Lands of the Kansas Indian Tribe

The earliest map locating the Kansas Indians is that of Marquette, in 1673. Marquette did not visit the Missouri River country, but made his maps from information drawn from Indians, or perhaps adventurers who had wandered far from the feeble settlements. This map shows the Kansas tribe west of the Missouri, very nearly where it was then in fact located. All the early maps of the interior of North America are necessarily erroneous. Their locations of physical features and Indian tribes are invariably wrong. But their approximations are valuable.

In an article on the “Kansa or Kaw Indians,” Volume X, Kansas Historical Collections, George P. Morehouse quotes Bougainville on French Forts, who said in 1757:

Kansas.— In ascending this stream [the Missouri River] we meet the village of the Kansas. We have there a garrison with a commandant, appointed, as in the case with Pimiteoui and Fort Chartres by New Orleans. This post produces one hundred bundles of furs.

On July 2, 1804, Lewis and Clark made the following entry:

Opposite our camp is a valley, in which was situated an old village of the Kansas, between two high points of land, on the bank of the river. About a mile in the rear of the village was a small fort, built by the French on an elevation. There are now no traces of the village, but the situation of the fort may be recognized by some remains of chimneys, and the general outlincs of the fortification, as well as by the fine spring which supplied it with water. The party who were stationed here were probably cut off by the Indians, as there are no accounts of them.

This old village found abandoned by Lewis and Clark had no doubt grown up around the French fort. And this French post was certainly the first settlement and trading-station ever set up in what is now Kansas by the white people. It was established after the visit by Bourgmont, in 1724, and was in a flourishing condition in 1757.

On previous pages of this work will be found much concerning the early location and history of the Kansas Indians. For that reason it is not deemed necessary here to write an exhaustive review of the tribe in its earliest connection with white men. In the time of Coronado the Kansas probably lived near the mouth of the Kansas River. There may have been villages of the tribe below and above the Kansas, and even on the east side of the Missouri in that vicinity. There is a very ancient village site on the farm of William Malott, a mile or perhaps a little more, northeast of White Church in Wyandotte County. George U. S. Hovey made a collection of several hundred arrowheads, and other weapons and implements from that site. The village was evidently a large one, and occupied for a long period. It was most probably an old Kansas town.

It had already been noted that the Kansas Indians could not have been Escanjaques. At the period when the Spaniards came in contact with the Escanjaques on the Arkansas, the Kansas were evidently living in towns along the Missouri, principally above the mouth of the Kansas River. They did not then own or claim much of the valley of the Kansas—perhaps they did not claim west of what is now Wyandotte County. Their country joined, on the south, that of the Osages, always a much more numerous people than the Kansa.

The Pawnees were the hereditary enemies of the Kansas. There is every reason to believe that the Pawnee country extended to within fifteen to twenty miles of the Missouri above the mouth of the Kansas. Also, that in what is now Doniphan County, Kansas, the Pawnee country reached the Missouri, extending along the west bank of the stream well into Nebraska. The Kansas were never able to break through this Pawnee wedge driven into the Siouan territory, and when the Pawnee pressure on the west was lessened, the Kansas abandoned their northward migration and ascended the Kansas River. Their greatest height on this stream was the mouth of the Big Blue. There is no creditable evidence that they ever had a village westward beyond the Blue. They hunted the buffalo far to the west of that point, but fear of the Pawnees made them bear to the south, throwing them to the Arkansas beyond the present Hutchinson. They were not unmolested even there, for the Pawnees claimed all that country and hunted over it.

The following is taken from Vial’s Journal of his trip from Santa Fe to St. Louis. While the Kansas Indians he was captured by were hunting on the Upper Arkansas, they were out of their own country and in that claimed by the Pawnees—in possession of the Pawnees.

