History

When the Santa Fe Trail was the great highway between the Missouri border, then the western limit of American settlement, and the Spanish town of Santa Fe, Council Grove was an important way point on the route. Situated on the Neosho River, it was a natural stopping place, well-watered with abundant grass and timber.

At this grove in 1825 the U.S. commissioners negotiated with the Osages for a passage across their lands. This right-of-way, surveyed by the government in 1825-1827, became the Santa Fe Trail as it is known today, and from this council with the Osages the town took its name.

In 1846 a treaty with the Kansa or Kaw Indians gave them a diminished reservation twenty miles square that included the site of present-day Council Grove. Traders and government agents soon followed the tribe to the new location. Seth M. Hays, the first white settler at Council Grove, established his home and trading post in 1847 just west of the Neosho River on the north side of the Santa Fe Trail.

The treaty of 1846 had provided that the government would make an annual payment of one thousand dollars to advance the education of the Kaw Indians in their own country. In 1850 the Methodist Episcopal Church South, which had ministered to the tribe since 1830, entered into a contract with the government, and construction of the mission and school building was completed by February 1851.

The building was of native stone, two stories high, with eight rooms, and was designed to accommodate fifty students as regular boarders, in addition to teachers, missionaries, and farmers. School began in May 1851 under the direction of Thomas Sears Huffaker, a twenty-four-year-old teacher who had served in the same capacity at the Shawnee Manual Labor School near present-day Kansas City. Classes for Indian children were held until 1854, when the school was closed because of the excessive cost--fifty dollars a year--of maintaining each student. The Kaw Indians never responded well to the efforts of the missionaries and sent to the school only boys who were orphans or dependents of the tribe. Girls were not allowed to attend. Members of the tribe considered the ways of the white man degrading to the Indian character.

During this period the school averaged about thirty pupils a year. Instruction was given in spelling, reading, writing, and arithmetic. The Indian boys showed facility in learning the principles of agriculture, but they received no instruction in the trades.

A treaty with the Kaw Indians in 1859 provided that the reservation be further diminished to an area nine by fourteen miles. These lands were relinquished in the 1870s, and the tribe moved to a reservation in present-day Oklahoma.

The mission building and grounds were sold to Thomas Huffaker in 1865, and he continued in possession for fourteen years. Thereafter, the property was owned by several individuals until 1926 when Carl I. Huffaker, a son of Thomas, bought the part on which the mission building stands.

In 1951 the Kansas legislature authorized the purchase of the mission property from Mr. Huffaker, and the Kansas Historical Society, as trustee for the state, now operates it as a museum. Find in-depth information about the Kaw Nation.