In general, U.S. treaties are nation-to-nation compacts, agreements between relatively equal governments, as seen, for example, in contemporary climate accords or trade treaties. However, as the non-Indigenous population in the United States grew, this nation-to-nation power dynamic shifted radically. By the nineteenth century, most treaties with Indigenous nations were designed by the U.S. government to aggressively acquire land and force Indigenous peoples to assimilate into U.S society. With this in mind, the site of this meeting highlights how political and cultural strategies worked hand-in-hand to try and unravel Indigenous ways of life.

The treaty articles were not negotiated in a neutral location; instead, they were drafted and finalized in a Christian mission, a particularly European American institution. Since the U.S. Congress passed the Civilization Act of 1819, which put aside $10,000 annually to fund Christian missionaries, the church, teachers, and missionaries who worked there were, in part, funded by the U.S. government. They were paid to undertake a specific goal: to assimilate Indigenous peoples into Euro-American culture and to eliminate Indigenous cultures and belief systems. Claiming Indigenous peoples were culturally “inferior” was a long-term justification for taking their resources and assaulting their culture.⁴

The Methodist mission site (also known as Mission Creek), used for the signing of the Treaty of 1846, was just west of Topeka and a mile away from Chouteau and Cyprian’s trading post.⁵ Charles Chouteau, who served as a witness to the treaty, stood to profit significantly from government annuities (annual payments from the U.S. government in exchange for Indigenous land) which would likely be spent at his store, where he notoriously marked up the price of goods.⁶ The same could be said for another witness to the treaty, Seth Hays, a trader who was one of the earliest white settlers on the land the Kanza retained after this treaty. After the treaty, Hays opened a trading post in Council Grove and became a key player in the Kanza’s forced expulsion, just thirteen years later, from the land promised to them “forever.”⁷ This was a pattern used by U.S. officials across the continent: missionaries, traders, and land agents often spearheaded repeated relocations/land loss/expulsions and profited from them.

This treaty reduced Kanza land from a two-million-acre reservation to only 256,000 acres. Thus, the Kanza retained just a fraction - under 13 percent - of the land they held after the Treaty of 1825. That means a loss of 87 percent of the land they held in 1825. 

The language of the treaty is worth considering. Both the current and historic definitions of “cede” are “to give way; to yield or surrender something.” Notably the article does not state that the Kanza agreed to sell their land to the U.S. government, but, instead, that they yielded it. Given that the Kanza had no choice but to relinquish vast swathes of their homelands in order to survive, the language of the treaty agreement made apparent the power imbalances that undergird it. Further, given that treaties are often employed to mark the terms of negotiation that end a war, the language of “ceding” invokes the structure of victor and vanquished peoples, with the victor ultimately controlling the terms of the agreement.⁸

The U.S. government agreed to pay “two hundred and two thousand dollars” for two million acres of Kanza land, which amounted to “just over 10 cents an acre.”⁹ A bargain by any standard. In fact, a 1911 U.S. government report examining the 1825, 1846, 1859 treaties and the Kanza’s forced relocation to Oklahoma through an act of Congress in 1872 stated, “It is plain these Indians ceded to the United States at various times large areas of land for which they were not adequately paid, and perhaps not paid as proper dealing on the part of the Government required under the treaties.”¹⁰ Their remaining Kanza reservation land was twenty-miles square in the Neosho River Valley and encompassed Council Grove, a Santa Fe Trail outfitting post. Council Grove was incorporated as a town in 1859, creating conflict that led to the Treaty of 1859.¹¹

Notably, the Kanza did not actually receive $202,000 in 1846, which would amount to approximately $8,220,000 in 2024.¹² Instead, the U.S. government promised to pay the Kanza the interest on most of those funds - $8,000 annually - for thirty years. The balance of the funds - $200,000 - was held in trust for the tribe by the U.S. government. In other words, the tribe was not in direct control of the money the U.S. paid for their land and, more often than not, was unable to use it. Once placed in trust, these monies were often misused or stolen and corruption was common.¹³

