Shawnee Indians
Background Information
The following excerpts taken from Johnson County, Kansas: A Pictorial History 1825-2005.
The Shawnee of Ohio and Missouri were among several Native American tribes who were relocated during the 1820s and 1830s to the region west of the newly formed state of Missouri, which was considered unsuitable for settlement and thus set aside as Indian Territory.
Hoping to preserve their people and customs, in 1825 the Shawnee agreed to a treaty that relocated them to the northeastern area of the Kaw River Valley, part of which is now Johnson County, Kansas.
Shawnee Visions
The Shawnee way of life was already changing when they arrived in this area in the 1820s and 1830s. Some were developing settled farming practices and had embraced Christianity. Other resisted these changes and tried to follow the way of their ancestors.
Shawnee society was organized around clans (instead of nuclear families) who lived together in semi-permanent towns, planting crops and hunting game together. The Shawnee worshipped and celebrated in large wooden council houses that served as the focal point of their community, and lived in simple bark-covered and a later, wooden-lodges.
The Shawnee removal to this region was part of a series of treaties with the federal government that placed nearly eleven thousand Native Americans on reservations west of the Missouri River. More than two thousand Shawnee were removed from their settlements in Ohio and Missouri under the treaties negotiated in 1825 and 1831. When the process began, the two largest groups of Shawnee were living separately in Missouri and Ohio. Both groups had grown weary of fighting for their land with the government and white settlers. The Shawnee and other Native Americans sought a permanent homeland where they could live together peacefully, free from interference by white settlers. In order to persuade the Native Americans to relinquish their settlements, government officials and Christian missionaries promised them that adopting American culture would ensure them a permanent homeland.
In 1825, the Shawnee were given 1.6 million acres in today’s eastern Kansas and $25,000 to purchase farm equipment and animals. After suffering an arduous journey with little food and few supplies, the Shawnee established themselves along the banks of the Kansas River and surrounding creeks. As agreed, the federal government also set aside funds for education and improvements for the Shawnee in their new homeland. Throughout their residency in the eastern portion of their reservation, establishing their initial settlement by 1828 near present-day downtown Shawnee.
Three denominations of Christian missionaries – Baptists, Methodists, and the Society of Friends, or Quakers – soon joined the Shawnee in the region. In order to gain access to the education funds promised by the government, which were contingent upon an active missionary presence in the reserve, the Shawnee negotiated with the missionaries to provide instruction in farming, manual and domestic arts, and Christianity. The Methodists and the Baptists actively courted Shawnee tribal leaders for this opportunity, but the first proposal accepted by the Shawnee was one offered by Reverend Thomas Johnson with the Methodist church in the fall of 1830. It would prove to be the largest of the Christian schools, although the Baptists and Quakers also established schools on the reserve.
The Shawnee skillfully used the local waterways to improve trade and industry and to cultivate the county’s earliest farms. The Shawnee built and operated a blacksmith shop that served not only members of the tribe but government agents, missionary families, and travelers. A dam, grist mill, and saw mill were constructed in 1836-37 at the cost of $6,994.40 through a contract to the superintendent of Indian Affairs. Such mill technology required a stream with a natural drop to provide the power; the Shawnee mill was thus located along Mill Creek, in the present day city of Shawnee. The mill site was destroyed by floods in 1844, and no evidence suggests it was ever rebuilt.
The Shawnee’s successes in trade, industry, and skilled farming were not lost on the traders, emigrants, and military personnel traveling on Santa-Fe and California-Oregon Trails and the Fort Leavenworth Military Road, which crisscrossed areas of present-day Johnson County. Missionaries and travelers noted their neat log cabins and fenced fields.
The Shawnee’s proximity to the developing towns of Westport and Kansas City, Missouri, while benefiting them economically, also exposed them to a frontier culture in which settlers and railroad companies were increasingly concerned with acquiring land. This land hunger ultimately forced the Shawnee to alter their way of life once again.
Land Hunger
Land ownership was essential to achieving success in the 1850s. The desire for unsettled land swelled, bringing land-hungry settlers into Indian Territory (including Johnson County), before the region was officially opened for settlement by non-Indian peoples. Lands in California opened for settlement at the close of the Mexican-American War in 1848. That same year, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in California, and politically powerful railroad companies pressured Congress for more land to extend their empires across the American West. However, the Indian reservations blocked these expansion plans. In response to these mounting pressures, the federal government devised new ways to remove Native Americans from the region and open the land to new settlers. A series of removal treaties and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, all formalized in 1854, accomplished this goal.