June 29, 1792. We left in the morning at day break along the said river, which flowed northeast. We found some buffaloes which the Indians had killed, and we believed that they were of the tribe of the Guachaches, who were hunting through that region. We went to find them, since I know they are well inclined to the government of the Province of Louisiana. We found them about four in the afternoon in their hunting camp on the said shore of the Napeste River. As they approached us on the opposite side with river between us, we fired some shots into the air, to get them to see us. They immediately set out and came to stop us on the other side. Those who first met us grasped us cordially by the hand. I asked them of what tribe they were, and they told me they were Cances. They immediately took possession of our horses, and of all our possessions and cut the clothes which we wore with their knives, thus leaving us totally naked. They were of a mind to kill us, whereupon some of them cried out to those who were about to do it, not to kill us with guns or arrows because of the great risk that would be run of killing one another as they had surrounded us; but that if they killed us it should be by hatchet blows or by spears. One highly esteemed among them took up our defense, begging all of them to leave us alive. Thereupon another highly respected one came and taking me by the hand made me mount his own horse with him. Then another one came up behind and hurled a spear at me, but the one who had me on his horse restrained him by laying hold of him, leaving me alone on the horse. A crowd of them even coming to kill me from behind, his brother mounted behind me. Then one of them, who had been a servant in the village of San Luis de Ylinneses and who talked excellent French, came up to me, and recognized me. He began to cry out: “Do not kill him. We shall ascertain whence he is coming, for I know him.” Taking the reins of my horse, he took me to his tent and said to me: “Friend, now your Grace must hurry if you wish to save your life, for among us it is the custom and law that after having eaten no one is killed.” After having eaten hastily as he charged me, they left me quiet, and the chiefs having assembled after a moment came to me and asked me whence I was coming. I told them I was coming to open a road from Santa Fe to Los Ylinneses, having been sent by the Great Chief, their Spanish Father, and that I had letters for the Spanish Chief at Los Ylinnese. Thereupon they left me in quiet until the following day. My two companions did not fail to run the same danger as myself, but they have also been saved by other Indians who were well inclined. On the following day they joined me, both naked. But the one called Vicente Villanueva had his horse cut and a dagger thrust in the abdomen which would have proved fatal had he not shrunk away when the blow was delivered. An Indian, who wished to save him received all the force of the blow on his arm and was quite badly wounded. They kept us naked among them in the said camp until the fifteenth of August.

The Kansas town erected at the mouth of the Big Blue was established after Bourgmont’s visit to the tribes at the mouth of Independence Creek. The exact date can not now be fixed. It was probably about 1780. Lewis and Clark found their abandoned villages on the Missouri and their towns were then on the Kansas. One town was twenty leagues up this river, and the other twice that distance. The entry runs to this effect: “This river (the Kansas) receives its name from a nation which dwells at this time on its banks, and had two villages one about twenty leagues, and the other forty leagues up.” The location of the first village is not now certainly known, but it must have been near the present site of Topeka. There was a Kansas town immediately west of the present North Topeka at different periods after the expedition of Lewis and Clark. The upper village was at the mouth of the Big Blue. It was in Pottawatomie County between the Blue and the Kansas rivers, on a neck of land formed by the parallel courses of the two streams, and about two miles east of Manhattan. This became the sole residence of the Kansa before 1806, for in that year Captains Lewis and Clark, Doctor Sibley and Mr. Dunbar, made an exploration to discover the conditions of the Western Indians. The lower village had been abandoned and the inference is that the inhabitants had moved to the town at the mouth of the Blue. The entry on this subject is “Eighty-leagues up the Kansas River, on the north side.” And the report says they all lived in this one village. They furnished the traders with the skins of deer, beaver, black bear, otter (a few), and raccoon (a few). Also buffalo robes and buffalo tallow. This fur product brought the tribe about five thousand dollars annually in goods sent up from St. Louis. The general remarks on the Kansas made at that time by the explorers Lewis, Clark and others are of interest.

The limits of the country they claim is not known. The country in which they reside, and from thence to the Missouri, is a delightful one, and generally well watered and covered with excellent timber: they hunt on the upper part of Kansas and Arkansas rivers: Their trade may be expected to increase with proper management. At present they are a dissolute, lawless banditti; frequently plunder their traders, and commit depredations on persons ascending and descending the Missouri river: population rather increasing. These people, as well as the Great and Little Osages, are stationary, at their villages, from about the 15th of March to the 15th of May, and again from the 15th of August to the 15th of October: the balance of the year is appropriated to hunting. They cultivate corn, &c.

