Territory.83 Using the captives as hostages to force their family members to move to the United States, the U.S. prepared to relocate about five hundred Mexican Kickapoos to Oklahoma.84
The “main body” of the Kickapoos (led by Wahpesee and Thahpequah) traveled separately from the U.S. agents and their captives, arriving “worn out and . . . in a suffering condition.” After settling on the North Fork of the Canadian River (thereby “returning” to a place they had never lived before), they planted corn and vegetables. But their agent seems to have questioned their intention to stay, for when some asked to go out on the plains, he said no, a decision in keeping with his supervisor’s views that the Kickapoos’ grounds should be not only plowed and cultivated but also fenced.85
The Mackenzie raid showed that even an international border did not protect the Kickapoos’ place and space claims from the U.S. government. Rather than follow an 1862 extradition treaty, the United States had taken matters into its own hands.86 True, when Mackenzie went after the Mexican Kickapoos, he feared that he might face the gibbet for his cross-border incursion, having been issued only oral orders to do whatever was necessary to “clean up this situation.” Knowing he was on dicey diplomatic ground, Mackenzie did not loiter. The raid was a quick in-and-out operation, with no U.S. forces sent to follow the Kickapoos who fled deeper into Mexico to escape and none assigned to pursue those Kickapoos who returned to the Santa Rosa area the following spring.87
Yet Mexican sovereignty had its limits. In contrast to subsequent—and still ongoing—border enforcement efforts aimed at keeping people out, U.S. forces had marched into Mexico to forcibly patriate people believed to “properly belong within the limits of the United States.”88 Mexican Indians were American Indians (in the narrower sense of the word American) if and when that suited U.S. interests. Mackenzie’s commanding officer summed up the matter by saying: “There can not be any valid boundary line when we pursue Indians who murder our people and carry away our property.”89
Mexico protested the raid, but it did not become a full-blown diplomatic incident, in part because the Mexican troops had their own history of border crossings in pursuit of Indians.90 The people of the Piedras Negras area who rallied upon hearing reports that six hundred gringos had violated their national territory quieted down upon hearing that the purpose of the raid had been to chastise Indians who depredated Texas.91 The United States had made it very clear that peace between the two nations depended on the removal of the Kickapoos, and the Mexican government pledged, in response, to support that end.92
NATIONAL INSECURITIES
Following the Mackenzie raid, the Mexican government worked harder to monitor the Coahuila Kickapoos so as to avoid a repeat incident. Its reading of public sentiment led it to place more emphasis on preventing U.S. military incursions than on protecting its residents from the harassment of Indian agents. Concerned by U.S. claims that the next intervention would mean annexation, the Mexican central government instructed the new governor of Coahuila to cooperate with U.S. agents in their efforts to remove Kickapoos, Mescaleros, and Lipans. The governor fo
llowed through on these orders by appointing a commissioner to do the cooperating.93 Yet cross-border raiding continued, with the blame falling on Kickapoos even in cases when they were not at fault.94 Hoping to avoid another intrusion, the Mexican government allowed the United States to send a special commissioner to try to remove the Kickapoos who were not captured in the Mackenzie raid.95 He reported that many Kickapoos were out of the state hunting, and others were “scattered in bands several hundred miles apart.” He also reported that “the Mexicans in this section appear more determined than ever before to prevent the removal of the remaining Kickapoos, as they claim with some truth that it would leave them subject to constant depredations from the Mescaleros, Lipans, and Comanches.”96
In his next dispatch, three months later, the agent reported that some Kickapoos who were away at the time of the Mackenzie raid still had not returned. He also accused the appointed Mexican commissioner of trying to covertly defeat his efforts to remove the Kickapoos. “Yesterday,” he wrote in elaboration, “the Mexican Commissioner failed to be present at the Council with the Kickapoos, and when he did come to day, he told them he was instructed by his Government to say that they could go, or remain here, as they might elect, and upon my request that he tell them that it was the desire of his Government that they should go, he declined, claiming it was exceeding his instructions.”97 The U.S. agent returned to the United States in a huff by rail, with one Kickapoo man who had elected to return with him. Another 116 Kickapoos departed on their own on horseback, outfitted with provisions that the agent had purchased at “outrageous prices” from opportunistic Mexican merchants. Among those who welcomed this group to the United States was a group of white men who fired upon them, killing one. At least 140 Kickapoos (by the agent’s count) remained in Mexico, most of them still taking cover hundreds of miles in the interior.98
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