Kansas Territorial
Sesquicentennial Commission

Week of February 1- 7, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

As February arrived in 1854, the Konza or Kansa Indians were living in winter camp on their reserve near what is now Council Grove in Morris County. When painter George Catlin visited the Kansas 20 years earlier, before they were assigned a reservation, he guessed they numbered 1,560 in their settlement, which was on the Kansas River between the future towns of Topeka and Manhattan. Contact with European, Asian, and African diseases and the loss of their hunting lands continually reduced their numbers. By the time they were moved again in 1872 to Indian Territory south of Kansas, only 600 people remained.

The Kansas, natives of the Great Plains, had adapted few characteristics of white culture or of the eastern Indians who'd been resettled among them. They struck American travelers as particularly fierce and wild looking. Catlin remarked on the men's intricate hair styling. Nearly all cut their hair quite close to the scalp leaving a short tuft they called the scalp lock. Within this tuft they left a small braid of long hair tucked up with a bone and ornamented with shocks of deer and horsehair dyed red, eagle feathers and other decorative items. Kansa men painted their faces and shoulders with swaths of vermillion paint, startling Easterners who never expected to encounter literal red men.

When artist Alfred Jacob Miller visited them in the late 1830s he noted the buffalo herds that had provided food, clothing and shelter were roaming to the west on the hunting lands of other, more aggressive tribes. The Kaws lived on the sparse small game left and "on recollections of the past: the future for them is entirely hopeless." [275 words]

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George Catlin, North American Indians (Edinburgh, Scotland: John Grant, 1926) pages 27-8
Marvin C. Ross, The West of Alfred Jacob Miller (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968) pages 16, 41.

Week of February 8- 14, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

February of 1854 saw a relatively mild winter on the central plains according to Reverend C. B. Boynton who recorded the weather at Fort Leavenworth. On the 12th, the temperature at 9 a.m. was 64 degrees, the morning high for the month.

In Washington City, tempers and public interest grew hot while debate over the Kansas and Nebraska Territories extended into its second month. Texas's Senator Sam Houston set aside his usual whittling as he rose often from his desk on the Senate floor to voice the minority opinion. Houston, angry over the proposed bill taking Indian Territory for white settlement that could include slavery, refused, as usual, to get in line behind his fellow Southern Senators. On February 8th, he surprised everyone with the outrageous idea that women be invited to listen to the proceedings on the Senate's floor. There were a hundred ladies waiting outside the door, he argued, hoping to obtain a seat in the balcony, the small gallery to which they were confined by tradition. "One hundred ladies?" questioned his peers. "Well, possibly fifty." The women eager to view the historical debate remained outside in the cold.

One who found a seat in the second floor gallery was Thomas Ewing, Jr., a student cutting his classes at Brown University in Rhode Island. "I was intensely anti-slavery," he recalled. "I was hot with indignation at the Whig leaders who supported the repeal of the Missouri compromise, or acquiesced in it, or resisted it but feebly."

On the 14th and 15th, Houston made a long speech reminding the Senate that land in the Indian territories had been promised to the tribes in perpetuity. While others "say in substance that God Almighty has condemned [them] and made them an inferior race; that there is no use in doing anything for them..I must be permitted to dissent.If the Indians on the frontier are barbarous., who are we to blame for it?" [325 words]

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Thomas Ewing, "The Struggle for Freedom in Kansas," Cosmopolitan Magazine, May, 1894, quoted in G. W. Brown, Reminiscences of Governor R. J. Walker (Rockford, IL, by the author, 1902) Page 159
James L. Haley, Sam Houston (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002) Pages 321-2

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Week of February 15- 21, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

An advertisement in the St. Joseph Gazette on the 15th offered $500 for return of a "Negro Man Runaway. Sam about 20 years of age, six feet high, weighs about 170 pounds, has a slight stoppage in his speech and formerly owned by John H. Whitehead of St. Jo." Sam had disappeared months earlier, possibly heading for the free states of California or Iowa. The $500 reward was about half of a young man's sale value, an enormous amount when daily wages for free labor were often counted in cents rather than dollars.

If Sam's destination were California, he probably followed the usual trail that cut across the northeastern part of the proposed Kansas Territory up to the Platte in Nebraska. Traders and immigrants who took that route past Fort Kearney were among the few American citizens who knew firsthand about land west of Missouri. One who called himself White Bear wrote a letter to the Gazette describing his experiences. Those looking for a "sylvan fountain of the wilderness" would be disappointed. The soil seemed "good as far as the Big Blue but the timber. . . seems to have a natural abhorrence for all portions of the country except the creeks [where the trees] remind one of a young man's mustache." His advice: adventurers should stay east of the Big Blue lest they "might wish themselves at home and become disgusted with the country."

