PrairyErth
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The agency sits in the mile-wide vale of the Neosho (the book Indian Place-Names gives five pages to explaining the word, which, among other possibilities, may mean “clean water” or “dirty water”; the small river has also been called the Blanche, the White, the Grand, and Six Bulls); the building is just below the juncture of Little John and Big John creeks and almost directly in front of where the larger stream flows into the Neosho. The well-watered but narrow valley cuts through the rocky, tallgrass hills, and today it grows milo, wheat, soybeans. Immediately north of the agency, on a rounded and grassed ridge, stands a forty-foot obelisk of limestone visible for miles; morning and evening, it casts a long and slender shadow as if a giant sundial. In the broad base of the monument, a small crypt holds the remains of an unknown Indian whose grave the river tore open, and with him is a copper box of “historical matter” to be opened in 2025, the bicentennial of Sibley’s treaty for right of passage through Kansa and Osage hunting grounds. Although the obelisk has no words inscribed anywhere on it, people call it the Monument to the Unknown Indian. When the Neosho exposed the grave in the 1920s, antiquarians found bones of a man and horse (the Kansa customarily strangled a warrior’s favorite horse and buried it with him to ride to the far village where time doesn’t exist; less honored dead received only their moccasins; today a can of chili or a chocolate bar may go into a casket); they also found numerous artifacts suggesting the man had been both a chief and a soldier in the Union army.
Frank Haucke, an unsuccessful candidate for governor and the son of the German immigrant who managed early to get title to this piece of the Kaw Reserve, convinced Boy Scouts and American Legionnaires to walk the nearby hills and gather good stones, and he paid masons to lay them up. The old Kaw at his reburial received a full military funeral: casket on a caisson, riderless horse with empty boots backward in the stirrups, and volleys from a battery of the Seventh Cavalry, the unit famous as Indian killers. A biplane sputtered over and dropped flowers on the four thousand people (whites had last gathered on the hill in 1868 to watch and cheer a halfhearted battle between the Kansa and Cheyenne—the final Indian engagement this far east); Roy Taylor, grandson of Ahlegawaho, the fine orator and last Kaw head chief in Kansas, gave a short allocution in the old tongue, a language that would never be heard here again.
A couple of years ago I went up to look over the agency and photograph it and three nearby rock cabins along the bank of the Little John Creek (it really should be the Little Big John). Charles Curtis, eighth-blood-Kansa vice president to Herbert Hoover, spent time here as a boy, a link that did not stop him from helping to dispossess the Kaw of their reservation in Oklahoma: even when this people saw one of their own reach the second-highest office in America, it worked against the survival of this luckless tribe. The agency, of cut and dressed limestone, once had twin chimneys, both now collapsed as are the west and east sides so that the sky pours in to light the one remaining fireplace now hanging to the wall with no floor beneath, its stones still rosy as if warm from burning logs; in places, plaster sticks to the end walls, both partly held upright by hackberry trees. What should be a splendid and informative historic site is merely a rather elegant ruin useful only for dreamtime. The possibilities for restoration now are remote in this place where the sense of history runs to genealogy, heirloom quilts, and embossed bottles.
Sixty feet south and also facing west stands a small one-story wooden house, sixteen by twenty-four, losing its siding to expose the adze marks on its frame timbers. Hackberrys support it too. In shape and color and condition, it looks like Dorothy’s house after it crashes down in Munchkinland in the 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz. I have heard various purposes—council house, dispensary, home—ascribed to the little place, none of which I can verify. One afternoon I went into it. Trash lay over the floor—wine bottles, antifreeze jugs, a pair of women’s red shoes (no ruby slippers these), and much rodent scat. At one time the place had been cut up into animal stalls, but the original floor plan was still evident, and, on the north wall near a small chimney, I could even yet read words on bits of newspapers pasted up for insulation, most of them stuck on sideways or upside down (would a literate person fix them like that?) so I had to wrench around to read them. I found one date, 1869, and on another scrap I could make out:
and on another:
I was lost in these accidental archives when a loud thump came like a huge footfall behind me; I wheeled around. No one there. I went back to reading, and another thump. Nothing. Paso por aqui.
On the Indian summer day when Joe and I were headed up along back roads to the agency, I told him about the noise, and he said, smiling, So speaks the Unknown Indian! Sometime I’ll tell you about a dream I had this spring when I was reading the Kaw Reserve archives.
We stopped at the agency and probed around, measured it before the rest fell in, and speculated on the general layout of the lost buildings. Across the road was a heap of cut stone, the remains of something neither of us could identify. Joe said, When I first came up here just a few years ago, the walls of the agency were still standing. It was looking pretty good, and then, suddenly, half of it was down. There’s been no archaeological work done here that I know of, although the state historical society once suggested stabilizing it, and I know the Haucke family wanted it preserved.
