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The Emigrant Métis of Kansas: Rethinking the Pioneer Narrative Written by Shirley E

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The Emigrant Métis of Kansas: Rethinking the Pioneer Narrative Written by Shirley E THE EMIGRANT MÉTIS OF KANSAS: RETHINKING THE PIONEER NARRATIVE by SHIRLEY E. KASPER B.A., Marshall University, 1971 M.S., University of Kansas, 1984 M.A., University of Missouri-Kansas City, 1998 A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of History 2012 This dissertation entitled: The Emigrant Métis of Kansas: Rethinking the Pioneer Narrative written by Shirley E. Kasper has been approved for the Department of History _______________________________________ Dr. Ralph Mann _______________________________________ Dr. Virginia DeJohn Anderson Date: April 13, 2012 The final copy of this dissertation has been examined by the signatories, and we Find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards Of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline. iii ABSTRACT Kasper, Shirley E. (Ph.D., History) The Emigrant Métis of Kansas: Rethinking the Pioneer Narrative Dissertation directed by Associate Professor Ralph Mann Under the U.S. government’s nineteenth century Indian removal policies, more than ten thousand Eastern Indians, mostly Algonquians from the Great Lakes region, relocated in the 1830s and 1840s beyond the western border of Missouri to what today is the state of Kansas. With them went a number of mixed-race people – the métis, who were born of the fur trade and the interracial unions that it spawned. This dissertation focuses on métis among one emigrant group, the Potawatomi, who removed to a reservation in Kansas that sat directly in the path of the great overland migration to Oregon and California. Utilizing entrepreneurial skills learned in the fur trade, the French-Potawatomi Louis Vieux located his home on the banks of the Red Vermillion, built a bridge, charged overland travelers to cross, and did a side business by offering meals. The métis Louis Ogee established a ferry over the Kansas River, and Madore Beaubien opened a store. Acculturating full-bloods, meanwhile, cut the prairie sod, fenced their fields, domesticated livestock, lived in log cabins, and embraced the Christian faith. Their spatial and temporal location placed these Indians and métis people in the center of momentous historical forces taking place as America moved west, and toward war, in the 1840s and 1850s, while their actions, I suggest, made them “pioneers” no less than the Euro-Americans who followed when Kansas was opened to non-Indian settlement in 1854. By placing the métis on center stage, this study, borrowing a phrase from historian Philip Deloria, has found Indians in an “unexpected place” – in the very pioneer saga of the American West. In 1850s Kansas, Indians and métis faced choices: Would they break up the reservation, take an allotment, become an iv American citizen and attempt to coexist with Anglo settlers, or would they hold fast to traditional ways? So diverse and wide was the gap in how members of the Potawatomi viewed themselves that these questions came to a head in Kansas. In 1861, the tribe split in two over the allotment question, a crisis, I suggest, that centered on culture and the changing face of the Indian Country. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project owes a debt of gratitude to mentors at the University of Colorado at Boulder who were ever patient as progress toward my degree seem to stretch on interminably. First and foremost I want to thank Dr. Ralph Mann, who took me on when elapsed time left me without a resident adviser. Like the social worker he once was, Ralph extended a needed hand. Kind, but never easy, he demanded revision after revision until the central premise of this study came into focus. Members of my dissertation committee – Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Lee Chambers, Ruben Donato, and Phoebe Young – offered key insights that sharpened my argument. Susan Lee Johnson, now at the University of Wisconsin, helped me early-on as I struggled to identify a topic and write a prospectus. The CU History Department reached out with teaching assistantships, travel funds, and a semester’s tuition waiver at one critical juncture. A big thank you also goes to Scott Miller, the department’s graduate assistant, who has been a rock through this entire process. I also wish to thank the University of Colorado Graduate School for extending a Beverly Sears Graduate Student Grant, which paid for translations. Archivists and librarians at the Citizen Band Potawatomi Family History Center in Shawnee, Oklahoma; the Frontier Trails Museum in Independence, Missouri; the Midwest Jesuit Archives in St. Louis; and the Pay Station Museum of the St. Marys Historical Society could not have been more helpful. Enough good