Kansas Territorial
Sesquicentennial Commission

Week of April 4 - 10, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

In early April, Shawnee tribal leaders met to consider selling their reserve. The land they'd occupied for thirty years stretched in a long rectangle south of the Kansas River from Missouri to a point near today's Topeka (different maps give different western boundaries.) Most Shawnee lived near Missouri where they had easy access to the American goods they had come to rely on. Sparsely settled western lands, the outlet, were primarily used for autumn hunting expeditions.

In 1854, the major area of Shawnee settlement was near Gum Springs, a watering spot that had long attracted travelers. Named for a grove of "gum trees" (probably Sweet Gum), a landmark in the grasslands, the settlement was west of three Christian missions that competed for the souls of the natives. The largest was Thomas Johnson's Methodist Mission and Manual Labor School on 2,000 acres near the Missouri line. Substantial brick buildings housed mission staff, slaves and boarding students, not only Shawnee but children from other tribes and Missouri white families. A few miles west was the smaller Baptist Mission, managed in the 1850s by Francis Barker. A mile further was the Quaker Mission run by Richard Mendenhall. Politics and ambition, as well as religion, created dissension among the personnel at the various missions. The Methodists, who had sided with the Southern Methodists in the national split of 1844, maintained a pro-slavery compound. Barker's Baptist Mission offered refuge for settlers dedi cated to the free-state cause, as did Mendenhall's Friend's Mission, strongly anti-slavery on Quaker principle.

New Englander Sara Robinson spent a few weeks at the Baptist Mission in the spring of 1855. It seems from her description that a fence bounded a group of log buildings. One entered by climbing over a stile, a staircase, rather than by walking through a gate. "After the road turns from the California road, it descends slightly.skirted with timber on either side.A large yard was enclosed by a high fence, with stairs by way of entrance. Some four or five steps were on the outside of the fence, a platform, perhaps two feet in width, above it and as many steps on the inside. The occasion of such an uncouth arrangement I cannot divine, although it prevails all through the country..Several dogs gave us greeting as we alighted from the carriage and stumbled over the stairway."

Take a short tour of the white presence in the Shawnee settlement by following Johnson Drive from I-435 east to State Line. The intersection of Nieman Road and Johnson Drive is the heart of the Gum Springs settlement (now named Shawnee.) An old single-story brick building a bit north on Nieman is one of the few remaining 19th century buildings standing. Continue on Johnson Drive past Merriam until you reach Shawnee Mission North High School (61st & Hemlock), which was built on the site of the Quaker Mission. A mile or so east on Johnson Drive in Mission turn left on Walmer. At the corner of 55th Street, two memorials note the site of the Baptist Mission on a slight rise in the landscape (now the yard of a suburban house.) Return to Johnson Drive and continue east until it ends; then drive on Highway 56 (Shawnee Mission Parkway) to Mission Road. Turn left to see the Shawnee Methodist Mission Historical Site, the most tangible remnant of the days of the Shawnee in Kansas. (562 words)

___________

Sara T.D. Robinson, Kansas: Its Interior and Exterior Life (Boston: 1856) Pp. 28-29.

The photograph is a receipt for a slave from the collections of the Kansas State Historical Society, transferred from their Territorial Kansas Online site. It says "Rec'd of Thomas Johnson Eight hundred dollars in full payment for a Negro girl named Martha of a Black complexion aged about fifteen years. The above described negro girl I warrant sound in body and mind and a slave for life and free from all claims---West Port Mo., May 24th, 1856, David Burge"

See PDF format

Week of April 11 - 17, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

Nineteenth-century Americans took great pride in pedigree, believing early arrivals of European blood who built a structure at any particular spot from Plymouth Rock to Seattle were somehow superior to more recent immigrants. The frontier blue book was the list of "Old Settlers," those who staked the first claims.