The U.S. government’s thirty-years of $8,000 annual interest payments, known as annuities, were paid “pro rata,” which meant distributed individually, typically to heads of households. And this “pro rata” rate depended on population. During these three decades the Kanza population declined, increasing individual payments. However, the treaty stipulates that after 30 years, each individual will only receive the amount they received in the first year’s annuities, which was just under $50.¹⁴ It was therefore in the government’s best interest for the Kanza to lose members because the U.S. would then pay less money for Kanza land. And that’s exactly what happened.

Further, the treaty required the Kanza to spend portions of their annuities in ways the U.S government found acceptable. These demands, common in treaties between the U.S. and Indigenous nations, exemplified legal paternalism, where the U.S. government and its officials dictated what was “best” for Indigenous peoples and nations, while simultaneously denying the Kanza full payment for their land. This was enshrined in U.S. law through three U.S. Supreme Court cases, known as the Marshall Trilogy. These cases simultaneously recognized and limited Indigenous sovereignty by relegating Indigenous nations to “domestic dependent nations” whose relationship “to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian.” This paternalistic attitude permeated the language and terms of nineteenth-century treaties between the United States and Indigenous nations, including the treaties with the Kanza.¹⁵

The treaty also made the Kanza pay for the tools that would be used to dismantle their culture. From each $8,000 annuity payment, they were required to spend $1,000 on “education” and $1,000 on “agricultural assistance.”¹⁶

Prior to the 1840s, the Kanza had successfully resisted assimilation attempts by both Catholic and Protestant Christian missionaries, which often came in the form of missionary schools for Kanza children.¹⁷ Mission education was based on European traditions and U.S. society’s behavioral and cultural expectations that stood in opposition to Kanza worldviews and lifeways. Children in such schools were forced to speak English, learn Christian belief systems, and take on white manners of dress and behavior. They were expected to abandon all aspects of their culture, language, and larger structures of belief.¹⁸ By including annual expenditures for “education” in the treaty, the U.S. government hoped to force change. Some of these funds were used to construct the Kaw Mission, which was completed in 1851 by the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church South. Much like the previous missionary attempts, the Kaw Mission, too, would fail in the face of Kanza people’s cultural resilience (though it remained open for the children of local white settlers). But its presence and this treaty provision demonstrated the increasingly unequal power dynamics between the U.S. and the Kanza.¹⁹

As discussed in the Treaty of 1825, the Kanza had always farmed, but such agricultural work was the domain of women. However, the U.S. government, in accordance with European understandings of gendered divisions of labor, wanted Kanza men to start farming and women to stop. At the same time, hunting was supposed to be deemphasized in the Kanza economy.²⁰ In Kanza society, though, the entire village was involved in summer hunts, where everyone’s collaborative labor allowed the community to restock food, hides, and other items necessary for everyday life and trade. As anthropologist Lauren Ritterbush notes, “The summer excursion was also a social affair for the community, an activity that had been followed for many decades.”²¹ In the 1840s, the challenges to Kanza farming were not “advancement” or skill, it was Santa Fe Trail traffic and the forced relocation of other Indigenous nations onto former Kanza lands that led to overgrazing, overhunting, and undermined farming and foraging.

