Prior to Missouri becoming a state in 1821, the Kansa tribe (Kaws)
gave up their land in western Missouri.
A treaty signed on September 25, 1818, by three
principal chiefs and eight warriors effected this land transaction.
Among those Kansa chiefs who signed that treaty was White
Plume
(ca. 1765—1838). The Kaw tribe at that time occupied lands in what became the
states of Kansas and Missouri. It numbered about 1500 persons. White Plume
married a daughter of the Osage Chief Pawhuska. This marriage may have been
important in establishing friendly relations between the closely related Kaws
and Osage. Most present-day members of the Kaw Nation of Oklahoma trace their
lineage back to him. He was the great-great-grandfather of Charles Curtis, 31st
Vice President of the United States. His village was located
at the area of present day Grantville, just northeast of North Topeka, Kansas.
White
Plume was first written about as one of the Kaw signatories to an 1815 treaty
with the United States. With his daughters married to French traders, American
officials considered White Plume to be more progressive than his leadership
rivals among the Kaws. In 1821 he was invited by Indian Superintendent William
Clark of Lewis and Clark fame to visit Washington D.C. as a member of a
delegation of Indian leaders.
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| President James Monroe |
The group met with President James Monroe and
other American officials, visited New York City, Baltimore, and Philadelphia.
They performed war dances on the White House Lawn and at the residence of the
French Minister. White Plume was given two silver epaulettes as a sign that the
U. S. government accepted him as the principal Kaw chief.
Although
he did not have authority over most members of the tribe at the time, as a
chief among the Kaw (Kansa, Kanza) Indians, White Plume, also known as Nom-pa-wa-rah, Manshenscaw, and Monchousia,
was a member of a large delegation brought to
Washington, D.C. by Indian Agent Benjamin O'Fallon in 1821-1822. The
delegation included prominent chiefs of the Missouri, Omaha, Oto and Pawnee
nations. The purpose of the visit was to impress the Native American
leaders with the power and generosity of the federal government in order to
maintain peace on Western borders which the government was unable to defend.
This portrait of White Plume by Charles Bird was one
of several painted of this sixteen member delegation. They were the first which
Mr. Bird King was commissioned to execute.
White
Plume came back from Washington convinced that the future of the Kaw, and his
own future, was best served by accommodation with the United States. Already eastern Indians
were being expelled from the east and squatted on Kaw lands. The Missouri River
served as a main trail for fur trappers and traders headed to the Rocky
Mountains. In 1822 the first wagons trespassed through Kaw lands from Missouri
to New Mexico on what was known as the Santa Fe Trail. Many white invaders or
Americans, including the missionary Isaac McCoy, saw Kansas as the place in
which all the dispossessed eastern Indians could be confined to an Indian
state. White Plume lived to see the traditional lifestyle of the Kaws become
increasingly unsustainable, which was why he attempted to meet the challenges
facing the Kaws by cooperation with the U.S. government.
By
1825, White Plume was the principal Kaw chief signing a treaty that ceded
18 million acres to the United States in exchange for annuities of 3,500
dollars per year for 20 years plus livestock and assistance to force the Kaw to
become full-time farmers. What was left to the Kaw was a pittance of land
thirty miles wide extending westward into the Great Plains from the Kansas
River valley.
At
the time of the treaty, the family lived at Kawsmouth, the confluence of the
Kansas and Missouri rivers, near what today is Kansas City. The treaty of 1825
assigned the Kaws to a reservation 30 miles north-to-south beginning just west
of present Topeka and extending far into present western Kansas.
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| Courtesy kawmission.org |
This
huge land grab in the 1825 treaty, plus a similar treaty signed by the
government with the Osage, opened up Kansas to the relocation of eastern Indian
tribes. The U.S. would squeeze the Kaw into ever smaller territories as they
brought in more tribes. In defense of White Plume, much of the land he ceded
was already lost to the Kaw and was being occupied by eastern Indians or White
settlers. What culminated in the Indian Removal Act of 1830 already had it
start.
In return for their land, the U.S. government promised
the Kaws two thousand dollars worth of cloth, vermilion, guns, ammunition,
kettles, hoes, axes, knives, flints, awls, and tobacco. These items were to be
issued each September for an indefinite period. A blacksmith was also promised
to keep their guns and implements in good repair. The bargain was sealed with a
gift of goods valued at $460 as proof of the government's good will and motives
of benevolence.
White
Plume probably also foresaw that the Kaw would have to learn to live on much
reduced territories and change their emphasis from hunting and fur trading to
agriculture. Thus, he chose cooperation as his policy. In a letter to William
Clark, superintendent of Indian Affairs, White Plume wrote:
I consider myself an American and my wife
an American woman—I
want to take her home with me and have everything like white people.
White
Plume had five children. His three sons all died when young men. His two
daughters, Hunt Jimmy (b. ca. 1800) and Wyhesee (b. ca. 1802) married the
French traders Louis Gonville and Joseph James. Until the United States acquired
the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803, the Kaw subsisted primarily on
buffalo hunting with only limited agriculture. They were dependent on selling
furs and buffalo robes to French traders, such as the powerful Chouteau family,
to acquire European goods such as guns. To win support for the treaty from the
increasingly important mixed bloods, each of 23 mixed blood children of
French/Kaw parents received a section of land, 640-acre plots, on the north bank of
the Kansas River just
east of the new reservation were granted in fee-simple to all 23 half-bloods of
the Kaw tribe, some of which included his own grandchildren.
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| Two of White Plume's grandaughers-courtesy Kansapedia |
That was how early in Topeka’s history a small group of
women became landowners, controlling some of its most valuable acreage. Their
grandfather, White Plume, was a Kaw chief who joined in signing the treaty of
1825. His participation secured land for his mixed-blood grandchildren and
their heirs. These powerful women with French names—Josette, Julie, Pelagie, and
Victoire—were each deeded one-square-mile tracts along the Kansas River, long
before Kansas was a territory. Their mothers were Kansa and these women were
among 23 mixed-blood Kaws who received special reservations.