Few people could read the landscape well enough to understand why the scruffy trees thrived only near the waterways. C. W. Boynton believed his scientific studies contradicted the common idea that Kansas was "a land of drought, unfit for agricultural purposes." The 30 inches of rain he measured at Fort Leavenworth in 1853 was about equal to precipitation in Wisconsin, St. Louis or the British Isles. Kansas, he declared, did not suffer from a deficiency of rain. "The soil is of a character that renders it a vast reservoir of the water which falls. It sinks deep, and remains to supply the roots of plants when the surface is dry."

Boynton failed to realize that Kansas's 30 inches of rain, which fell in isolated torrential events in contrast to England's steady drizzle, would not support traditional European-American farming practices. Optimistic boosters of western expansion ignored the implications of a boom and bust rain cycle. Many relied upon a principle of the era's popular science that claimed rain followed the plow.

The theory hypothesized that prairies like Kansas were dry because the soil was untilled. Once farmers turned the grasses over, the soil would attract rain clouds. If rain fell primarily in agricultural areas, why not classify farming as the cause of the rain, rather than the reverse? (450 words)

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Letter from White Bear, Fort Kearney on the Oregon Route, February 19th, 1854, printed in the St. Joseph Gazette March 15, 1854.
C. B. Boynton and T. B. Mason, Journey Through Kansas with Sketches of Nebraska (Cincinnati: Moore, Wilstach, Keys, 1855) Pages 62-3

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Week of February 22- 29, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

As Americans reading about Congressional Debate over the new territory in their newspapers began to recognize the name Kanzas, most believed the center of the continent to be a great desert, home to a few nomadic tribes hunting sparse game. In truth, the land organized into the Kansas-Nebraska Territories also supported settled residents who farmed, hunted and made a living from American travelers on the emigrant and trade trails. In 1854, many of the Native Americans there, the Shawnee, Delaware and Wyandot, had been born in the Ohio Valley.

One of the first spots in Kansas where eastern adventurers met Native Americans was Blue Jacket's Crossing on the Wakarusa River in the Shawnee (then often spelled Shawanoe) Indian Reserve. George Blue Jacket was the grandson of a famous Shawnee warrior. In 1791, long before General George Armstrong Custer's name became synonymous with an overwhelming Army loss to native tribes, General Arthur St. Clair lost his military reputation when he came up against Blue Jacket and several other warrior chiefs in what is now Ohio. St. Clair also lost nearly one thousand men while the Shawanoe, Miami and Delaware suffered an estimated thirty-five casualties. But one victory, no matter how impressive, did not win the war, and the Shawanoe were soon pushed west to Indiana. Blue Jacket's sons and grandsons later walked under Army escort to the unnamed land west of the Missouri.

George Blue Jacket charged a fee to cross the Wakarusa at a particularly low and stable spot, and he kept a hotel on the river. Traveler William Hutter described Blue Jacket's Crossing, "a sort of Shawnee boarding house." Blue Jacket's two houses, typical of Shawnee buildings, were "the most commodious and pretending houses that the best of the Indians have in this country, and consist of two or one and a half story log houses, built about 12 or 15 feet apart, gable to gable, and the roofs made to meet over the intervening space which is the only place on which any doors open. This space is floored or not, and more or less enclosed at the pleasure of the owner. The better ones have a kitchen placed immediately behind this space."

Using our present geography to locate Blue Jacket's Crossing, it was over the Wakarusa, a narrow river with rather deep, muddy banks that winds from Wabaunsee County, through Shawnee County to meet with the Kansas River at Eudora in Douglas County. All man-made evidence of the crossing is gone, but it was southwest of Eudora, just south of Kansas Highway 10, near Douglas County Highway 1057. On the south bank is a rocky cliff, which provided natural gravel underfoot for the horses and oxen pulling wagons. George Blue Jacket's grandfather, who dealt such a blow to the fledgling United States Army, was a familiar name to many of the people using this branch of the trade trail to Santa Fe or the emigrant trail to California and Oregon. (500 words)

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Louise Barry (editor), "Scenes In (And En Route To) Kansas Territory, Autumn, 1854: Five Letters by William H. Hutter," Kansas Historical Quarterly, XXV, 3, Autumn, 1969, Pages 312-336.

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