things never can be said about the collections and professional staff at the Kansas State Historical Society in Topeka and the Western History/Genealogy department of the Denver Public Library, where Senior Special Collections Librarian Wendel Cox shared a wealth of knowledge about the library’s map collection. I also owe a special thank you to Frances Gimber, RSCJ, who trusted me with files at the United States Province Archives of the Society of the Sacred Heart in St. Louis. vi Personal friends, family, and colleagues at the National Park Service who have shared my joys and frustrations through the completion of this project have been a source of strength and cheer. I am ever grateful. vii CONTENTS CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION………………………………………………...…………..….........1 Background and Literature……………………………………………………….14 Arrangement of Dissertation……………………………………………………..39 II. THE KAWSMOUTH CONFLUENCE…………………………………………….…49 III. THE POTAWATOMIS……………………………………………………………….94 IV. MÉTIS ORIGINS………………………………………………………………….....141 V. POTAWATOMIS AT THE CONFLUENCE………………………………………..198 VI. RETHINKING THE PIONEER NARRATIVE……...………………………………242 VII. ST. MARY’S MISSION AS PIONEER INSTITUTION……………………………308 VIII. A QUESTION OF IDENTITY……………………………………..……….……….376 IX. CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………419 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………….…...442 APPENDIX………………………………………………………………………………………..447 viii FIGURES Figure 1. Vieux Cemetery………………………………………………………………….………..1 2. R. Jones, “Map showing the lands assigned to Emigrant Indians west of Arkansas & Missouri,” 1836………………………………………….............3 3. E.B. Whitman & A.D. Searl, “Map of Eastern Kansas,” 1856 ………………….............52 4. Reservations of the Emigrant Indians in Kansas, 1846………………………..………...53 5. Potawatomi Land Cessions……………………………………………………………..124 6. Location of métis families………………………………………………………...........143 7. Platte Purchase and Potawatomi reservation under Treaty of 1846………….………...198 8. Fort Riley Military Road and California-Oregon Trail crossings………………............245 9. Alexander Gardner, “Ferry across the Kaw at Lecompton Kansas, 338 miles west of St. Louis, Mo., 1867 …………………………………….…251 10. Alexander Gardner, “Potawatomie Indians at St. Mary’s Mission, 375 miles west of St. Louis, Mo,” 1867…………………………………………...329 11. Alexander Gardner, “St. Mary’s Mission, 375 miles west of St. Louis, Mo,”1867…………………………………………………….………..330 12. Potawatomi Diminished Reservation, Jackson County, Kansas…………………….….377 13. Studio portrait of Louis Vieux………………………………………………………….403 14. Abraham Burnett, wearing suit and moccasins………………………………………....423 15. Abraham Burnett……………………………………………………………………….424 1 INTRODUCTION The old Vieux cemetery, surrounded by rolling fields and pasture land, rests on a hill in northeast Kansas, the Red Vermillion River flowing nearby. Years ago, the Kansas State Historical Society planted a sign here, announcing that this is the place where Louis Vieux, of Potawatomi and French ancestry, operated a toll bridge over the Vermillion when throngs of Oregon Trail pioneers and California gold seekers passed this way. The sign says Figure 1: author’s photo Vieux (pronounced VIEW) charged one dollar per outfit The Vieux Cemetery to cross his bridge and took in as much as three hundred dollars a day. Louis Vieux lies buried in the cemetery that bears his name, the graves of his wives Sha-note and Mary at his side. Nearby are the stones of his brothers Paul and Jacques Vieux, as well as those of his twin daughters, Estea and Mary, who died in infancy, as did a number of Louis’ grandchildren. They also lie buried here, far from Louis’ birthplace in the Old Northwest. How a French-Potawatomi métis and his extended family came to be buried amid the corn and soybean fields of Kansas is a question that gave rise to this dissertation. That he operated a bridge and collected tolls from the storied pioneers of the Oregon Trail is still more puzzling. How, this dissertation asks, does the presence in pre-territorial Kansas of a métis family like that of Louis Vieux change the way we think about the “settlement” of the American West and the “pioneers” who achieved it? 2 This dissertation explores that question by placing the Potawatomi métis of Kansas at the center of the westering story. It focuses, as does Anne F. Hyde’s recent Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1869, on the “intermingled racial past” of families like that of Louis Vieux and Sha-note.1 By placing métis families front and center in the narrative of Kansas settlement, the familiar pioneer story of sunbonneted women and stalwart Anglo men venturing onto an empty prairie emerges, I suggest, as arrogant, a half-truth that has marginalized the Indian and métis families who relocated to Kansas under the U.S. government’s Indian removal
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