The Turtle's Beating Heart

by Low, Denise;

  We drive through the Lawrence downtown, where we see visible history. Kansas was the eye of the storm over slavery, and some results of this conflict are frozen in architecture. Missouri ruffians burned Lawrence twice. The few surviving buildings from Quantrill’s Raid are venerated landmarks. Because of effective preservationists, many other historic buildings remain as well. The old opera hall has Gilded Age glamour. Turrets and cupolas ornament the vernacular limestone courthouse. New buildings must blend designs with the old styles, according to the city code. The result is an homage to the town’s noble past.

  25. Diminished Delaware Reserve, Leavenworth and Wyandotte Counties, in northeastern Kansas, with Kansas River boundary on the south. Created by R. P. Studley & Co., between 1850 and 1859. Used with permission of kansasmemory.org, Kansas State Historical Society. Item no. 305064. Call no. R G4202 N63:2 D4 Z1850 .S8. KSHS Identifier: DaRT ID: 305064.

  We cross the Kaw River to North Lawrence. Beyond the visitor’s center, a former Union Pacific Railroad depot, the change is immediate. Economy is the first rule of this adjunct town’s appearance. The few commercial buildings are utilitarian. Houses are old and occasionally remodeled but often not. When we turn off the main road, the settlement is strung out along bottomlands, small houses dwarfed by large garden plots. Many are well kept, and many are not. Nothing suggests the past history of Delaware lands.

  I am surprised to find that any Delaware-era buildings survive. They are not protected by building codes, and so alterations make them almost invisible. A resident, Daniel Bentley, gave me the address of the Delaware trading post, on a road once called “Delaware Street.” We follow newly numbered streets to the site.

  26. Old Delaware Trading Post, North Lawrence, Kansas, 2014. Author's collection.

  The house is similar to most other buildings. Renovation is evident, but when we look more closely, the integrity of the original two-story form is preserved—a hall and parlor house with an overhang porch. The basic rectangular box has a porch of awning and posts and then various lean-tos jumbled at angles. According to a nineteenth-century historian, this basic cabin is an archaic Native form as well as European: “rectangular in ground-plan, and . . . constructed with a gable like a modern wall-tent, but with a hole in the top to let out the smoke.” Inside this two-story model a staircase would divide the downstairs into two halves and lead upstairs to the same arrangement on the top floor. My house today, a California ranch-style house, also is a long rectangle with one front door and a medium-pitched roof for rain. This is a practical design for the climate. Materials differ, but the same compact structure continues to work well.

  We stop at the next-door house to visit Bentley. His land would have been the post’s cornfield, and he raises a large garden in the rich soil. He greets us at his door and comes outside to point out details of the original store.

  “The north lean-to was once a kitchen,” he says. “They cooked outdoors during the summer, on the north side for shade. I find kitchen things when I’m tilling the garden—shards of glass so old they have turned violet.”

  “Anything more unusual?” I ask. Antique glass is found at most old sites.

  “A round metal spoon, very worn,” he says, “with an unusually deep bowl.”

  “That sounds like Delawares. They used deep-bowled spoons, originally wood or copper,” I say. “The shape is what would be Native, different from manufactured tableware.”

  “That must be it,” he says.

  We talk more about some other finds, including some arrowheads, but these were probably from earlier people. Knives, arrow points, scrapers, fish hooks, awls, and needles most often were made of metal by the mid-1800s. The detritus of a Delaware house site is almost identical to goods left around European American settler homes. An 1867 collection of Lakota and Cheyenne artifacts from a tipi encampment near Fort Larned, Kansas, displays a dozen coffee grinders, metal arrow points, bullet molds, and buttons. Military records of what historians call “Hancock’s War” help date these captured items, which are remarkable for the dominance of trade items.

  We thank Bentley for his help with local history. His neighbors kept alive memory of the Delawares in the oral tradition, even after the city changed street names.