The following notes, from Vol. IX, pp. 194-196, Kansas Historical Collections, are of interest here. “Regarding the situation of the first Kaw agency, Daniel Boone, a son of Daniel Morgan Boone, government farmer of the Kaws, says in a letter to Mr. W. W. Cone, dated Westport, Mo., August 11, 1879: ‘Fred Chouteau’s brother established his trading-post across the river from my father’s residence the same fall we moved to the agency, in the year 1827. The land reserved for the half-breeds belonged to the Kaws. The agency was nearly on the line inside of the Delaware land, and we lived half-mile east of this line, on the river.’ “Survey 23, the property of Joseph James, was the most easterly of the Kaw half-breed lands. The first Delaware land on the Kansas river east of this survey is section 4, township 12, range 19 east; hence the site of the old agency. August 16, 1879, Mr. Cone and Judge Adams, piloted by Thos. R. Bayne, owner of survey No. 23, visited the site of the agency. In the Topeka Weekly Capital of August 27, Mr. Cone says: ‘We noticed on the east of the dividing line, over on the Delaware land, the remains of about a dozen chimneys, although Mr. Bayne says there were at least twenty when he came there, in 1854.’ “John C. McCoy, in a letter to Mr. Cone, dated August, 1879, says: ‘I first entered the territory August 15, 1830. . . . At the point described in your sketch, on the north bank of the Kansas river, seven or eight miles above Lawrence, was situated the Kansas agency. I recollect the following persons and families living there at that date, viz.: Marston G. Clark, United States sub-Indian agent, no family; Daniel M. Boone, Indian farmer, and family; Clement Lessert, interpreter, family, half-breeds; Gabriel Phillibert, government blacksmith, and family (whites); Joe Jim, Gonvil, and perhaps other half-breed families. . . . In your sketch published in the Capital you speak of the stone house or chimney, about two miles northwest of the Kansas agency. That was a stone building built by the government for White Plume, head chief of the Kanzans, in 1827 or 1828. There was also a large field fenced and broken in the prairie adjoining toward the east or southeast. We passed up by it in 1830, and found the gallant old chieftain sitting in state, rigged out in a profusion of feathers, paint, wampum, brass armlets, etc., at the door of a lodge he had erected a hundred yards or so to the northwest of his stone mansion, and in honor of our expected arrival the stars and stripes were gracefully floating in the breeze on a tall pole over him. He was large, fine-looking, and inclined to corpulence, and received my father with the grace and dignity of a real live potentate, and graciously signified his willingness to accept of any amount of bacon and other presents we might be disposed to tender him. In answer to an inquiry as to the reasons that induced him to abandon his princely mansion, his laconic explanation was simply “too much fleas.” A hasty examination I made of the house justified the wisdom of his removal. It was not only alive with fleas, but the floors, doors and windows had disappeared and even the casings had been pretty well used up for kindling-wood.’ “Mr. Cone gives the following description of White Plume’s stone house in his Capital article of August 27, 1879: ‘Mr. Bayne showed us a pile of stone as all that was left of that well-known landmark for old settlers, the “stone chimney.” It was located fifty yards north of the present depot at Williamstown, or Rural, as it is now called. Mr. Bayne, in a letter dated August 12, says: The old stone chimney, or stone house to which you refer, stood on the southwest quarter of section 29, range 19, when I came here, in 1854. It was standing intact, except the roof and floors, which had been burnt. It was about 18×34, and two stories high. There was a well near it walled up with cut stone, and a very excellent job.'” John T. Irving’s account of his visit to this village throws light on the character of the Indians, especially White Plume. “We emerged from the wood, and I found myself again near the bank of the Kansas river. Before me was a large house, with a court-yard in front. I sprang with joy through the unhung gate, and ran to the door. It was open; I shouted: my voice echoed through the rooms; but there was no answer. I walked in; the doors of the inner chambers were swinging from their hinges and long grass was growing through the crevices of the floor. While I stood gazing around an owl flitted by, and dashed out of an unglazed window; again I shouted; but there was no answer; the place was desolate and deserted. I afterwards learned that this house had been built for the residence of the chief of the Kanza tribe, but that the ground upon which it was situated having been discovered to be within a tract granted to some other tribe, the chief had deserted it, and it had been allowed to fall to ruin. My guide waited patiently until I finished my examination, and then again we pressed forward. . . . We kept on until near daylight, when we emerged from a thick forest and came suddenly upon a small hamlet. The barking of several dogs, which came flying out to meet us, convinced me that this time I was not mistaken. A light was shining through the crevices of a log cabin; I knocked at the door with a violence that might have awakened one of the seven sleepers. ‘Who dare—and vot de devil you vant?’ screamed a little cracked voice from within. It sounded like music to me. I stated my troubles. The door was opened; a head garnished with a red nightcap was thrust out, after a little parley, I was admitted into the bedroom of a man, his Indian squaw and a host of children. As however, it was the only room in the house, it was also the kitchen. I had gone so long without food that, notwithstanding what I had eaten, the gnawing of hunger was excessive, and I had no sooner mentioned my wants, than a fire was kindled, and in ten minutes a meal (don’t exactly know whether to call it breakfast, dinner or supper) of hot cakes, venison, honey and coffee was placed before me and disappeared with the rapidity of lightning. The squaw, having seen me fairly started, returned to her couch. From the owner of the cabin I learned that I was now at the Kanza agency, and that he was the blacksmith of the place. About sunrise I was awakened from a sound sleep, upon a bearskin, by a violent knocking at the door. It was my Indian guide. He threw out broad hints respecting the service he had rendered me and the presents he deserved. That I could not deny: but I had nothing to give. I soon found out, however, that his wants were moderate, and that a small present of powder would satisfy him; so I filled his horn, and he left the cabin apparently well pleased. In a short time I left the house, and met the Kanza agent, General Clark, a tall, thin, soldier-like man, arrayed in an Indian hunting-shirt and an old fox-skin cap. He received me cordially, and I remained with him all day, during which time he talked upon metaphysics, discussed politics, and fed me upon sweet potatoes.”