Finally, this article of the treaty allocates $2,000 for four other expenses. First, an unspecified amount of money is appropriated to cover the federal government’s expenses in negotiating the treaty. Second, $400 of treaty compensation was distributed to the Methodist Episcopal Church for the school and other buildings, deemed “improvements,” constructed at Mission Creek, which was now on the “ceded” land. Though the Kanza had rejected Methodist schools and teachings, they were made to reimburse the Methodist Church for this property - a pattern repeated in many treaties between Indigenous nations and the U.S. Third, the treaty provided $600 for the construction of a new mill - to grind corn into meal or flour - on their smaller reservation, to replace the one they would have to abandon on the “ceded” land.²²

After those three expenses were paid from this $2,000 allocation, the remaining funds were supposed to economically support the Kanza for the rest of the year. However, the federal government took more than a year to determine the new reservation’s borders, undermining food provision and causing starvation. As historian Ronald Parks described it, “the tribe suffered intensely during the two-year interim between signing the Mission Creek treaty in January 1846 and their final relocation to Council Grove, a period when they were essentially homeless.”²³

Everyone involved knew there were problems with the location of the Kanza’s remaining reservation land. The land was often used by Kanza enemies, the Comanche, Cheyenne, and Pawnee. Indian Agent to the Kanza Richard Cummins, who co-authored the treaty, noted that the land the Kanza retained after this treaty was “occupied a portion of almost every year by these tribes, particularly by the Pawanees [sic].” At the same time, most Americans could not travel there without great difficulty. There was no road from Fort Leavenworth and the Kansas City area, which would make recruiting and retaining a Kanza Indian agent, blacksmith, farmer, and missionary staff, not to mention making annuity payments, very difficult.²⁴

Surveying errors were also a concern. In the case of Kanza treaties, some surveys were completed based on “faulty maps.”²⁵ And, as historian Ronald Parks explains, “in 1847, the U.S. government did, in fact, mistakenly establish the northern three-tenths (120 square miles) of the Kanza Reservation on land already reserved for the Shawnee.”²⁶ Despite the fact that Article 3 states the land survey will be completed “in the present year,” the Kanza were left to the whims of government officials to name the official boundaries of their new reserve lands. And they had to wait a decade: the survey was not completed until July 24, 1856.²⁷

The language in this article - “that the Kansas Indians may know” - places the responsibility of respecting treaty boundaries on the Kanza without addressing how these boundaries will be publicized or enforced. Settlers already squatting on or interested in settling on Kanza land often ignored or disputed treaty boundaries; this was made easier by lengthy waits for government surveys. Even when treaty boundaries were known, settlers often used false claims of confusion to rationalize their choice to illegally squat on prime pieces of land and threatened Indian agents who tried to evict them and enforce treaty boundaries, which was common on the Kanza reservation by 1856. Correspondingly, Indian agents and local political officials had little incentive to enforce treaty boundaries among their constituents as their political offices depended on votes from these settlers.²⁸

The Treaty of 1846 was negotiated in January 1846. Because Article 3 and Article 5 of the treaty required additional land surveys and investigations to fully determine the official boundaries of the new reservation, Article 4’s requirement that the Kanza move by May 1847 was overly ambitious. In other words, there was no clear agreement about where the new Kanza towns would be located, but there was a definite date when the Kanza had to move. In 1846, the Kanza had three distinct towns, each with a different tribal leader: Fool Chief, American Chief, and Hard Chief. Before the Treaty of 1846, Fool Chief’s village was located north of the Kansas River between Mission and Soldier Creeks, while Hard Chief’s people were on the Kansas River between what is now Wamego and St. George. The Kanza were “ceding” all lands east of the Blue River; thus, these towns would have to be relocated.²⁹ 

Before the Kanza relocated their towns, the U.S. declared war on Mexico. Prior to the treaty and the war, Council Grove was a “rendezvous point” for travelers on the Santa Fe Trail, primarily serving as a place where smaller groups combined into larger caravans for efficiency and safety. The war changed everything. Traffic along the trail exploded. Council Grove became an important hub to outfit and supply U.S. military goods and personnel. By the end of the war in 1848, the U.S. had gained nearly half of Mexico’s land, and traffic along the trail continued to bring people and goods to new U.S. territories.³⁰