  The North Lawrence trading post dates to pre–Civil War times, when Delawares prospered. The Civil War as a terrible time for Delaware people. Most of them sided with the United States government, and the cost for their service was the Kansas land. While Delaware men fought in the Indian Home Guards, neighbors burned their buildings and stole livestock. A record by a government agent for the Delawares, Fielding Johnson, itemizes the theft of three hundred horses, pigs, and cattle from October to December 1862. Arson was another weapon, and the marauders’ fires echoed terrorist tactics of Ohio and Pennsylvania. This intimidation forced Delawares to plan yet another move to the next Indian Territory, Oklahoma.

  Deeds show the transfer of Delaware land to the railroads and wealthy farmers in the late 1860s. The bare bones of the story are in a local history:

  In a treaty between the United States and the Delaware Indians, ratified on August 22, 1860, the government granted to Sarcoxie, Chief of the Turtle Band, approximately 320 acres including the greater part of the site of North Lawrence. All of this land was transferred to Charles Robinson, Robert S. Stevens, and William A. Simpson by Sarcoxie and War-me-mar-o-qua, his wife, on November 2, 1861. Almost immediately afterwards, the tract was broken up by the transfer of a strip of land to the Eastern Division of the Kansas Pacific Railroad Company, and other smaller sales to settlers who had moved to the community.

  Sarcoxie received and then sold North Lawrence land as the Turtle Band of Delawares faced overwhelming threats. One of the buyers, Robinson, was first governor of Kansas and a heroic abolitionist, yet he engineered this slick appropriation of the Delaware farmlands. One oral tradition story indicates he used the lumber from the Delaware religious building for his barn. The Delaware “big house” was on Robinson’s holdings.

  Kansas Delawares of the area keep alive their heritage, but few people outside their circle know they exist. In Lawrence almost no Delaware history appears in museums or on websites, yet they were Civil War heroes. Military records of the Indian Home Guards show that “of a total of 201 eligible Delaware males between the ages of 18 and 45, 170 volunteered for service in 1862.” Their efforts did not create allies among power brokers of the Kansas Territory, and reviving that history creates a conflicted view of the town fathers.

  We are grateful to find this one building still standing. We thank Bentley and continue our trip.

  We drive out of the maze of North Lawrence and turn east at Teepee Junction, a regional landmark. A former coach at Haskell Institute, Frank W. McDonald, built the fifty-feet-tall concrete tipi in 1928. He hired Navajo artist Tom Nokie to paint it with Plains Indian figures in headdresses. The odd American Indian–looking structure, a roadside attraction for years, was originally a gas station and beer garden. It was often staffed by the Haskell boarding school students for no pay. This is one of the few indications of a Native history, and it is for tourists. Nothing about it suggests an accurate history of Delaware people.

  In the car I return to the old map, which shows the string of railroad stations named after Delaware leaders: Fall Leaf, Journey Cake (now Linwood), Lenape, Tiblow (Bonner Springs), and Secondine. Steamboats navigated the Kaw and stopped along the river at these towns in the 1830s. Railroads later used the same stops. They constructed bridges just low enough to block steamboat traffic, which ended their competition. The low trestles attest to the ruthlessness of that industry.

  Along the way we see much farmland, and my husband mentions this is one of the best soils in the world, according to his geology class in college. The Rockies blew loess across the region, and a glacier from the Ice Age carried in more layers of soil. We see mostly fields of milo and corn but also many grand new houses. This is a mixed rural setting of gentrified and older pla
ces. All have a million-dollar view of rolling wooded hills and meadows.

  We continue eastward to a collection of houses on Fall Leaf Road. On a bluff overlooking the river, we see a substantial brick building, which turns out to be an old schoolhouse. Local history sources date this building after the 1903 flood. When the old site of the town flooded, all the original buildings were lost, including any Delaware structures. Two huge black dogs appear, barking furiously, to hurry us on our way.