Louis
Gonville, a French trader, arrived at Kawsmouth in 1807 to hunt and trap along
the Kansas River. Gonville married White Plume’s daughter, Hunt Jimmy, and they
had two daughters, Josette and Julie. When their marriage ended around 1818,
Gonville married White Plume’s younger daughter, Wyhesee. Several children were
born to this marriage—it appears only Pelagie and Victoire lived to adulthood.
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Location of 23 Half-Kaw Allotments -
Courtesy kawmission.org |
The
23 "half-breed tracts," as they were called, began at the eastern
edge of the 1825 reservation extending 23 miles east on the north bank of the
Kansas River, from present-day Topeka nearly to Lawrence. Josette and Julie received
tracts three and four, Pelagie and Victoire received tracts five and six.
Josette,
also known as May Josephine, moved to the Kansas City, Missouri, area when she
was young to live with the Chouteau family. There she served as an interpreter.
Around 1839, Josette married Joseph Pappan. Soon after Julie married Louis
Pappan, Victoire married Achan Pappan, and Pelagie married Annabel Francouer.
The families moved to their tracts in the spring of 1840. Seizing an
opportunity, the Pappan brothers began a ferry business to transport travelers
across the river.
Begun
around 1841, the first ferry consisted of one or two log canoes, which were
propelled by long poles. The Pappan’s ferry business prospered as more people
headed west, until flooding destroyed the ferry and log cabin in June 1844.
Following their loss, the Pappans lived in Kansas City until about 1849, when
they returned to discover a competing ferry along the river. They purchased a
franchise and resumed their business.
The
value of the bottomland had greatly increased by the 1850s and the Pappans
received many offers to sell their land. Julie Pappan was a wealthy landowner.
She and Louis lived comfortably in their log cabin and cultivated between 15
and 20 acres of the prime bottomland. Their daughter Ellen married to Oren
Curtis, had two children, Charles and Elizabeth. In an effort to secure the
future of her grandchildren, Julie left 40 acres to her daughter and
grandchildren, omitting her son-in-law’s name from the deed. When Ellen died a
few months later, legal battles ensued. The minor children, Charles and
Elizabeth Curtis, were eventually awarded the deed to the property in 1875.
Julie sold her remaining property by 1865 and she and Louis lived their
remaining years on the Kaw Reservation near Council Grove.
The rest of the tribe received no such special consideration, which led to factionalism
within the tribe.
White Plume himself did not live on the half-breed allotments,
but at the eastern edge where a brick two story mansion about
18×34
had been built for him. This house stood about 50
yards north of the present Union Pacific depot in the village of Williamstown,
Jefferson county. White Plume discovered his residence
was over the line on the Delaware lands. While there would never have been any
objection to this mistake or oversight of the white men who located the Agency
buildings, White Plume was too proud to live on the land of another tribe. He
abandoned his house and moved up the Kansas River.
When asked why he left the princely mansion, he simply
explained, “Too many fleas.” Those who examined the home found it overrun with
vermin. Most of the wood trim, doorjambs and window sashings were gone, burnt
for kindling. All that remained was a pile of stone and a two story chimney.
A
hasty examination made of the house justified the wisdom of his removal. It
was not only alive with fleas, but the floors, doors and windows had disappeared
and even the casings had been pretty well used up for kindling-wood,
Thomas L. McKenney, one of the authors of the book,
History
of the Indian Tribes of North America first
published in 1838, recalled Monchonsia as “a
man respected by his tribe, cautious, fearless, and brave….
“White Plume (Wom-pa-wa-ra, "He who
scares all men"), a chief of the Kansas Indians, was born about 1763 and
died past 70 years of age. He is described by Catlin as "a very urbane and
hospitable man of good, portly size, speaking some English, and making himself
good company for all persons who travel through his country and have the good
luck to shake his liberal and hospitable hand." The government built a
substantial stone house for White Plume about 1827 or 1828,…”
Father P. J. De Smet, the Jesuit missionary,
in speaking of White Plume, says: "Among the chiefs of this tribe are
found men really distinguished in many respects. The most celebrated was White
Plume." John T. Irving, in his Indian Sketches, thus describes this
dignitary: "He was tall and muscular, though his form through neglect of
exercise was fast verging towards corpulency. He wore a hat after the fashion
of the whites, a calico hunting shirt and rough leggings. Over the whole was
wrapped a heavy blanket. His face was unpainted and although his age was nearly
seventy, his hair was raven black and his eye was as keen as a hawk's. He was
the White Plume, chief of the Konza nation."
John C. McCoy, in a letter to Mr. Cone, dated August, 1879,
says: “I first entered the territory August 15, 1830. . . .
“We passed up by it in 1830, and found the gallant old
chieftain sitting in state, rigged out in a profusion of feathers, paint,
wampum, brass armlets, etc., at the door of a lodge he had erected a hundred
yards or so to the northwest of his stone mansion, and in honor of our expected
arrival the stars and stripes were gracefully floating in the breeze on a tall
pole over him. He was large, fine-looking, and inclined to corpulency, and
received my father with the grace and dignity of a real live potentate, and
graciously signified his willingness to accept of any amount of bacon and other
presents we might be disposed to tender him.”
In my most recent book, Charlie’s Choice, I make reference
to the special land consideration given to the mixed bloods in the days of
Chief White Plume. It is also a reason the father of the beautiful Kansa woman who seeks him out has a negative attitude towards those of mixed blood. Read
more in the book description which you will find along with the purchase link
by CLICKING HERE.