The Shawnee tribe signed a treaty with the federal government May 10, 1854, reducing their land holdings from 1.6 million acres to roughly 200,000 acres. Charles Bluejacket, a prominent member of the tribe, served as the interpreter between the Shawnee and the government. The treaty fundamentally changed how the Shawnee owned their land. It required each Shawnee man, woman, and child to select a 200-acre allotment to be held individually rather than sharing the land collectively as a tribe. For the most part, the Shawnee and other tribes in the region accepted the allotment treaties, believing they would preserve their lands and lifestyles.
The allotment policy however, developed for the sake of American progress, did little to preserve the lands of Native Americans or to protect tribal rights. The federal government at this time did not recognize Native Americans as sovereign nations, but rather saw them as wards, whose interests were to be protected by assigned guardians. This relationship, of course, relied upon the ethical standards of the guardian. Oftentimes, the guardian did not have the resources to protect Shawnee lands. In the summer of 1856, violence erupted as squatters attempted to make claims on the Shawnee lands. The Shawnee’s pleas for assistance were disregarded by the local guardian, who feared intervening would lead to greater violence. Other officials were overtly corrupt and actively precipitated the illegal transfer of Shawnee lands to white settlers. Lack of strong tribal leadership among the Shawnee also played a role. The federal government negotiated treaties with individuals not always recognized within the tribe as leaders. Often those Shawnee who negotiated were rewarded with additional land holdings. Chief Joseph Parks and Black Hoof each received an additional two thousand acres of land for cooperating with the federal government during the 1854 treaty.
Eventually tribe members attempted to protect their land rights by pleading their cases directly to government officials in Washington, D.C., but with little success. Weary of fighting for land and the ability to live as a people, most of the Shawnee left Johnson County for the new Indian Territory (Oklahoma) by 1871.
Charles Bluejacket: Shawnee Leader and Landowner
Charles Bluejacket, like most of the Shawnee people, accepted the 200-acre land allotment provided in the 1854 treaty. He became a successful farmer, raising livestock and crops, including a successful fruit orchard. An 1858 newspaper account praised Bluejacket’s adoption of the American way of life: “[Mr. Bluejacket] has a beautiful farm of several hundred acres under improvement, subdivided into fields. His dwelling is a frame house 20x40, two stories high, plastered and painted, furnished in a style that would do credit to many of our wealthy people in the old states. Mr. Bluejacket is a quite a gentleman in his manners…”
Charles Bluejacket was born in Michigan, grandson of the infamous war chief Waweyapeirsenwaw, more commonly known as Blue Jacket. As a child, he attended Quaker mission schools in Ohio and the Baptist Mission School in Johnson County. He became a Methodist minister in 1859 and preached throughout his life. In 1864, he was not only recognized as the minister of the Shawnee tribe but he also served as Head Chief, continuing in that role until January of 1865. Charles Bluejacket lived in Johnson County until 1872, when he sold his farm and moved to the new Indian Territory in Oklahoma. He returned to Kansas in September 1897 to help locate the gravesite of The Prophet and died shortly thereafter at his home in Indian Territory.
The Shawnee Black Bob and James Abbott
The Black Bob Band of the Shawnee resisted the changes brought by the missionaries and allotment treaties. Refusing to accept individual parcels of land offered in the 1854 treaty, the Black Bob jointly held 33,000 acres in the southeastern part of the county. The Black Bob did not adopt the settled farming lifestyle; they preferred instead to leave the land uncultivated and move from place to place as needed. The border conflicts and the Civil War forced many members of the band to leave the area, and white settles, seeing the land “unused,” illegally purchased or claimed portions of the Black Bob tract. After the war, some of the Black Bob returned to find speculators and settlers illegally claiming ownership to their land.
Government land agents appointed to protect the Native Americans’ rights often overlooked questionable sales and illegal land claims made by white settlers. Among those land agents was James Abbott, who supervised the selection of the 200-acre allotments outlined in the 1854 treaty. Following his term as Indian Agent, Abbott teamed with land speculator H.L. Taylor to acquire some of the Black Bob land holdings. The two then illegally sold portions of their land to new settlers.
In 1879, after years of struggle, the federal government broke the 1854 treaty and removed the Black Bob to Oklahoma. The settlers were forced to pay for the illegally acquired land, but the Black Bob band received little of the money.
