![]() Hard Chief’s village, nearer the river, had some 500 or 600 inhabitants, and a third village of Fool Chief was located on the north side of the Kansas River, not far from the Menoken Union Pacific Railroad station. The village of American Chief, containing some 20 lodges and 100 followers, was on the west side of the creek about two miles from the Kansas River. After the treaty of 1825, the tribes moved east again and, in 1830 had two villages near the mouth of Mission Creek a short distance west of Topeka. The 15th annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology said there was a Kanza village at the Saline River’s mouth and that the first treaty between them and the United States was concluded there. In his report, he stated that the old village was “about two miles east of Manhattan, on a neck of land between the Kansas and Big Blue Rivers. Adams, Secretary of the Kansas Historical Society, had surveyed this village. Remsburg, who was regarded as an authority on matters relating to the Kanza Indians, said the grand village of the tribe was located where the town of Doniphan now stands and was known as the “Village of the Twenty-four.” After the white settlers induced them to remove farther west, the principal village of the tribe was near the southwest corner of Pottawatomie County. These villages were also mentioned by Lewis and Clark nearly a century later. ![]() Another Frenchman, Etienne Venyard Sieur de Bourgmont, who visited the tribe in 1724, called them the “Canzes” and reported that they had two villages on the Missouri River, one about 40 miles above the mouth of the Kansas River and the other farther up the river, both on the right bank. These early Frenchmen gave the tribe the name of Kah or Kaw, which, according to the story of an old Osage warrior, was a term of derision, meaning coward, and was given to the Kanza by the Osage because they refused to join in a war against the Cherokee. The first white man to acquire knowledge of the Kanza Indians was Spanish Conquistador Juan de Onate, who met them on his expedition in 1601 and referred to them as the “Escansaques.”Īlthough French missionary Jacques Marquette’s map of 1673 showed the location of the Kanza Indians, the French did not come in contact with the tribe until 1750, when the French explorers and traders ascended the Missouri River to the mouth of the Kansas River, where they met with a welcome reception from the Indians. The tribe then successfully occupied some 20 villages along the Kansas Valley before settling at Council Grove before they were finally removed to the Indian Territory in 1873. ![]() Here, they were visited by the “Big Knives,” as they called the white men, who persuaded them to go farther west. The Kanza, being without these superior weapons, were forced back to the Kansas River. Those going down the Mississippi River became the Quapaw or “dawn stream people,” those who went up became the Omaha or “upstream people.”Īfter the Kanza separated from the Omaha and Ponca and established themselves at the mouth of the Kansas River, they gradually extended their domain to the present northern boundary of Kansas, where they were met and driven back by the Ioway and Sauk tribes, who had already come in contact with the white traders from whom they had received firearms. The first separation took place at the mouth of the Ohio River. The 15th annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology said: “According to tribal traditions collected by Dorsey, the ancestors of the Omaha, Ponca, Quapaw, Osage, and Kanza were originally one people dwelling on the Ohio and Wabash Rivers, but gradually working westward. In the traditional migration of the group, after the Quapaw had first separated from there, the main body divided at the mouth of the Osage River, the Osage moving up that stream and the Omaha and the Ponca crossing the Missouri River and proceeding northward, while the Kanza ascended the Missouri River on the south side of the mouth of the Kansas River.” When the first white men visited the region now comprising the State of Kansas, they found it inhabited by four tribes of Indians: the Kanza or Kaw, which occupied the northeastern and central part of the state, the Osage, who were located south of the Kanza the Pawnee, whose country lay west and north of the Kanza, and the Comanche, whose hunting grounds were in the western part of the state.Ī handbook issued by the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1907 defined the Kanza as “A southwestern Siouan tribe.” Their linguistic relations are closest to the Osage and close with the Quapaw. Kanza Chief White Plume by Charles Bird King about 1822.
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