We tried to find the site of the second Kaw mission (the first still stands in Council Grove as a state museum) but concluded it disappeared when the Missouri Pacific Railroad rerouted its track bed. Then we went a quarter mile north to the wooded bank of Little John Creek and scared up a covey of quail that startled six deer into running that alarmed a bird into a cry unlike anything I’d ever heard in Kansas. There’s something weird here, I said. Surrounding one of the rock cabins were hackberry, dogwood, redbud, coffee trees, and a big clump of old pokeweed stalks bleached like skeletons. The little sixteen-by-twenty-four, one-room limestone house with dressed quoins and a manteled fireplace once had two windows and a single door, but now the roof was gone and a wall had collapsed just since I’d last seen it. The masons had laid the stone with some eye toward simple aesthetics, unlike the Kaw cabin the local Rotary Club took down to move into Council Grove a few years ago and inaccurately rebuilt. I asked Joe what had happened to all the rock houses once in the valley: They’re in fences, foundations, porches. I muttered that if Americans recycled trash instead of historic buildings, we’d be on to something in this country.
The cabin sat only thirty feet from the creek, an odd tiling, since the most repeated advice the Kansa offered settlers in Chase was not to build houses in bottoms. I asked whether this placement in the flood zone was a deliberate effort by the government to make the homes almost uninhabitable, and he said, I doubt we could ever prove that, especially since whites built their own houses in flood-plains, but the thinking behind such a scheme would coincide with what squatters wanted. The Kansa didn’t take to the houses anyway—claimed they weren’t healthy. They preferred their traditional bark lodges and buffalo-skin tepees, although they did apparently use some of the cabins as stables. A tepee is definitely easier to move out when the water’s rising than a rock house.
A tree had fallen and mashed in two walls of the next cabin. Joe said, A couple of years ago, one of my students tried to get the Kaw tribe in Oklahoma interested in preserving these last few houses and the agency, but nothing came of it—I don’t know why. Maybe some of them see the place as a reminder of the final days of their decline.
I suggested that, with only six full-bloods left, it could be difficult to stir up interest in a tribe now composed of many people who are seven-eighths white or half-Cherokee or three-quarters Choctaw or what have you. Given the American penchant for honoring places of bloodshed, if the Kansa had fought their last eviction with guns and turned this place into a Wounded Knee, it might have been preserved.
Joe said, Maybe, but only if whites had been killed too. Without that old magic word massacre, too many Americans of European de
scent think Indian history irrelevant—there’s no emotional tie. The popular notion of what to do with an Indian site is to loot it. People want Indian commodities, not their way of seeing the world. Turquoise rings, not significant concepts.
Back on the road, we drove toward Council Grove and past the “Madonna of the Trail” statue, her artificial-stone breasts grand enough to nurture a generation of pioneer squatters, and on to the franchise ice cream stand only yards from where the old Santa Fe Road crossed the Neosho. I ordered us a couple of milk shakes, passed Joe his, and said, fruit of the dispossession. We took them to the south edge of town, to the little park commemorating one of the honored stumps in the Grove, this one the Custer Elm, a sixteen-foot-circumference bole suffering from dry rot under its little roof; on the sign:
Even if we ignore the pejorative “tragic” and “massacre,” the “shortly before” was actually almost a decade, but then Council Grove has always been handy at making history suit its ends: a mile west of here, on another rounded ridge with a stone monument, is the alleged site (the evidence is less than scanty) of the murder and burial of Father Juan de Padilla, the Franciscan who accompanied Coronado on his trip into central Kansas in search of the gold of Quivira and returned the year following to try to convert Indian souls.
I said something about the insanity of missionaries and government agents expecting a tribal people, who had followed a successful stone age way of life for thousands of years, just to drop it along with their deepest beliefs and, in a few months, embrace industrial-age agriculture, as if Native Americans would take one look at whites and say, Thank you for coming to save us from our long degradation, you lovely people. The records show, to the contrary, that many Kansa considered it ruinously degrading to imitate squatters, merchants, or bigoted clergymen.
Joe, who had brought along a briefcase of documents to show me, sat down at a picnic table and said, Given what squatters and missionaries and politicians really wanted, I’m not sure insanity is as accurate a word as insidious. The standard argument has always been that the Kansa were among the most resistant and stupid of Indians and that they refused to give up traditional ways and accord themselves with Thomas Jefferson’s idea for them as “Christian-farmers.” But that argument is mostly a myth perpetrated by whites who made sure the Indians failed. Traders wanted them out hunting to supply the fur market, squatters and speculators wanted their land, missionaries wanted their souls, and bureaucrats wanted the power and money attached to sales of Indian land, so it became expedient to blame the Kaw themselves for lack of progress in learning how to farm. The myth also conveniently absolved whites from guilt and complicity in genocide. The Kaws’ failure to leave old nomadic ways was almost foreordained by whites.
These last few months I’ve been reading in the federal archives about the Kaw Reserve here—lots of letters to Washington from agents and missionaries—and they make clear what happened even though the history is complex, with many different people pulling different ways. But at the heart of it was the government forcing several land-cession treaties onto the Kansa over the years when they were still on their ancestral grounds up along the Kaw River. First, Congress made them cede twenty million acres—that’s the size of South Carolina—in return for two million acres and annuities from the sale of their lands. Then, in a later treaty, the government took that reservation away and handed them roughly a quarter of a million acres here along the Neosho, and then reduced that to the Diminished Reserve before finally forcing them into Oklahoma, where the Kansa had to buy land from the Osage. For the nineteen million acres they lost, they received a pittance, money that wasn’t a handout but the interest from sums received from sales of their land. But it was even worse than that because much of that pittance didn’t make it back to them. All of this done to a people who never went to war against the United States and never broke a treaty with a government that never entirely kept one with them.
