When Kansas became a U.S. territory in 1854 literally all of its land area was guaranteed by treaty to Indians. More than 10,000 Kickapoos, Delawares, Sacs, Foxes, Shawnees, Potawatomis, Kansas, Ottawas, Wyandots, and Osages, not to mention a number of smaller tribes, inhabited Kansas. By 1875 there were only a couple of bands left. The forced removal of thousands of Indians from eastern Kansas between 1854 and 1871 affected more Indians and occupied more government time than the celebrated exploits of the military against the more warlike western tribes. In this volume Miner and Unrau show Kansas at mid-century to be a moral testing ground where the drama of Indian disinheritance was played out. They relate how railroad men, land speculators, and timber operations came to be firmly entrenched on Indian land in territorial Kansas. They examine remarkable incongruities in Indian policy, land policy, law, and administration, pointing to specific cases in which legal maneuvers by the federal government—within the framework of treaties, statutes, and executive pronouncements—helped to insure the pattern of tribal destruction. Separate chapters deal with internal factionalism in the Indian tribes, the practice of government chief-making, and the "Indian Ring"—the sub rosa alliances influencing the treaty or sale process. The authors also include revealing portraits of the individuals, from territorial governors to railroad officials, who helped engineer the end of Indian Kansas. "The reader's perception of those brave, hard-working sod-house settlers may never be the same after reading this book."—American West.

The End of Indian Kansas: A Study of Cultural Revolution, 1854-1871

History

Unrau, William E.

Miner, H. Craig

Americas

Univ Pr of Kansas

This book shows that without the cooperation of the"mixed-bloods," or part-Indians, dispossession of Indian lands by the U.S. government in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would have been much more difficult to accomplish. The relationship between the Métis and the loss of Indian lands, never before fully explored, is revealed in Unrau's study of Charles Curtis, a mixed-blood member of the Kansa-Kaws.Curtis is best remembered as Herbert Hoover's vice-president, but he also served in Congress for more than 30 years.A successful lawyer and Republican politician, Curtis had spent his early years on a reservation but grew up comfortably and fully integrated into the white world. By virtue of his celebrated status, he became the most important figure in the debate over federal Indian policy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.As the Indian expert in Congress, Curtis had significant power in formulating and carrying out the assimilationist program that had been instituted, particularly by the Dawes Act, in the 1880s. The strategy was to encourage reservation Indians to reject communal life and reap the rewards of individual enterprise. Central to these developments were questions of ownership, land claims, allotments, tribal inheritance laws, and what constituted the public domain. The underlying issues, however, were Indian identification and assimilation. The government's actions—affecting schools, the federal courts, Indian Office personnel, allotment and inheritance laws, mineral leases, and the absorption of the Indian Territory into the state of Oklahoma—all bore the mark of Curtis's hand.

Mixed-Bloods and Tribal Dissolution: Charles Curtis and the Quest for Indian Identity

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

University Press of Kansas

The End of Indian Kansas: A Study in Cultural Revolution, 1854-1871

Miner, Craig

"The inordinate indulgence of Indians in spiritous liquors is one of the most deplorable consequences which has resulted from their intercourse with civilized man."—Governor Lewis Cass, Michigan Territory, 1827 "Often I have been compelled to ask myself, 'Who is the civilized and who is the savage?' Their principal vices are emphatically our vices. If they get drunk it is upon our whiskey. . . . [A]nd yet we claim to be 'civilized' and freely deal out to them the epithet 'savage.'"—The Reverend William H. Goode, reflecting on his early 19th-century sojourn in Indian Country In White Man's Wicked Water, Unrau tells the compelling story of how an alcohol-sodden society introduced drink to the Indians. That same society then instituted futile policies to control the flow of alcohol to tribes who, as one superintendent put it, "have not the moral force to resist temptation." Unrau dispels that racial-deficiency theory and debunks the belief that prohibition was carried out by well-intended reformers. Unrau shows that, contrary to the perniciously false image of the innately "depraved savage," Indians actually learned their "uncivil" behavior by emulating—in hopes of accommodating—"civilized" men. Indian inebriation in the nineteenth century, he shows, essentially mimicked the habits of white Americans who-spurred on by prevailing attitudes and federal law-were aspiring to integrate the natives into the cultural mainstream. Prohibition zealots, intent upon soothing white anxieties, were far more concerned with this goal than with stemming the flow of alcohol. Scholars have often viewed the sale of alcohol to Native Americans as a ploy by Euro-Americans to trick them into unfair land and trade deals. But Unrau makes it clear that alcoholic consumption by Native Americans was the inevitable consequence of cultural confluence, not of conscious white subversion. To support his arguments, Unrau has closely examined previously neglected records pertaining to illicit alcohol trafficking, its tie to the land-cession/annuity-distribution system, and the influence of federal subsidy to non-Indian, western development. From these sources, he provides surprising new insights into alcohol use and abuse in relation to Indian removal. Unrau also sheds new light on nineteenth-century prohibition attempts in the trans-Missouri West (primarily Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma) up to the absolutist prohibition law of 1892.