The town at the mouth of the Blue was partly depopulated about 1827. In that year an Agency for the Kansas Indians was established on Allotment No. 23, to Kansas half-breeds, on the north bank of the Kansas River, in what is now Jefferson County. At least, it was intended to build the Agency on that Allotment. It was in fact so near the east line of the tract that some of the buildings were on section 33, township 11, range 19, and on section 4, township 12, range 19, most of them on section 4, as was determined when the state was surveyed. This town was south of the station of Williamstown, on the Union Pacific Railway. There was a blacksmith and a farmer appointed for the Indians of the Agency, and these lived there. The farmer was Col. Daniel Morgan Boone, son of the great pioneer. Napoleon Boone, son of Col. D. M. Boone, was born there August 22, 1828, supposed to have been the first white child born in what was to become Kansas. The chief, Plume Blanche, White Plume, or Wampawara, was at the head of the village. Frederick Chouteau was the Indian trader. He had his trading-house on the south side of the river, on Horseshoe Lake, now Lakeview. It was at this Agency that Captain Bonneville crossed the Kansas River on his journey to the Rocky Mountains (1832). Marston G. Clark was U. S. Sub-Indian Agent there. The Captain spent the night with Chief White Plume, whom he found living in a substantial stone home, which had been erected for him by the Government. It is scarcely probable that all the Kansas Indians were gathered about this Agency. No doubt there were other villages up the Kansas River at that time. Some of the annuity payments provided for in the treaty when the great cession was concluded were made at this agency. The first was made at a trading-house near the mouth of the Kansas River, in what is now Wyandotte County. White Plume discovered in some way that his residence was over the line on the Delaware lands. While there would never have been any objection to this mistake or oversight of the white men who located the Agency buildings, White Plume was too proud to live on the land of another tribe. He abandoned his house and moved up the Kansas River. His house stood northwest of the Agency, and north of where the railroad station of Williamstown was located. Long before he moved his house had become uninhabitable, most of the woodwork having been torn out and used for fuel. It was alive with vermin.

This is stated from what Frederick Chouteau told Judge F. C. Adams. See Vol. I, Kansas Historical Collections, page 287. In a letter of Mr. Chouteau to W. W. Cone, May 5, 1880, he fixes the date as 1832. See Kansas Historical Collections, Vol. IX, page 196, note 54. These statements are incorrect. Captain Bonneville found the Agency there in May, 1832.