To celebrate the Territory's 25th anniversary in 1879, 3,000 Kansans met to reminisce about "Bleeding Kansas" and record their arrival dates in the "Register." Among the oldest of the old settlers was J. W. Lunkins of South Carolina, who arrived in Lawrence, he wrote, on April 13, 1854. Lunkin's entry is a minor mystery in territorial history because no other records of Lunkins in the territory survive. The typeset entry is probably an error due to handwriting interpretation and this early settler was actually William Hall Richardson Lykins, whose wife was from South Carolina.

Lykins, 26 years old in 1854, staked a claim overlooking the Kaw River in today's Lawrence in April or possibly on May 26th, a date often linked to his name. Whether April or May, his claim was illegal but, unlike other squatters, Lykins had lived in the territory for much of his life. Son of a missionary, Dr. Johnston Lykins, and grandson to another, Isaac McCoy, William came here as a child in the early 1830s with his parents. Johnston and Delilah McCoy Lykins accompanied a group of Shawnee on their journey to the Indian lands west of Missouri.

Isaac McCoy had lived on the frontier in the days when Indiana was the far west. He was a Baptist Missionary to the Miami there, then to the Potawatomi and Ottawa in Michigan. McCoy supported Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal policy, moving native tribes who wanted to keep their traditional culture. William Lykins grew up as a white child in Indian Kansas, living first at the Shawnee Baptist Mission in what is now Mission, Kansas, and then at the Potawatomi Mission, near today's Kansas Museum of History in Topeka.

By 1854, Isaac McCoy and Delilah had died and Johnston Lykins had retired from the ministry. The elder Lykins lived "back in the states," in year-old town of Kansas, where he made a success of real estate speculation, acquiring lots, building the town and then selling real estate at a profit to later setters.

In the spring of 1854, while would-be settlers impatiently waited for Washington to act, William Lykins might have had his eye on a particularly pretty spot in the western Shawnee Reserve, near the California Road. The overland trail that wound west of Blue Jacket's Wakarusa crossing passed over a high point of land that travelers called Back Bone Ridge, a limestone hill between the two valleys cut by the Kansas and Wakarusa rivers. Lykins picked a claim on the edge of the ridge that spring, but later in the summer moved down to the edge of the Kansas River. (480 words)

___________

Charles S. Gleed, The Kansas Memorial, a Report of the Old Settlers' Meeting (Kansas City, 1880) Pg. 234.
Daniel W. Wilder, The Annals of Kansas (Topeka: Kansas Publishing House, 1875) Pg. 41.
John N. Holloway, History of Kansas (Lafayette, Indiana: James, Emmons & Co., 1868) Pg. 116.

This week's attachment is a carte-de-visite photo of Johnston Lykins, William Lykin's father, from the collections of the Kansas State Historical Society.

See PDF format

Week of April 18 - 24, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

On April 22nd, Sarah Sutton and her family crossed the Missouri River into Kansas on a ferry, an old steam boat with the cargo area remodeled into a barn of sorts for livestock. The ferry carried the nine wagons,100 head of cattle, ten horses and "36 souls" in their party. Once across the river, they "camped on the bank, and felt very thankful that we were landed there safe. We had some oats to feed our horses, but the cattle had nothing to eat. We felt a little doughtful [sic] that night, it being the first we spent in the Indian nation, and so many strangers was tented near us."

Sarah, her husband John and seventeen of their children and grandchildren left Cass County, Illinois, a month earlier, on their way to the Oregon Territory. John and eldest son James had scouted ahead, riding mules to Oregon and back in 1853. They assured the family that Oregon was a healthy land free of the "Illinois ague"(malaria) that had laid Sarah low all winter. "There is warm winters and the easyest country in the world to make a good living in," she wrote a neighbor. ["Ague," the old-fashioned name for malaria and its intermittent fevers and chills, was probably pronounced like egg-you by the Suttons.]

The Sutton party spent three days in St. Joseph, resting their animals after the trip across Missouri and branding them for identification on the overland trail. St. Joseph was one of the primary "jumping off places," where easterners stocked their wagons for the five-month journey across the plains and mountains. "A great many are gathering here for California and Oregon," Sarah wrote in her diary. She was one of 10,000 travelers camped that spring in the river towns from Council Bluffs, Iowa, south to Westport. The year 1854 turned out to be rather slow for western migration; nearly 20,000 had set out across the Indian territories the year before, many of them crossing the northeast corner of Kansas en route to the Platte River road.