  In Linwood, farther down the road, I think of my friend Janet Allen, who descends from the Delaware man Journey Cake. The town no longer bears his name, but the school district has a short history: “This brave man escaped his captors and journeyed a long distance home to the Linwood area. Along the way, he suffered many hardships, with only a small cake of corn bread for sustenance. He was re-christened ‘Journey Cake’ by his tribe after telling them his story upon his arrival home.” This was the last leader before removal to Oklahoma. The town also had the name “Stranger,” and the nearby creek bears this name. Settlers changed the town name to Linwood for the linden trees on the site. This also removed reminders of the Delaware presence.

  A member from the Kansas Delaware Tribe of Indians told me about the original Delaware store that still stands in Linwood, so we slow down and read street signs. I appreciate her emailed directions today as we scrutinize the houses, many of which date to the 1860s. Most of the town’s original buildings have additions that are historically haphazard. The trading post is one of them—an upper story has been added to half of the house. Without help we would have never recognized it. We stop to take a photograph of the characteristic front porch with the roof overhang. This is one of the few relics of Delaware history. We are disappointed at how the addition destroys the lines of the building.

  At the edge of town we follow a dead-end road and find Stranger Creek, close to its confluence with the Kaw and surprisingly wide. A railroad bridge spans it, and as we watch, a train of coal cars hurtles by. Somewhere owners continue to reap profits from land once acquired from the Delawares.

  Next is the site of Lenape, but little appears to remain but fields until we find a road over the tracks. Down the incline we find a collection of old farmhouses. They resemble historic photographs, but I cannot be sure. When I was young, I would not hesitate to stop at a country house and inquire. People were always welcome to visit. After In Cold Blood and other random tragedies, people are suspicious of strangers. We keep moving.

  Finally, we find the Lenape Cemetery, a square of precious farmland preserved despite the passage of time and the high price of land. The hillside has a range of gravesite markers, ornate to simple, including fieldstones. Some tablet-shaped marble stones are quite old. I am surprised to find the name Bare on several tombstones. This is one of the archaic spellings of my Bair or Bear family. Henry Bare’s stone has an image of shaking hands. Perhaps this is a mason’s symbol or a welcome to heaven or a last handshake. It is not overtly Christian, like the crosses on other markers. It is identical to the tombstone for the Delaware leader Black Beaver at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Beaver is another of my family names in the cemetery, a husband and wife.

  We walk through the hillside lots and find names like Allen, Boaz, Burnett, Cullison, and McConnell. Fresh mounds of dirt show this remote rural cemetery still receives souls from the surrounding community. The dates and names and a few images are all that commemorate these people’s lives. We finish our walk through the aisles and leave.

  We continue southward across the river to Eudora, a town named after a Shawnee man’s daughter. Here we find the historic Delaware cemetery, the Zeigler Cemetery. The fenced lot filled with cedars has more direct ties to tribal history. A plaque recounts, “The Retsingers deeded the land for the cemetery in the 1870s so Delaware Indians who lived in this area from 1829 to 1866–67 would have a burial place.” When these Delaware people smoked their prayers every evening along the Kaw River, they left these words, etched on the cemetery marker: “We will have peace as long as the moon will rise and set on the Kaw.” Their breath mixed with mist, and so they commingled with the river. Their bones became part of the land. Names include Adair, “Carl ‘the Chief’ Koerner,” “Colored man, name unknown,” Longacre, Matthew, Retsinger, Schultz, Swisher, and Zeigler. The earliest burial is 1833, and the latest is 1944. Farmers and relatives in the area keep the cemetery neatly mown. My husband and I leave tobacco at the cemetery gate and finally turn to the road home. Another cemetery in Kansas City holds Delaware leaders like Captain Ketchum and his family, but the quick winter twilight is turning to night.

  The history of Delaware people may seem to be fading farther into the past. Yet the dice roll and fortunes change. On July 10, 2013, the Delaware Tribe of Indians, of Bartlesville, Oklahoma, purchased eighty-seven acres of the North Lawrence farm where the Big House once stood. They have no plans for the land yet, but Delawares renew their ties to former Kansas holdings. On the way back to the highway my husband and I pass a small sign that identifies the land.