When White Plume moved from the Agency the other Indians followed him. It was found unprofitable to maintain the Agency, and it was abandoned after 1832. The remainder of the population of the town at the mouth of the Blue had moved down the Kansas River by the year 1830. They had established three villages under the government of as many chiefs. Hard Chief had fixed his village, in 1830, about a mile above the mouth of what is now known as Mission Creek, on the south side of the river, from which his people carried their water. He had more than five hundred followers in his town. The American Chief’s village was on American Chief Creek (now called Mission Creek). It was some two miles from the Kansas River, and on the creek bottom. The town consisted of twenty lodges and about one hundred Indians. This village was also established in 1830.5 They were built because Frederick Chouteau had told American Chief and Hard Chief that he would build a trading-house on the creek which he named American Chief Creek, for the chief who established his village on its banks. He did move there in 1830, and he and these two villages remained there until the removal of the tribe to the reservation at Council Grove. The other village established by the inhabitants of the town at the month of the Blue was that of Fool Chief. It was the largest, containing more than seven hundred people. It was on the north side of the river about a mile west of Papan’s Ferry. The location of this town must be determined by that of the ferry at that time, something difficult to do. The town is said to have been immediately north of the present town of Menoken. That would have put it inside the bounds of the lands belonging to the tribe. White Plume must have settled near the town of the Fool Chief when he moved up from the Agency. But there was another Kansas Village. Little is known of it, and its location is not clear. The only information concerning it is given by Fremont, in 1842, as follows:

The morning of the 18th, [of June] was very pleasant. A fine rain was falling, with cold wind from the north, and mists made the river hills look dark and gloomy, We left our camp at seven, journeying along the foot of the hills which border the Kansas valley, generally about three miles wide, and extremely rich. We halted for dinner, after a march of about thirteen miles, on the banks of one of the many little tributaries to the Kansas, which look like trenches in the prairies, and are usually well timbered. After crossing this stream, I rode off some miles to the left, attracted by the appearance of a cluster of huts near the mouth of the Vermillion. It was a large but deserted Kansas village, scattered in an open wood, along the margin of the stream, on a spot chosen with the customary Indian fondness for beauty of scenery. The Pawnees had attacked it in the early spring. Some of the houses were burnt, and others blackened with smoke, and weeds were already getting possession of the cleared places. Riding up the Vermillion river, I reached the ford in time to meet the carts, and, crossing, encamped on its western side.

On Fremont’s map this village is found to be on the Little Vermilion, a creek he delineates. But there is no such stream—and there never was. In what is now Pottawatomie County there is a Vermilion Creek. The Oregon Trail crossed it on what the official survey made section 24, township 9, range 10, two and one-half miles east of the present town of Louisville. There is where Fremont camped. From that point the Oregon Trail bore away from the Kansas River starting over the uplands for the Blue River. The Indian town was on the Vermilion below the crossing. Long’s detachment to visit the village at the mouth of the Blue crossed the Vermilion. This crossing was on the Indian trail which led up the Kansas River. This village was probably where the Indian trail crossed the Vermilion. Its inhabitants no doubt fled to the lower towns when driven out by the Pawnees.

There is a question as to when the missionaries turned attention to the Kansas Indians. At the Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church held at St. Louis, Mo., in 1830, Rev. Thomas Johnson was appointed a missionary to the Shawnees, and his brother, Rev. William Johnson, was appointed missionary to the Kansas Indians, Rev. William Johnson seems to have gone at once to the tribe to which he was appointed. According to one statement of Frederick Chouteau the Kansas Agency in what is now Jefferson County was maintained until 1830; and by another statement he fixed the date at 1832. If the Agency was kept up until 1832, Mr. Johnson spent the first two years of his missionary life there. If Mr. Chouteau moved his trading-house to Mission Creek, in Shawnee County, in 1830, then it was there that Mr. Johnson began his missionary labors. The probability is that it was at the more western location that he established the first Kansas Indian Mission, in 1830. In 1832 he was sent as missionary to the Delawares, where he remained about two years. He received then his second appointment to the Kansas Indian Mission, in 1834. He arrived on Mission Creek at the Kansas towns early in the summer, and began work on the mission buildings. These were erected on the northwest corner of section 33, township 11, range 14 east. The principal building was a hewed-log house thirty-six feet long and eighteen feet wide. It was a two-story structure, having four rooms—two below and two above. There was a huge stone chimney at each end. The kitchen was of logs, and apart from the house. There was a smoke-house and other building.

William Johnson labored at this mission until April, 1842, when he died. He accomplished little, and his hard work bore little fruit in the savage minds and hearts of the Kansas Indians. They could not be prevailed on to labor for their own support. They would not plant and cultivate corn and other grains, nor raise cattle. They went into the settlements by the hundred to beg. Rev. Thomas Johnson, brother to the missionary William, on his way to the Kansas Mission in May, 1837, met four hundred to five hundred of these Indians on their way to the Missouri settlements to beg.

