168 Kansas History Báxoje in Blue: Ioway Soldiers in the Union Army by Greg Olson
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An 1869 photograph of Iowa chiefs taken in Washington, D.C. Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 40 (Autumn 2017): 168-185 168 Kansas History Báxoje in Blue: Ioway Soldiers in the Union Army by Greg Olson n 1864, there were seventy-eight men between the ages of twenty and forty-five listed on the rolls of the Ioway Nation. Of that number, fifty, or nearly two-thirds, had volunteered to serve in the Union army during the Civil War. 1 Sixteen Ioway men enlisted in the Thirteenth Kansas Volunteer Infantry in 1862, and thirty-two joined the Fourteenth Kansas Volunteer Cavalry in 1863. Seven more joined various other units in Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska. During the war, Ioway soldiers saw action in Tennessee, Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, and the Indian Territory.2 IAlthough the Ioways were certainly not the only Indigenous Americans to serve in the military during the war, the circumstances of their enlistment and their experiences in the army were different from those of most other Native American soldiers in the Trans-Mississippi West. Most Native men served in segregated units, but all fifty Ioways served in integrated units. This article seeks to investigate why the Ioways had the opportunity to serve in regular companies with white men. It also explores the Ioways’ military experiences and addresses some of the obvious questions raised by their willingness to enlist in the army. One wonders, for example, why the Ioways, who had been frustrated by six decades of contentious relations with the United States, chose to send two-thirds of their able-bodied men to fight for the federal government. At a time when settlers were demanding that Kansas tribes be removed to the Indian Territory to make their land available, the Ioways hoped that service in the military would help them leverage a bargain with the government that would allow them to retain their reservation in Kansas. Other reasons for their military service certainly came into play. Young Ioway men Greg Olson is curator of exhibits and special projects at the Missouri State Archives and is the author of The Ioway in Missouri and Ioway Life: Reservation and Reform, 1837–1860. 1. The population of Ioway men is from John A. Burbank to Superintendent of Indian Affairs W. M. Albin, September 30, 1864, microfilm 234, roll 311, frames 311–314, Great Nemaha Agency Records, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC (hereafter Great Nemaha Agency Records). The author would like to thank Ioway Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Lance Foster and Ioway tribal member Juli Kerns for their valuable assistance in verifying the names of Ioways who served in the military during the Civil War. 2. Some Ioways signed up with more than one unit during the war. James Whitecloud, for instance, served in the Thirteenth Kansas, Fourteenth Kansas, and First Regiment Kansas Infantry. See “Thirteenth Regiment, Field and Staff, Roster of,” Report of the Adjutant General of the State of Kansas, 1861–1865, vol. 1 (Topeka: Kansas State Printing Company, 1896), 445–70; “Descriptive roll, Fourteenth Regiment, Cavalry, Kansas Civil War Volunteers,” vol. 2, Kansas Memory, State Archives Division, Kansas Historical Society, http://www.kansasmemory.org/item/227703; Mary Jane Warde, When the Wolf Came: The Civil War and the Indian Territory (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2013), 252–53. Baxoje in Blue 169 had a long history of participating in war. However, life Over the next thirteen years, more treaties pushed the on the reservation had largely put an end to that tradition. Ioways toward Missouri’s western border. The 1836 Platte The Ioways may also have seen enlistment in the armed Purchase Treaty forced them out of the state and onto a forces as a way to better themselves financially, as they two-hundred-square-mile reservation that straddled the were a small and impoverished tribe. The promise of a border separating present-day Kansas and Nebraska on regular salary, food, and clothing may have made service the west bank of the Missouri River. By the time of the Civil enticing, as did the hope that the government would offer War, subsequent treaties had whittled that reservation to their families assistance while the men were away at war. about one-quarter of its original size. Furthermore, the It is also possible that their Indian agent, John A. government forced the Ioways to share the little land Burbank, somehow directed the Ioways’ enlistment in they retained with the Sac and Fox Nation of Missouri, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Kansas regiments. The which had been forced to relinquish all of its adjoining Ioways’ agents had a twenty-year history of exercising reservation.4 tight control over the activities of the tribe, and Burbank During their years on the reservation, the Ioways had exerted his control by refusing to allow them