Council Grove Morris Kansas United States

The Kansa, or Kaw, speak a Siouan dialect closely related to the languages of the Osage and Quapaw.

According to their own tradition they originated in the east; they crossed the Missouri and ascended the Kansas.

Numbering perhaps twenty-five hundred in 1541, they reside in a village of one hundred and thirty earth lodges near present Council Grove, Kansas.

Clan membership among the Kansa is apparently determined according to female ancestry.

Women own the lodges, take charge of sacred burial customs, and wield considerable influence in village affairs.

Young men establish links with a variety of mysterious powers, or “wakans,” through the sacred rite of the vision quest.

Council Grove is a beautiful area of forests, water, and tall grass prairie, but it is probably the worst location that could have been selected for the already weakened and demoralized Kaw tribe.

It is a favorite stopping place for the rough-hewn teamsters and traders and voracious merchants on the Santa Fe Trail.

The first Kaw arriving there in 1846 had been beaten up by traders.

The flourishing whiskey trade in Council Grove also proves to be deleterious.

Whites invade native lands and sporadic efforts by soldiers to force them off the reservation are ineffective.

In 1860, the Kaw reservation, overrun by White settlers, is reduced to eighty thousand acres (three hundred and twenty square kilometers).

The Kaw and other native groups in Kansas suddenly became an asset with the coming of the American Civil War in 1861, as the state recruits them as soldiers and scouts to stave off invasions by slave-holding tribes and Confederate supporters in Indian Territory.

Seventy young Kaw men are persuaded—or forced—to join Company L, Ninth Kansas Cavalry.

They will serve in Indian Territory (Oklahoma) and Arkansas during the war and twenty-one of them will never come home—a large loss to the already diminished numbers of the tribe.

William Quantrill's gang of Bushwhackers had grown to over three hundred by early 1863.

William T. Anderson, Jr., who will later be immortalized as “Bloody Bill” Anderson, had joined Quantrill's Raiders by the spring of 1863, if not sooner.

William T. Anderson, Sr., a Southern sympathizer, had been shot to death in March 1862 by a prominent Unionist, some say for horse-stealing, others say for simply having pro-slavery views.

Most accounts claim a neighbor did it and that Anderson’s twenty-two-year old son and his brother Jim later confronted the neighbor, killing him and another man.

Anderson, now in trouble with the law, had had to leave Kansas.

Whatever the reason, the event had turned Anderson into a hater of the Union cause.

European-Americans in Kansas agitate for removal of natives, including the Kaw, after the Civil War.

However, amidst the gloom of a tribe that seems likely to disintegrate comes one colorful moment.

The Kaw and the Cheyenne have long been enemies.

On June 1, 1868, about one hundred Cheyenne warriors descend on the Kaw reservation.

Terrified white settlers take refuge in Council Grove.

The Kaw men paint their faces, don their finery, and sally forth on horseback to meet the Cheyenne.

The two Indian armies put on a military pageant featuring horsemanship, fearsome howls and curses, and volleys of bullets and arrows.

After four hours, the Cheyenne retire with a few stolen horses and a peace offering of coffee and sugar by the Council Grove merchants.

No one had been hurt on either side.

During the battle, the mixed-blood Kaw interpreter, Joseph James, Jr. (more commonly known as Jojim or Joe Jim) had galloped sixty miles to Topeka to request assistance from the Governor.

Riding along with Jojim was an eight-year-old, part-Indian boy named Charles Curtis or "Indian Charley".

Curtis will later become a jockey, a lawyer, a politician, and Vice President of the United States under Herbert Hoover.