In 1844 the widow of William Johnson was married to Rev. J. T. Percy, who was in that year sent to continue the work of Christianizing the Kansas Indians. Nothing of account was accomplished, and the school was discontinued. In 1846 the Kansas Indians were given a reservation at Council Grove. They soon removed to their new home. In 1850 the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, put up, at Council Grove, what was the best mission building ever erected in Kansas. It was built by Rev. T. S. Huffaker, who was long connected with the Kansas tribe. It still stands, the finest specimen of the buildings of its time, quaint, massive, silent, a splendid monument to the fine spirit of the Church which labored long, zealously, but in vain to make Christians of intractable savages.

In 1851, Mr. Huffaker opened his school. As few or no Indian children would attend, he admitted the children of white settlers, employees of the commerce which rolled over the Santa Fe Trail. It was one of the first schools in Kansas to receive white children. In after years Mr. Huffaker was constrained to admit that all attempts to educate the Kansas Indian children had failed. And these Indians never gave any serious attention the Christian religion.

The Kansas Indians ceded to the United States an immense territory. They did not own so vast a tract. They never had possessed it. Much of it they had never even hunted over. It is very doubtful whether they even claimed some of the land they sold. The Government wished to extinguish the Indian title. Having purchased it from the Kansas Indians, no other tribe could set up a claim.

At St. Louis, on the 3d of June, 1825, the Kansas Indians ceded, by treaty of that date, the tract or territory described as follows:

Beginning at the entrance of the Kansas river into the Missouri; thence North to the North-West corner of the State of Missouri; from thence Westwardly to the Nodewa river, thirty miles from its entrance into the Missouri; from thence to the entrance of the big Nemahaw into the Missouri, and with that river to its source; from thence to the source of the Kansas river, leaving the old village Panai Republic to the West; from thence, on the ridge dividing the waters of the Kansas river from those of the Arkansas, to the Western boundary of the State line of Missouri; and with that line, thirty miles, to the place of beginning.

To understand this cession it must be made plain that at that time the western line of Missouri was a north-and-south line through the mouth of the Kansas River. West of that line, north of the mouth of the Kansas, and east of the Missouri River, lay what are now Andrew, Atchison, Buchanan, Holt, Nodaway, and Platte counties, Missouri. These comprise the best body of land in Missouri. It was attached to that state in 1836.

As construed and mapped the treaty conveyed a tract of the best land in Nebraska, reaching from the Missouri to Red Cloud, and extending north at one point something more than forty miles, and including the present towns of Pawnee, Tecumseh, Beatrice, Fairbury, Geneva, Hebron, Nelson and many others.

This princely domain was cut off at the head of the Solomon, from where it reached down to within twelve miles of the Arkansas, northwest of Garden City. Thence it followed the divide to the Missouri line. It was nearly half the State of Kansas.

Out of this cession, however, there was set aside a reservation for the Kansas Indians, the grantors. This reservation was described as follows:

A tract of land to begin twenty leagues up the Kansas river, and to include their village on that river; extending West thirty miles in width, through the land ceded in the first Article.

There were twenty-three allotments to half-breeds, as had been noticed. The east line of this reservation was through the center of range 14, east, of the public survey made later, and nine miles west of the center of Topeka. It extended west three hundred miles and contained nine thousand square miles of the heart of Kansas. It was held by the Kansas Indians until 1846. On the 14th of January of that year they ceded two million acres off the east end of their tract, embracing the full thirty miles in width, and running west for quantity. It was provided that if the residue of their land should not afford sufficient timber for the use of the tribe, the Government should have all the reservation. This lack of timber was found to exist; thereupon the Government took over the entire Kansas reservation, and laid off another tract for the Indians. This tract was at Council Grove, and was about twenty miles square. It was supposed to lie immediately south of the lands of the Shawnees, but when surveyed it was found to encroach on the Shawnee reservation some six miles. To avoid complications, the Shawnees ceded this overlapped part in 1854. In 1859 the Kansas Indians made a treaty retaining a portion of their reservation—nine miles by fourteen miles—intact. The remainder was to be sold by the Government, and the money used for the benefit of the tribe. These lands were sold by acts of Congress, of May 8, 1872, June 23, 1874, July 5, 1876, and March 16, 1880. The tribe had in the meantime moved to a reservation in Oklahoma. The tract nine by fourteen miles was disposed of under the above named acts of Congress, and the money applied to the use of the tribe. And thus were the Kansas Indians divested of the last of their hereditary soil.

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