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When white men first arrived, the future site of Topeka and a large area around it, virtually the whole Kansas River basin, was occupied by the Kansa Indians. The Kansa are a people of Sioux heritage that had migrated to the area from the east, under pressure from white men, in the late Seventeenth Century. In a treaty signed in 1825, the Kansa ceded the eastern part of their lands, not including the site of Topeka, to the federal government for use as a reserve for other tribes being removed from the east. In return, the tribe was promised peace, the payment of an annuity for 20 years and the assistance of a government-employed blacksmith and agriculturalist to help them establish farms. The 1825 treaty also gave 24 half-breeds, many of them the grandchildren of Chief White Plume through daughters married to white Indian traders, their own individual reservations along the north bank of the Kansas River. This was done, as Unrau notes, as part of a deliberate policy of destabilizing the authority of traditional chiefs and elders in tribes by giving bribes, openly rewarding leaders who would cooperate with white policy and elevating half-breeds. The site of North Topeka was part of reserves given to two half-breed granddaughters of Kansa Chief White Plume in this treaty. Giles notes that about 20 families of half-breeds lived on the north bank of the river opposite Topeka in 1855.
The Kansa treaty of 1825 was very similar to treaties made with many other Indian nations during the same time period, in that it promised to pay for land with an annuity and promised assistance in settling on farms. It was also like many other treaties during the same period in that it was dishonored. The annuity payments were almost always late, if they came at all, and chicanery between the white Indian traders, the Indian agents in charge, Indian office contractors and compliant and bribable leaders among the tribes and people in Washington almost always insured that, when the annuity did arrive, it would benefit white traders and white men serving as the Indians' attorneys to collect it much more than it benefited the Indians. Moreover, there was often no one hired to serve as blacksmith or agriculturalist under the treaty, and, when someone was hired to one of these positions, he was always an Indian trader or an associate of an Indian trader, a person financially interested in keeping the tribe dependent on its annuities. Little progress was ever made during this period teaching agriculture to even those Indians who wanted to learn it, because it was not in the economic interest of the white men on the scene for them to become self-supporting.
However, it was also inconvenient to the white men in charge to have large numbers of surviving dependent Indians. Only a few Indians were needed to justify appropriation of the annuities in Washington. Therefore, frequent hunger and outright starvation among the Indians was met with deliberate indifference. Likewise, although Congress appropriated money on several occasions to provide smallpox immunizations for the Indians, the Indians in Kansas never received them. Quite the contrary: on at least two documented occasions blankets known to be infected with smallpox were distributed by Indian agents to the Kansa Indians, resulting in deadly smallpox epidemics. There were also documented occasions on which Kansa Indians who tried to farm were punished for doing so. But such depredations were not unique to the Kansa; they were visited, in varying degrees, upon all of the Indians of Kansas during this period.
A matter of some shame to the Church of Jesus Christ is the role of missionaries in the demise of the Kansa during this period. Catholic missionaries had won White Plume to nominal Catholicism prior to the treaty of 1825, but abandoned their work with the Kansa shortly after this, finding most of them to be much too resistant to their message. Nevertheless, the 1825 Kansa treaty did specify that a Catholic priest would be assigned to White Plume's camp, and also set aside a large area of choice land in the Big Blue River valley to be used to finance the education of the Kansa. It was generally understood that the proceeds of that land would go to the mission organization that successfully established education among the Kansa. The Methodists and Baptists entered the competition for this land, at different times during the period 1834-1842, but both found the Kansa resistant to their message (which included an insistence on total rejection of Indian culture in favor of "civilization") and ultimately abandoned their missions.
In the meanwhile, the missionaries themselves became involved in the Indian trade, in profiting from the Indians' subjugation "in the name of Christ." This situation became so odious that, at one point, one band of the Kansa moved their camp 35 miles to the west to avoid the missionaries! The only missionaries who avoided trying to make a profit off of the Kansa and treated them properly were the Quakers and Mennonites, who came later, after their removal to the Neosho Valley.
In 1846, with their annuities from the treaty of 1825 running out, many of their people starving because of a bad hunting season, the withholding of annuity payments for several years and official chicanery, the Kansa were forced to cede the rest of their original lands on the Kansas river, including the later Topeka townsite, in trust, to the federal government and move to a 30 mile square reservation on the upper Neosho River. The lands ceded were to be used establishing reservations for other tribes forcibly removed from other parts of the country and not for white settlement. This treaty also promised annuities, which were seldom paid, and assistance in establishing agriculture, which was seldom given. Other tribes were moved in from the east, and, in a few instances, from the west, between 1842 and 1853.
The treatment of the Kansa by greedy white men, including greedy missionaries, during this period was not the exception but the rule. Most of the Indians in later Kansas received similar treatment.