The Suttons left St. Joseph a bit early, probably to avoid the enormous rush in the first days of May, the date when the conventional wisdom dictated that travelers leave. Later departure could result in being trapped in October's mountain snows. Earlier departure meant that prairie grasses were yet too sparse to feed livestock, a problem the Suttons immediately encountered. On Sunday the 23rd, they were "obliged to travel about 5 miles back to find grass for our cattle." Sarah seemed displeased about traveling on that Sabbath, a common attitude when men's ideas of necessity overruled women's religious sensibilities. In that five mile backtrack, the Sutton party "passed three or four white families that were clearing a wide road" through the timber. These people were probably squatters illegally making claims on Indian land near what is now Doniphan County, Kansas. (480 words)

___________

Merrill J. Mattes, The Great Platte River Road, (Lincoln: Nebraska State Historical Society: 1969, Vol. XXV) Pg. 17.
Sarah Sutton, "A Travel Diary in 1854." Kenneth L. Holmes, editor. Covered Wagon Women, Volume 7, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987) Pp. 16-33

See PDF format

Week of April 25 - May 1, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

During the last week of April, 1854, the Legislature of Massachusetts approved and Governor Emory Washburn signed the charter for the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company, permitting the company to invest in Kansas emigration by issuing stock worth five million dollars, sold in $100 shares. Eli Thayer and his committee projected that 20,000 settlers would travel to the new territory in 100 parties of 200 people each, equipped with tools and machinery at the Aid Company's expense. The funds raised would also sponsor a newspaper and build hotels, lumber and grist mills. Once Kansas became a free state and an economically viable place to farm and settle, the Company would sell its land and businesses at a profit to be shared as dividends by investors.

The plan had flaws. Shares were expensive. Litigation-minded naysayers worried about liability. Reformers felt profit and idealism should not be mixed. Indeed, over the next weeks such concerns caused Thayer's Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company to collapse. But his idea of assisted Kansas emigration for a political cause took hold, not only in the hearts of free-state philanthropists, but also in the imaginations of pro-slavery partisans. As newspapers around the nation published news of the Massachusetts plan, Southerners, and especially Missourians, terrified each other by conjuring up a vast conspiracy sponsored by New England's most powerful capitalists. Pro-slavery partisans incited their neighbors with images of hordes of "undesirables", primarily criminals and recent immigrants, bribed to settle in the Kansas Territory just long enough to vote for a free-state legislature.

The same week, Governor Clifford signed another bill with far reaching social consequences if only short term practical effect, recommending integrated schools in the city of Boston. Massachusetts, at the time, was the only state requiring children to attend school, yet children of African-American descent were confined to their own institutions. For almost fifteen years, activists led by William Cooper Nell had been petitioning the government to permit blacks to attend the city's common schools. The bill resulted in the opening of Boston's schools "to all the children and youth within its limits, irrespective of complexional differences," for the fall, 1855, term, an enormous victory for the city's black community, about 3% of the population. Boston's integrated schools were not a permanent institution (the fight continues into our lifetimes) but the April, 1854, victory was a milestone in equal rights. (400 words)

(The portrait is of William Cooper Nell copied from the website aaregistry.com, a site for photos and biographies of African-Americans.)

___________

Samuel A. Johnson, "The Emigrant Aid Company in Kansas," Kansas Historical Quarterly Volume 1, #5, November, 1932. Pp. 429-441.
"The Genesis of the New England Emigrant Aid Company," The New England Quarterly, Volume 3 #1, January, 1930. Pp. 95-155.
John T. Hilton, William C. Nell, et.al., Triumph of Equal School Rights in Boston (Boston: R. J. Walker, 1856) Pg. 1.

See PDF format

Back to Kansas Territorial Sesquicentennial Commission