With the U.S. government’s preoccupation with the war, there was little interest or aid in determining Kanza reservation boundaries and new sites for their towns. At the same time, traffic on the trail further stressed natural resources and undermined the Kanza economy. By late spring 1848, the Kanza were destitute and as historian William Unrau explains, the Kanza moved to their remaining reservation land “with little or no government supervision.” Subsequently, “Hard Chief’s people located their village near Cahola (Kahola) . . . some ten miles from Council Grove. Directly northwest was a village controlled by Peg-gah-hosh-she (Big John; probably American Chief). . . It was located near the mouth of Big John Creek less than two miles from Council Grove and the Santa Fe Trail crossing." In the end, U.S. officials prioritized Santa Fe Trail commerce over Kanza prosperity and upholding the treaty provisions.³¹

This article shows how the Kanza negotiated caveats in the treaty based on their own concerns, but framed in terms U.S. officials would accept. Timber was often a concern in treaty negotiations because it typically signaled access to water necessary for daily life and agriculture. In an interview for this project, historian Ronald Parks, explained that “During the negotiations, the Kanza chiefs objected [to U.S. officials proposed reservation lands] and said, ‘well, there's no hard wood, there's no right kind of timber out there.’” However, as discussed in Article 3, the Kanza were actually more concerned about living in lands frequented by their enemies, such as the Comanche, Cheyenne, and Pawnee. Parks continues, “Here's the problem with that whole scheme. First of all, there was suitable timber in that area. The surveys of 1859 and 1860 and other observers when the first settlers came into that area [indicated] there were large groves of Burr Oak and Walnut along some of the streams - Pipe Creek, Salt Creek, Solomon River - they did have suitable timber. The Indians, who had hunted there for generations, would have known that. The white people wouldn’t have had a clue. But the problem was, that would have put the Kanza . . . out there on their own and they would have been surrounded by hostile tribes, their enemies. . . ." By centering the terms of negotiation around timber and agriculture, rather than conflict with their enemies, the Kanza created an argument they knew would be more persuasive to U.S. officials and would allow them some flexibility in determining their reservation boundaries.³²

As explained in Article 3, the boundaries of the new reservation would not be surveyed until 1856.

Like the Treaty of 1825, the land the Kanza retained in the Treaty of 1846, predictably, did not “remain for their use forever,” despite the promise offered here. Thirteen years later, the Treaty of 1859 further reduced the Kanza’s 256,000 acres to 80,000 acres. In 1872, the U.S. government then used a congressional act to mandate that the Kanza relinquish the entirety of their Kansas homelands. Despite the Kanza’s vehement protests, the nation was relocated to Indian Territory - present-day Oklahoma - in 1873. The false promise of permanence was a common feature of U.S. treaties.³³

An Indian “sub-agent” lived either on Indigenous land or very close to it and functioned as an intermediary between a tribal nation and the U.S. government. Instrumental in U.S. Indian policy, agents oversaw treaty fulfillment, supervised employees - such as blacksmiths or farmers, prevented trespassing on reservation lands, settled claims between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, and granted licenses to traders. These political appointees rarely had relevant experience for their jobs and earned relatively low salaries. The federal government was much smaller than it is today, and joining the Indian service served as an avenue for entering politics and thus political considerations, rather than Kanza welfare, often determined who served in these positions. Many Indian agents also used their positions to defraud Indigenous nations and the U.S. government. Unfortunately, speculation and corruption were commonplace.³⁴

Following this treaty, the U.S. government failed to appoint an Indian agent to the Kanza until 1855. In the intervening years, as historian William Unrau explained, “nine different agents - including some who served for less than three months - were at least nominally in charge of Kansa affairs.” Assigned to multiple tribes, all of these agents lived at least fifty miles away. Failure to uphold this article’s treaty requirements proved especially brutal for the Kanza as they relocated their towns “with little or no government supervision” in the midst of the changes wrought by the Mexican-American war (as described in Article 4).³⁵ 