  Delawares endured the longest Trail of Tears among Native nations, extending from the 1600s to 1867 and from the Atlantic Ocean to Oklahoma. The resulting diaspora of Delaware bands is a direct aftermath. Each place on that route retains importance to Delaware people, including these Kansas lands. Most important is the presence of the Kaw River, still a major source of water for people. The valleys continue to be transportation routes for trains and highway traffic. Whenever I look north from my house to the river, I see the Delaware history as a road that starts in the distant past and travels along the Kaw River and continues.

  *

  Native writers of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first create literary works that reflect on Native identities in their myriad forms, from “blood quantum,” a measure usually restricted to animal breeds, to cultural experience. These authors create a virtual community, expanded by social media. This is a new haven as Delawares and other Native people disperse geographically in a country where mobility is often essential to livelihood. Over 70 percent of American Indians and Alaska Natives live away from tribal communities, according to the 2010 U.S. Census. Native people are among the most mobile of United States citizens. They journey to homelands for tribal dances, and they follow the powwow trail, which leads all over the country.

  Prose writer Louis Owens uses the term blood trails, which also defines Native people, especially mixed-bloods. The migrations of forced removal, for Owens the Cherokee Trail of Tears, parallel heritage, or “bloodline-related,” experiences. One aspect is the reconfiguring of original literatures, which is “another kind of removal.” Even Native groups that did not lose their lands struggle to adapt to the English language. Their stories do not fit easily into United States mainstream culture. All Native people live in at least two worlds, usually more.

  Delaware journeys away from a geographic homeland—through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin or Indiana, Missouri, and Kansas—are a series of dislocations. The original center place, the New Jersey shore region, is more than a physical point. It is a moment of coherence, a place and time when narratives corresponded most directly to people’s environment. The farther away from this point, the more individuals struggle to create new survival stories. Sometimes the struggle is creative, sometimes tragic.

  Diaspora is also an internalized process. Sometimes the process of fragmentation becomes the new tradition. In government and church boarding schools for American Indians and Alaska Natives, many students were forcibly separated from their families. They were beaten by staff. In turn they began beating their children, introducing a new practice because that is what they learned. My grandparents avoided the boarding schools and problems associated with them by staying outside of the federal jurisdiction. This did not prevent a legacy of broken histories. My mother separated herself from her parents and extended family.

  My grandfather disappeared periodically and rode the rails, inexplicable lapses from his responsibilities. M
y brother remembers his calls from California or Oregon, half a continent away. These distant destinations, I discovered through census records, were not impulsive wanderings but, instead, corresponded to places where his maternal cousins lived. One owned an orchard in Oregon, where Grandfather could find seasonal work. On his travels he tried to keep contact with a dispersed family, an impossible task but one he attempted. He could not, however, articulate this quest to even his most intimate family members.

  Owens’s family retained some oral history and lost more. When he wrote about his experiences, he suffered public attacks for his mixed identity, yet he relayed an important story about a large population of Native-descended people. His eventual suicide was a tragic loss. This final choice is the most extreme form of silence.

  Silence is a common symptom of the trauma of Native displacement. Chickasaw author Linda Hogan writes about the “unnamed grief” her family experienced as the family lived in a complicated, urbanized, and difficult world: “As a young person coming from silences of both family and history, I had little of the language I needed to put a human life together. I was inarticulate to voice it, therefore to know it, even from within. I had an unnamed grief not only my own.” Hogan’s “silence of both family and history” describes my own experience. My family mostly suppressed controversial histories of the past, except for rare private conversations like those my brother and I had with my grandfather. I presume they occurred with my father as well, since he changed political allegiances. Never were these topics discussed openly with the entire family. The incident that precipitated the family move to Kansas City, at the height of Ku Klux Klan activity, is only briefly sketched. Stories of other Native-descended people in the region create some context. In Oklahoma, a few miles south of my Bruner great-grandparents’ homes, Jeanetta Calhoun Mish describes terrifying vigilante activity, including lynchings. This Delaware writer’s accounts include attacks on Native people as well as African Americans. John D. Berry recounts the 1930s story of his mother, then in second grade, telling her class she was Indian. That night neighbors shot up the house and forced the family to move.