to enlist early been pressured by government agents and Presbyterian in the war. That the Ioways ended up enlisting when and missionaries to assimilate. By 1861, many Ioways had where they did may well have been linked to Burbank’s attended—if only sporadically—classes and church political and personal ties to the state’s chief recruitment services at the Presbyterian Ioway, Sac and Fox Mission. officer, Kansas senator James Henry Lane. They had also given up many of their traditions and had It also seems natural to ask whether the Ioways begun to adopt the agrarian methods and lifestyle of their encountered racism or cultural difficulties unique to white neighbors.5 Native people while in the military. Throughout the war, The chain of events that led to the Ioways’ participation segregated units of Native soldiers tended to receive in the Civil War began in mid-April 1861 with the clothing, weapons, and supplies that were inferior to arrival of their new Indian agent John A. Burbank. Like those the army issued white soldiers. Because the Ioways most Indian agents who received their posts through served in integrated units, they fared better than most political patronage, Burbank was a member of a well- other Native soldiers who fought for either side during connected family. His older brother, J. Edward Burbank, the war. Although it is difficult to determine the extent was a newspaperman who had become a member of the to which Ioways in the military were subjected to racism Nebraska territorial legislature in 1859. His sister, Lucinda, and discrimination, it does not appear that they were was the wife of Indiana governor and later senator Oliver completely accepted by their white neighbors at home or P. Morton. in the military. Natives of Indiana, Edward and John Burbank were The Ioways, or Báxoje, as they call themselves, trace also abolitionists and political allies of fellow Hoosier their earliest roots to MayanShuje, or Red Earth, near and Kansas Jayhawker James Lane. Edward Burbank met present-day Green Bay, Wisconsin. Over time, the Ioways Lane while the latter was on a speaking tour in Indiana in broke away from their relatives the Otoes, Missourias, 1856. Lane was making plans for what would eventually and Winnebagos and slowly migrated south and west. become known as the “Lane Trail,” a route from Chicago When they first encountered European missionaries in the to the Kansas-Nebraska border. Lane hoped the trail 1670s, the Ioways were living in southeastern Minnesota would serve as a conduit to move abolitionists into Kansas and northeastern Iowa. Over the next 150 years, they and freed slaves out of the region, all while bypassing the gradually moved to southern Iowa and northern Missouri slave state of Missouri.6 along the Grand and Chariton Rivers. It was there that Ioway headmen signed their first land cession treaty with the U.S. government. In the 4. “Treaty with the Iowa, etc., 1936,” in Kappler, Laws and Treaties, vol. Treaty of 1824, they sold their rights to all land in the 2, 468–470; “Treaty with the Sauk and Foxes, etc., 1861,” in Kappler, Laws 3 and Treaties, vol. 2, 811–14. state of Missouri north of the Missouri River for $5,000. 5. For more on this period in the Ioways’ history, see Greg Olson, Ioway Life: Reservation and Reform, 1837–1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016); and Martha Royce Blaine, The Ioway Indians (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995). 3. “Treaty with the Iowa, 1824,” in Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, 6. J. Edwin [Edward] Burbank, “Story of the Founding of Falls City’s vol. 2, ed. Charles J. Kappler (Washington, DC: Government Printing First Newspaper,” in Lewis C. Edwards, History of Richardson County, Office, 1904), 208–09. Nebraska: Its People, Industries, and Institutions (Indianapolis, IN.: B. F. 170 Kansas History The Ioways, or Báxoje, as they call themselves, trace their earliest roots to MayanShuje, or Red Earth, near present-day Green Bay, Wisconsin. Over time, the Ioways broke away from their relatives the Otoes, Missourias, and Winnebagos and slowly migrated south and west. When they first encountered European missionaries in the 1670s, the Ioways were living in southeastern Minnesota and northeastern Iowa. Over the next 150 years, they gradually moved to southern Iowa and northern Missouri along the Grand and Chariton Rivers. A series of treaties with the U.S. government in the early nineteenth century pushed the Ioways toward Missouri’s western border, and then out of the state altogether. By the Civil War, they shared a small reservation with the Sac and Fox Nation of Missouri on the west bank of the Missouri River where Kansas and Nebraska meet. During that meeting, Lane regaled Edward Burbank Though Sol Miller, the editor of the White Cloud Kansas with descriptions of a town site located on the Big Chief, credited Kansas’s other senator, Samuel Clarke Nemaha River near the Kansas-Nebraska border that he Pomeroy, with handing out the patronage that sent John hoped to make the terminus of his trail.