In 1855 John Montgomery was finally appointed to serve as Kanza sub-agent. By that time, Congress had passed two significant pieces of legislation that greatly encouraged migration to the region: one in 1853 authorized the president to negotiate with tribes west of Missouri and Iowa to relinquish their land; and another, in 1854, created Kansas and Nebraska territories. Thereafter, all Indigenous lands in Kansas, including the Kanza’s, faced settler invasion. Montgomery found between fifty and seventy-five families squatting on the Kanza reservation and ordered them to leave in 1856. Local citizens protested, threatened violence, attacked Montgomery in the press, appealed to local politicians, and stayed put. Montgomery also used his position to claim land for himself within the Kanza reservation - a classic example of the fraud often perpetrated by Indian agents through their official positions. Squatting on the Kanza reservation subsequently increased.³⁶

In the Treaty of 1825, the U.S. government agreed to “provide and supply a blacksmith” to the Kanza, but failed to reliably maintain anyone in the position. For U.S. officials, providing blacksmith services was directly tied to Indigenous peoples adopting U.S.-style agriculture, which required many metal goods, such as axes, plows, mowers, and wagons. Even as the Kanza rejected changing their agricultural practices, they still utilized many metal goods - such as guns, spears, and cooking utensils - that required blacksmith services. This treaty article states that the Kanza would pay for blacksmith services out of their annuities. However, their agent John Montgomery struggled to staff the position, and the few men he did employ were often terminated because they engaged in the illegal alcohol trade.³⁷

Since the Treaty of 1825, Kanza life had become increasingly precarious. The Kanza had to survive on less land, while the U.S. government relocated eastern Indigenous nations into the region, increasing competition for natural resources and undermining survival for all. In other words, U.S. Indian policy had produced circumstances that challenged virtually every aspect of Kanza life. With limited options in the 1840s and widespread suffering, Kanza leaders needed additional income to survive and they knew their most valuable asset was land. Even in the face of these obstacles, Kanza leaders tried to maintain some control over where their remaining reservation would be located. And most importantly, they maintained the nation as a community, albeit on a shrinking fraction of their homelands. Like the Treaty of 1825, the U.S. government failed to uphold many of this treaty’s provisions, culminating in another treaty in 1859, and a congressional act - the Kaw Land Bill - in 1872 that forced the Kanza to leave their ancestral homelands and emigrate to Oklahoma.³⁸

^{1. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1846 (Washington: Ritchie and Heiss Printers), 75.}

^{2. William E. Unrau, The Kansa Indians: A History of The Wind People, 1673-1873 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 115; David A. Nichols, Lincoln and the Indians: Civil War Policy and Politics, Third Edition (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2012), xi-xiii.}

^{3. Ronald D. Parks, The Darkest Period: The Kanza Indians and Their Last Homeland, 1846-1873 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), 13-14.}

^{4. William E. Unrau, The Emigrant Indians of Kansas: A Critical Bibliography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 10-11; Parks, The Darkest Period, 12.}

^{5. Unrau, The Kansa Indians, 130, 161; Parks, The Darkest Period, 16-17.}

^{6. Unrau, The Kansa Indians, 115.}

^{7. Parks notes that in 1847, only one year after this treaty signing, Hays and Chouteau were two of only six Euro-Americans in what would become the town of Council Grove. Parks, The Darkest Period, 14, 22; Unrau, The Kansa Indians, 165.}

^{8. "Cede, v.," OED Online, accessed June 2022; Robert J. Miller, Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and Manifest Destiny (Westport, Conn: Praeger Publishers, 2006), 3-5; Margaret Huettl, “Nation to Nation: Understanding Treaties and Sovereignty,” in Understanding and Teaching Native American History, ed. Kristofer Ray and Brady DeSanti (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), 131–32.} 

^{9. Parks, The Darkest Period, 14; Unrau, The Kansa Indians, 161-162.}

^{10. “Claim of the Kaw or Kansas Indian (Feb. 4, 1911)” in the 61st Congress, 3rd Session, House of Representatives, Report No, 2071.}