White Man's Wicked Water: The Alcohol Trade and Prohibition in Indian Country, 1802-1892

"The inordinate indulgence of Indians in spiritous liquors is one of the most deplorable consequences which has resulted from their intercourse with civilized man."—Governor Lewis Cass, Michigan Territory, 1827 "Often I have been compelled to ask myself, 'Who is the civilized and who is the savage?' Their principal vices are emphatically our vices. If they get drunk it is upon our whiskey. . . . [A]nd yet we claim to be 'civilized' and freely deal out to them the epithet 'savage.'"—The Reverend William H. Goode, reflecting on his early 19th-century sojourn in Indian Country In White Man's Wicked Water, Unrau tells the compelling story of how an alcohol-sodden society introduced drink to the Indians. That same society then instituted futile policies to control the flow of alcohol to tribes who, as one superintendent put it, "have not the moral force to resist temptation." Unrau dispels that racial-deficiency theory and debunks the belief that prohibition was carried out by well-intended reformers. Unrau shows that, contrary to the perniciously false image of the innately "depraved savage," Indians actually learned their "uncivil" behavior by emulating—in hopes of accommodating—"civilized" men. Indian inebriation in the nineteenth century, he shows, essentially mimicked the habits of white Americans who-spurred on by prevailing attitudes and federal law-were aspiring to integrate the natives into the cultural mainstream. Prohibition zealots, intent upon soothing white anxieties, were far more concerned with this goal than with stemming the flow of alcohol. Scholars have often viewed the sale of alcohol to Native Americans as a ploy by Euro-Americans to trick them into unfair land and trade deals. But Unrau makes it clear that alcoholic consumption by Native Americans was the inevitable consequence of cultural confluence, not of conscious white subversion. To support his arguments, Unrau has closely examined previously neglected records pertaining to illicit alcohol trafficking, its tie to the land-cession/annuity-distribution system, and the influence of federal subsidy to non-Indian, western development. From these sources, he provides surprising new insights into alcohol use and abuse in relation to Indian removal. Unrau also sheds new light on nineteenth-century prohibition attempts in the trans-Missouri West (primarily Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma) up to the absolutist prohibition law of 1892.

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Addiction & Recovery

The Indian Trade and Intercourse Act of 1834 represented what many considered the ongoing benevolence of the United States toward Native Americans, establishing a congressionally designated refuge for displaced Indians to protect them from exploitation by white men. Others came to see it as a legally sanctioned way to swindle them out of their land. This first book-length study of "Indian country" focuses on Section 1 of the 1834 Act—which established its boundaries—to show that this legislation was ineffectual from the beginning. William Unrau challenges conventional views that the act was a continuation of the government's benevolence toward Indians, revealing it instead as little more than a deceptive stopgap that facilitated white settlement and development of the trans-Missouri West. Encompassing more than half of the Louisiana Purchase and stretching from the Red River to the headwaters of the Missouri, Indian country was designated as a place for Native survival and improvement. Unrau shows that, although many consider that the territory merely fell victim to Manifest Destiny, the concept of Indian country was flawed from the start by such factors as distorted perceptions of the region's economic potential, tribal land compressions, government complicity in overland travel and commerce, and blatant disregard for federal regulations. Chronicling the encroachments of land-hungry whites, which met with little resistance from negligent if not complicit lawmakers and bureaucrats, he tells how the protection of Indian country lasted only until the needs of westward expansion outweighed those associated with the presumed solution to the "Indian problem" and how subsequent legislation negated the supposed permanence of Indian lands. When thousands of settlers began entering Kansas Territory in 1854, the government appeared powerless to protect Indians—even though it had been responsible for carving Kansas out of Indian country in the first place. Unrau's work shows that there has been a general misunderstanding of Indian country both then and now-that it was never more or less than what the white man said it was, not what the Indians were told or believed—and represents a significant chapter in the shameful history of America's treatment of Indians.

