The Cherokees’ “Trail of Tears” and the forced migration of other Southern tribes during the 1830s and 1840s were the most notorious consequences of Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policy. Less well known is the fact that many tribes of the Old Northwest territory were also forced to surrender their lands and move west of the Mississippi River.
By 1850, upwards of 10, 000 displaced Indians had been settled “permanently” along the wooded streams and rivers of eastern Kansas. Twenty years later only a few hundred—mostly Kickapoos, Potawatomis, Chippewas, Munsees, Iowas, Foxes, and Sacs—remained.
Joseph Herring’s The Enduring Indians of Kansas recounts the struggle of these determined survivors. For them, the “end of Indian Kansas” was unacceptable, and they stayed on the lands that they had been promised were theirs forever.
Offering a good counterpoint to Craig Miner’s and William Unrau’s The End of Indian Kansas, Herring shows the reader a shifting set of native perspectives and strategies. He argues that it was by acculturation on their own terms—by walking the fine line between their traditional ways and those of the whites—that these Indians managed to survive, to retain their land, and to resist the hostile intrusions of the white world. The story of their epic struggle to survive will place a new set of names in the pantheon of American Indian heroes.
Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.
Table of Content
List of Illustrations and Maps
Kansas Open Books Foreword
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Removal to “Kansas”
3. The Vermillion Kickapoos
4. The Chippewas and Munsees
5. The Iowas and the Missouri Sacs
6. “Vagabond Trespassers” Mokohoko’s Band of Sac Indians
7. The Prairie Potawatomis and the Struggle against Land Allotment
8. The Triumph of Indian Kansas
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the author
Joseph B. Herring previously worked as an archivist at the National Archives, a senior program officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities, and taught history at Kansas Newman College (now Newman University). He is the author of two books and his articles on Native American history have appeared in the American Indian Quarterly, Western Historical Quarterly, Kansas History, and Great Plains Quarterly.
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