^{11. Ronald Parks, ”Four Reservation Villages,” The Kanza Reserve 150 Years Ago, Kaw Mission Website, January 30, 2009, accessed June 12, 2024, https://www.kawmission.org/places/kawmission/pdfs/2-59_Four_Villages.pdf; Unrau, The Kansa Indians, 162-164.}

^{12. “MeasuringWorth.com,” accessed June 12, 2024, https://www.measuringworth.com/index.php.} 

^{13. Parks, The Darkest Period, 14; Craig Miner and William E. Unrau, The End of Indian Kansas: A Study of Cultural Revolution, 1854-1871, Second edition (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990), 55-56.}

^{14. William E. Unrau, Mixed Bloods and Tribal Dissolution: Charles Curits and the Quest for Indian Identity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989), 67.}

^{15. The Marshall Trilogy was named for the U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall and it refers to these three cases: Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), Worcester v. Georgia (1832). Miller, Native America, Discovered and Conquered, 1–3, 9–58, 165-167; Huettl, “Nation to Nation: Understanding Treaties and Sovereignty,” 131–32.}

^{16. Parks, The Darkest Period, 14.}

^{17. Unrau, The Kansa Indians, 116-37.}

^{18. Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: 1900-1940, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928, Second edition (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020).}

^{19. Parks, The Darkest Period, 33, 38-53.}

^{20. Parks, The Darkest Period, 46; Unrau, The Kansa Indians, 168.}

^{21. Parks, The Darkest Period, 46-47; Lauren Ritterbush, “Visit to Blue Earth Village,” Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 38 (Spring 2015), 15.}

^{22. Unrau, The Kansa Indians, 134-137; Parks, The Darkest Period, 14.}

^{23. Parks, The Darkest Period, 17-20, 67.}

^{24. Parks, The Darkest Period, 15. Unrau, The Kansa Indians, 157, 161}

^{25. Unrau, The Kansa Indians, 162-3, 173-174.}

^{26. Parks, The Darkest Period, 67.}

^{27. Parks, The Darkest Period, 69.}

^{28. Parks, The Darkest Period, 61-65, 67; Unrau, The Kansa Indians, 162-3, 172-175; Miner and Unrau, The End of Indian Kansas, 60.}

^{29. Parks, The Darkest Period, 14, 17, 36.}

^{30. Parks, The Darkest Period, 21-24; Unrau, The Kansa Indians, 164-165.}

^{31. Unrau, The Kansa Indians, 166-167.}

^{32. Parks, personal interview, March 31, 2021; Parks, The Darkest Period, 14-15, 67.}

^{33. Parks, The Darkest Period, 78-81, 232-235.}

^{34. Nichols, Lincoln and the Indians, 15-17, 23-24; Parks, The Darkest Period, 95; Unrau, The Kansa Indians, 140-141.}

^{35. Parks, The Darkest Period, 94-96; Unrau, The Kansa Indians, 166-167.}

^{36. Tai S. Edwards, Osage Women and Empire: Gender and Power (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018), 106; Parks,The Darkest Period, 64-65, 94; Miner and Unrau, The End of Indian Kansas, 60.}

^{37. Ronald Parks, The Kanza Reserve 150 Years Ago, “We Want A Gun Smith,” November 14, 2008, www.kawmission.org/places/kawmission/pdfs/11-58_We_Want_a_Gunsmith.pdf, accessed Nov. 6, 2023; Unrau, The Kansa Indians, 140-141.}

^{38. Parks, The Darkest Period, 13-14, 233–235; Indian Land Tenure Foundation, “Kansa 1846: Treaty Record,” http://portal.treatysigners.org/us/Lists/Treaties/Item/displayifs.aspx?List=1d438ded-5d2c-496d-a768-1c25b01ebe3c&ID=257&Web=b0e0e821-85ef-409a-b6d6-880d311c7288, accessed June 20, 2024.}