Samuel Garrett
Samuel Garrett, who worked as a surveyor during the 1850s, was one of a small number of white men who lived and worked on the Shawnee Methodist Mission, assisting with the operations of the 2240 acres. While working on the Mission, some of these men met and married Shawnee women. Those who did were adopted into the tribe and received “all the rights, titles, privileges and immunities of said tribe of Indians,” as Garrett’s official adoption document states. Garrett married Elizabeth Choteau on November 12, 1853, and was adopted by the tribe in 1856.
Garrett’s marriage and adoption into the Shawnee tribe coincided with major changes for the Shawnee on the Methodist Mission and in the Johnson County area. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened the area for settlement, and a treaty reduced the Shawnee’s land holdings in Kansas to less than two hundred thousand acres. Some Shawnee accepted the two hundred acres that were offered to each Shawnee individual and stayed in the area, living among the increasing numbers of white settlers. Some relocated to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma, and one hundred members of the Black Bob band took common ownership of land in the Tomahawk Creek area and tried to maintain a traditional way of life.
In 1870 Elizabeth Choteau Garrett died, and Samuel and his four sons and two daughters moved with the Shawnee to Indian Territory, near present-day Miami, Oklahoma. One son, Frederick Garrett, married Sarah Linnia Carr, and together with their six children, the couple returned to Johnson County. In 1911, the Garretts build a home on 60 acres of the original Garrett Shawnee Indian land near Wilder, Kansas. Frederick farmed 260 acres until his death in 1929. His youngest son, Edward O. Garrett, took over the farming operation at that time.
Along with Samuel Garrett’s photograph, the Johnson County Museum of History holds in its collection Garrett’s binoculars and survey maps.
--ALBUM vol. 10, no. 3 (summer 1997)