When the Kansa arrived here after the 1846 cession, their earlier resistance to giving up the old nomadic ways began to diminish, especially when, a couple of decades later, whites began overrunning their western hunting grounds and slaughtering the bison that sustained their culture. The Kaw were open to farming because the women had cultivated plots long before even the Spaniards met them, but it was to the benefit of whites to make sure that Indian attempts at a new agriculture couldn’t succeed: in 1860, Indians with bows and arrows and rifles weren’t going to survive, but ones with plows and oxen might, and then they could hold on to their land.
The first nine years on the reservation here, the Kansa had no agent living nearby to guide them in such a huge cultural transition or give them a voice to Washington. Almost as soon as they arrived, squatters began creeping onto their land even though Kansas wasn’t legally opened to white settlement until 1854. In 1855, the first resident agent wrote his bureau in Washington and requested a survey of the reservation to settle disputes over squatter claims, but all he received was a rough sketch that was useless because there were no boundary markers on the reserve. By then, more than fifty squatters had taken up Kansa land, nearly all of it in the fertile valley. Council Grove was founded within the reservation although merchants denied that fact and fought for years to prove their claim. Since virtually no whites would benefit from helping the Kansa, the government talked but did nothing significant to stop squatters from taking land. Keep in mind that there were a couple of dozen other tribes in Kansas also being dispossessed.
All the while this went on, the Kaw were supposed to be receiving their treaty annuity of eight thousand dollars: for their sixteen hundred people, that’s five dollars each. They also received two thousand dollars annually for agriculture and education: a dollar and a quarter per person. A sum like that will guarantee failure in farming and schooling.
Throughout all this Joe was pulling out documents to show me. I said that local pioneer accounts are full of complaints about Indians begging and stealing, but the usual reasons are that the Kaws were degraded savages and constitutionally indolent. I’d not found any pioneer reminiscences that speak of the livestock and crops—and land—squatters stole from the Kansa. One account even mentions the settler who kept his tobacco in an Indian skull, yet, in Chase County, there is not a single report of a Kaw harming a white.
On the Neosho, the mam weapons were treaties, starvation, and whiskey. The placement of the reserve astride the Santa Fe Trail with all the desperate frontier riffraff it attracted was either misguided or criminal. The first attempt to help the Kansa here came from the Methodist mission and school where Council Grove is today, but the missionary, Thomas Huffaker, it seems, was always interested in finding where his personal financial benefit could coincide with the Kaws’. The later Dimmished Reserve is mostly his work. The Indians complained that the children they sent to his mission ended up hoeing crops that he sold at a profit to other whites, and, increasingly, they resisted this forced child labor so that within three years the mission closed, but Huffaker remained to speculate in Kansa land. Even had the schools been conducted properly, a few years is hardly enough time to move a people from the Stone Age into rock houses. The second mission, down by the agency, had similar problems and didn’t last any longer. Assuming that whites were sincere about these efforts, they learned nothing from their failures.
During all of this, the Kansa continued to hunt buffalo in the West because they could dependably earn ten to twelve thousand dollars a year and sometimes twice that. But the chiefs also continued asking the government to fulfill its treaty obligations and supply the plows, hoes, livestock, seed, fencing, and teachers promised them. What they received were short rations of this and that but lots of talk about a new treaty that would—this time—really fulfill promises. That’s when the agency and stone cabins and mill were built. All the Kansa had to do in return was give up 176,000 fertile acres of their 256,000. The proceeds of that land sale were to pay off and remove squatters: in other words, to receive what was alread
y theirs, the Kaw had to agree to give up two thirds of it.
After they signed the new treaty, the government failed to evict more than a few squatters and again didn’t supply enough agricultural assistance even though everything was to be paid for from the Kaws’ own money—which bureaucrats controlled. Worst of all, this treaty abolished tenure-in-common and stipulated forty-acre family plots. One missionary, who inspected the rocky uplands where most of the tracts were, said they were “nearly destitute of timber and water and but poorly adapted to agriculture.” By forcing them to cede their lands for a pittance and then keeping much of that money from them, whites were able to assure the failure of any Kaw transitions. Some of our most revered leaders did nothing, even Lincoln, who granted the town patent to Council Grove.
I said that wherever Indians have had land distributed to them individually, sooner or later it ends up in white hands.
The buildings the government put up at that time with Kaw money were inferior, and the profits from construction went to white builders, primarily a scheming New Yorker named Robert Stevens, an associate of Sam Wood, who, by the way, was a leader in the movement to land-job the Kansa. Many border-warfare heroes became more venal when the issue was Indian dispossession. The mill never received a burr to grind corn and wheat, so it was useless and soon began falling apart and then ended up going to a businessman who bought it for a fraction of its cost.