The Rise and Fall of Indian Country, 1825-1855

In the culture of the American West, images abound of Indians drunk on the white man's firewater, a historical stereotype William Unrau has explored in two previous books. His latest study focuses on how federally-developed roads from Missouri to northern New Mexico facilitated the diffusion of both spirits and habits of over-drinking within Native American cultures.Unrau investigates how it came about that distilled alcohol, designated illegal under penalty of federal fines and imprisonment as a trade item for Indian people, was nevertheless easily obtainable by most Indians along the Taos and Santa Fe roads after 1821. Unrau reveals how the opening of those overland trails, their designation as national roads, and the establishment of legal boundaries of "Indian Country" all combined to produce an increasingly unstable setting in which Osage, Kansa, Southern Cheyenne, Arapahoe, Kiowa, and Comanche peoples entered into an expansive trade for alcohol along these routes.Unrau describes how Missouri traders began meeting Anglo demand for bison robes and related products, obtaining these commodities in exchange for corn and wheat alcohol and ensnaring Prairie and Plains Indians in a market economy that became dependent on this exchange. He tells how the distribution of illicit alcohol figured heavily in the failure of Indian prohibition, with drinking becoming an unfortunate learned behavior among Indians, and analyzes this trade within the context of evolving federal Indian law, policy, and enforcement in Indian Country.Unrau's research suggests that the illegal trade along this route may have been even more important than the legal commerce moving between the mouth of the Kansas River and the Mexican markets far to the southwest. He also considers how and why the federal government failed to police and take into custody known malefactors, thereby undermining its announced program for tribal improvement.Indians, Alcohol, and the Roads to Taos and Santa Fe cogently explores the relationship between politics and economics in the expanding borderlands of the United States. It fills a void in the literature of the overland Indian trade as it reveals the enduring power of the most pernicious trade good in Indian Country.

Indians, Alcohol, and the Roads to Taos and Santa Fe

Volume 114 in the Civilization of the American Indian Series "[William] Unrau's book is the definitive written history of the Kansa to date, particularly in terms of their interaction with the federal government."--American Indian Quarterly "Unrau examines tribal legends and tradition to trace the origins of the Kansa culture to a single Indian nation, located in 'an unidentified area east of the Mississippi River' and made up of the people who separated before the mid-sixteenth century into the Kansas, Quapaws, Omahas, Osages and Poncas. Balancing tradition and archaeological evidence with French and Spanish records, [Unrau] suggests several routes of migration that could have brought the Wind People to the Kansas River valley."--The American West

Kansa Indians: A History of the Wind People, 1673-1873 (The Civilization of American Indian Series)

University of Oklahoma Press

When Ottawa University was founded in Kansas in 1865, it was supposed to be the first major Indian university in the West - an enlightened product of the Ottawa tribe's 1862 treaty with the United States.  Yet, as events demonstrated, it was always designed to serve the needs of white citizens, and the tribe was victimized by the promoters - church leaders, government officials, and tribal leaders alike.  the establishment of the university was a case study in tribal dispossession.

Tribal Dispossession and the Ottawa Indian University Fraud

Miner, C.

Univ of Oklahoma Pr

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Unrau, William E.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Unrau, William E.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Unrau, William E.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The End of Indian Kansas: A Study of Cultural Revolution, 1854-1871

Mixed-Bloods and Tribal Dissolution: Charles Curtis and the Quest for Indian Identity

The End of Indian Kansas: A Study in Cultural Revolution, 1854-1871

White Man's Wicked Water: The Alcohol Trade and Prohibition in Indian Country, 1802-1892

White Man's Wicked Water: The Alcohol Trade and Prohibition in Indian Country, 1802-1892

The Rise and Fall of Indian Country, 1825-1855

Indians, Alcohol, and the Roads to Taos and Santa Fe

The Rise and Fall of Indian Country, 1825-1855

Kansa Indians: A History of the Wind People, 1673-1873 (The Civilization of American Indian Series)

Tribal Dispossession and the Ottawa Indian University Fraud