An Uphill Beginning to Life

A pre-schooler, I rode with Uncle Jack while he drove his car from College Springs, Iowa, up the dusty dirt road hill to Grandma’s house, having traversed the two miles that took us fully into Northwest Missouri. Approaching Grandmas’s driveway, gesturing to the pasture on the right, Uncle Jack said matter of factly but like it was important, “Indians used to live here!” 

Not knowing what to say to this grownup (probably in his 20s), I nevertheless asked, “What did they eat?” “Oh, I don’t know,” he replied, “Post Toasties?” From an adult perspective, I suppose the answer was partly right. Cornflakes were related to the maize which we had been told was a regular Indian staple, but the answer may also have been an adult’s way of saying, “I don’t know.”

During my childhood visits with Grandma Huff, Indian lore was all round and regularly discussed. Grandma had a large, dark stone ax-head that had been found during spring planting, and though chipped on one end, it made a good, heavy and unique doorstop.

While tilling the soil each spring on her farm, other Indian artifacts had often turned up. During Uncle Dick’s boyhood, he had accumulated a substantial collection of arrowheads, from small ones for birds, to gradually larger ones for bigger animals. Maybe, a child speculated, the largest ones were for war, like the Indians depicted on TV. Those collectibles, found during spring planting on Grandma’s farm, were visible and intriguing proof that people and civilizations had lived on that land years before us.

Uncle Dick arranged and displayed his accumulated arrowheads in his bedroom from smallest to largest and my recollection is that there were as many as two dozen. On a walk alongside that same field that Uncle Jack had identified as a former Indian settlement, Dad once again told me how farming in the spring commonly revealed arrowheads. 

As we walked, Dad bent over and picked up a perfect gray medium sized arrowhead, saying, “Like this!” As an adult I wondered whether he had planted the arrowhead for the two of us to find, or whether arrowheads really were that common on Grandma’s farm. Brother Mark assures me that Dad regularly noticed things and that he didn’t have time to plant an arrowhead and then take me on a walk to find it. I suspect Mark is right, and that artifacts really were that common in those fields.

Now fully adult myself (if there is such a phenomenon), I have often pondered the stories of Indians in NW Missouri, wondering more about them, who they were, how they lived, and where they went. They certainly weren’t there when I was a boy, but they had left parts of their stone weapons and tools behind. Hopefully the modern Google search engine and my training as an historian would help to find answers?

The Written History of NW Missouri Indians ~ Getting Past the European Style

Beginning to explore the history of Indians in Northwest Missouri was at first frustrating, though that is often the case when an historian begins a new project. Indian history of the State of Missouri, and specifically of Northwest Missouri, seemed at first a foggy blur. There was general agreement that there were a number of Indian tribes in Missouri but less concurrence on where each tribe had been within the state, and which tribes inhabited NW Missouri and possibly my grandmother Vira’s farm.

The European version of written history seemed to most accurately describe white man’s settlement of Missouri, which had begun before, but exploded after, the Platte Purchase of 1837. The written history of Northwest Missouri got more clear immediately after the Platte Purchase when all of NW Missouri had been secured from the Indians for $7500. That would be $204,361 today, not much for millions of acres. For some perspective, that’s about the current worth of 47.3 acres of NW Missouri farmland today.

Our schoolbook written history of NW Missouri began with the arrival of European settlers, following European historical style. Glossed over or ignored was the history of the civilizations that had been there for thousands of years before. Sometimes there were bits of narrative about how the Native American Indians had interacted with the new settlers and explorers but much of that was anecdotal and only partially true, since it wasn’t told by Indians.

Further investigation showed that NW Missouri Indians were the Otoe-Missouria. The future of their lives in Missouri had begun to be foretold by the formal Indian Removal Act of 1830 signed by President Andrew Jackson. 

The Platte Purchase of 1837, the whole of NW Missouri, sped the continuing genocide and removal of Native Americans. European settlers were going to take the land, and though colliding cultures always influence each other, as the Indian culture somewhat did to the Europeans, what was left of Indian civilization would never be the same.

While several tribes signed the treaty removing Indians from NW Missouri, not all tribes resided within the contended space. The Otoe-Missouria did.

Given that they were NW Missouri’s inhabitants prior to European settlement, it is small wonder that Otoe-Missouria artifacts would abound on and in some farm land. When twentieth century school children in NW Missouri were taught the history of their region, the Platte Purchase was termed a land acquisition. That followed the huge Louisiana Purchase of 1803 which allowed inevitable European exploration and settlement. Indian removal from the land and subsequent relocation were mostly ignored and seemed of minor interest. European style historical narratives didn’t record the forced removals in detail, and certainly not from an Indian perspective.

Despite this lack of formal historical coverage, local people while I was growing up, and still today, are often proud of having any biological trace of Indian heritage and of having Indian artifacts in their farm soil. Though Indian heritage was and still is real, actual racial miscegenation had begun early because the first European explorers were mostly men and the women they encountered were mostly Indian.

Though the early white NW Missouri settler Joseph Robidoux had married an Indian woman, that merited merely cursory mention in our formal schoolbook histories. My personal recollection of learning in school about Robidoux and Indians didn’t go beyond, “Oh, how interesting.” Even in college and graduate school, though we learned more about the backwaters of history and its often untold stories, Indian history was never a main topic.