Until the Kansas-Nebraska Act was enacted in May of 1854, the land which became Kansas was officially designated to be and permanently remain unorganized Indian territory. It was the Great American Desert, a place where the Indians native to the area and other tribes forcibly removed from white-settled ("civilized") areas to the east and west of it could be settled on reservations separated from "civilized" people forever. This, at least, is what the Indians were promised.
By contrast, white idealists in Washington hoped that here, on the Great American Desert, Indians could be christianized by missionaries, "civilized," separated from their tribes and taught to take up the way of sedentary farming on small family farms in the way of the white man. The political ideal of "christianizing" Indians, however, often had little to do with personal faith in Christ and much more to do with separating Indians from their tribes, teaching them Victorian American habits of life and teaching them that they were by nature and heredity subservient to whites.
By 1854, however, it was well known that Kansas was not a great desert but very fertile land, "too good" for the Indians. Pressure was mounting to open this land to settlement, regardless of the 30 years of Indian treaties securing the possession of nearly all of it by a number of native tribes. It was also becoming obvious that many of the Indians were not willing to be "christianized" and were not going to be easily and quickly trained to keep their "place" in white society. There was strong sentiment that, if the Indians could not be trained to serve whites profitably, they should be killed en masse or again forcibly removed to less fertile lands. This sentiment was succinctly summarized by one of its opponents, Congressman E.M. Chamberlain of Indiana, during the Congressional debates on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, in these words:
"You cannot civilize the Indian because you cannot enslave him."
With the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the federal government embarked on a deliberate policy of removing all of the Indians in Kansas to Oklahoma. This policy, though never publicly announced, was tacitly understood by all involved in Indian policy in Washington, including the officers of the Indian Office, the members of the Congressional committees involved in Indian policy, and, most important, the lobbyists for the railroads and the Indian traders and other land speculators who would soon be competing for Indian land in Kansas. However, the removal of the Indians could not be done immediately, because the tribes in Kansas possessed treaty rights that would first have to be lawfully extinguished. This was accomplished more or less ruthlessly over the next 17 years.
Several methods, some of them new, were used to pressure the Indians to cede their Kansas lands. As in the past, annuities were withheld, paid late or diverted into white hands by various marginally legal means, and the resulting starvation was met with deliberate indifference. Tribes were threatened that, unless they ceded large blocks of their land for railroad use or (in the case of the Delawares in 1854), for public auction to raise money, white squatters would simply be permitted to take it without payment and the tribes wouldn't be able to do anything about it. Once the railroads had land, they stripped timber off of all nearby land retained by the Indians, generally without payment. The railroad corporations involved generally had the major territorial and state officers, representatives in Congress and the necessary Indian agents as major stockholders, or saw that the treaties ceding lands to the railroads paid these people off handsomely.
Furthermore, white settlers were encouraged to "squat" on the best Indian land, even when there was unoccupied public domain land available, establishing small farms there, knowing that, while they might eventually have to pay the federal government $1.25 per acre to preempt the land, they would never have to pay the Indians anything. Indian agents who requested troops to drive squatters off of Indian lands were never given troops for this purpose, and suits by the Indians to recover their lands in court were never successful, since the squatters themselves served the tacit national policy of driving the Indians off of their Kansas lands. Indians who did establish successful farms were generally driven from those farms by armed squatters who wanted those farms themselves. Lawful settlers and squatters also customarily stripped timber and other resources and stole animals from neighboring Indian lands.
Miner and Unrau report that, during this entire period, only two white men were convicted of crimes against Indians in Kansas courts and no Indian property was ever recovered. To be sure, Kansas courts did sometimes rule against squatters, but only in suits brought by railroads or land speculators, white men or corporations having superior title or superior bribes for the court. The question was not whether Indian title was good—it was good only until it appeared lawfully extinguished—or whether Indians could ultimately remain in Kansas. They were conceded only a right to "exist" here until they could be removed to Oklahoma. The only question asked by the Kansas courts of this period was which group of white men should be allowed to profit the most from their demise.
The genocide practiced against Kansas' Indian tribes to serve white greed had become so bad by 1870 that two different federal officials, in reporting to their superiors, noted a spiritual dimension to it. One official noted that surely we were bringing "the wrath of the Great Father" on ourselves by our treatment of the Indians. (He had in mind particularly one band of Sac and Fox who had refused to move to Oklahoma and who, therefore, had officially altogether ceased to exist and whose officially nonexistent women and children were therefore reduced to wandering naked from farmhouse to farmhouse begging.) A second official, on observing the whole course of Indian affairs in Kansas, wrote that he believed the "Devil had changed his residence and moved to Kansas" because the things that were done here certainly could not have been done without his "leadership." If even secular officials at the time could see satan's hand and the expectation of God's wrath in our ancestors' treatment of the Indians, can it be doubted that it opened the door to satan's work in this state?
Summary of the founding of Topeka and its present implications.
Areas for repentance (first list)
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