Monthly Archives: January 2024

NW Missouri Indians – Part IV

Posted on by
Reply

They Were Called Indians

Aboriginal, the term most familiarly used for the first people in Australia, literally refers to the initial inhabitants of a place. That term is generally applied to peoples already in a place to contrast them with incoming peoples, such as the European settlers arriving in Virginia. The term aborigine, however, was never used for the original human inhabitants of the United States. 

The term Indian is an import from European languages, originating in North America in the 15th century. It is commonly understood that when Christopher Columbus sailed west from Europe, he was attempting to land on the Asian continent of India. Consequently, when Columbus landed in the Caribbean, he assumed it was “…Islands of India beyond the Ganges”. Hence, Columbus and the Portuguese colonists called the indigenous inhabitants “indeos” – Portuguese for what we call in English “Indians.”

The term American Indian is not something that they called themselves but it’s now the accepted term used by the United States Government, and by the National Museum of the American Indian. American Indians have as many different terms for themselves as there are tribes. The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) states that there are “574 federally recognized Indian Nations (variously called tribes, nations, bands, pueblos, communities and native villages) in the United States. Approximately 229 of these ethnically, culturally and linguistically diverse nations are located in Alaska; the other federally recognized tribes are located in 35 other states.”

Discovery in Process

While researching the Indians previously inhabiting Grandma’s farm, several things that had happened were interesting. For one, having done some online exploration about Indians, something happened akin to online shopping for Weejuns or robotic vacuum cleaners. If you window shop for something online, the next time you go to Facebook, the ads you see may be about what you looked for, Weejuns and vacuum cleaners.

As I researched Indians, pictures of Native Americans began to regularly appear on my Facebook timeline. Two years later, they still do.  Indian pictures showing up on my Facebook timeline might excite my paranoia if I took the time to think about it, but however right or wrong it might be, it’s a fact of modern electronic life. 

The Facebook pictures I see are widely varied, of Chiefs, of Medicine men and women, of regular women, of children, and of both women and children. Currently it’s often pictures of attractive young Indian women in stylish, supposedly traditional, dress. They aren’t consistently from one tribe, but generally from the Plains Indians. Unrealistically, to the ordinary lay-person Indians have always been considered to be all alike. Indians were Indians, and they all attacked wagon trains in the movies, albeit portrayed by white men dressed as Indians. 

Indian pictures by Europeans were mostly taken from 1890 to 1930, 75 to 90 years later than when Indians had occupied Northwest Missouri before the Platte Purchase. The photographed pictures of Indians during this forty-year period usually showed them in stylish and ceremonial dress. 

While some pictures had been taken in the mid-nineteen century’s earliest photography, Indian pictures and portraits were most fashionable during the 40 years as the 19th century become the 20ieth. Painter George Catlin made hundreds of portraits of the disappearing Indians, in the rapidly changing American West. The result was a romanticized view of a culture that had been systematically banished, unwillingly sharing their land with the westward European settlement.

The Indian photos at the turn of the century had samenesses. They were proud ceremonial pictures, the subjects dressed in other than regular everyday wear. The costumes were usually quite beautiful, stylized and the finest they could muster.

Indian photography of the period tried to make them look regal with a European touch. Sometimes the men wore pieces of white man’s clothing, and a jacket to a European suit or a hat might accompany their native ceremonial finery.

An observable irony was that these proud pictures of Indians were taken not at the height of their civilization but after the genocide of their race was largely completed. The subjects were not proud masters of the plains but residents of newly created government controlled reservations.

While the photos were and are of genuine interest they exhibited only some aspects of Indian lore, reflecting how the white men saw them, and attempting to show ways that Europeans had improved their traditional lives.

These pictures didn’t shed light on Indians of Northwest Missouri, but were indicative of what most remaining American Indians had become. The tribes and customs they depicted were much more colorful than the lives and customs of the Otoe-Missouria Indians who had lived on Grandma’s farm before the Platte Purchase.

The Otoe-Missouria Indians of NW Missouri had left behind more than their stone implements and weapons. In addition to the name Missouri (the State and the River), the state name for Iowa was borrowed from the Indians, and the same was true for the nearby state of Nebraska. 

The name “Nebraska” is based on an Otoe Indian word Nebrathka meaning “flat water” (referring to the Platte River, the official symbol of Nebraska, and sometimes so still and shallow that it seemed flat). Some communities in Nebraska that are also names of native American Indian tribes includes seven counties and eight cities. The name Omaha has Otoe Indian origins, as does Keya Paha county, where wife Judy has a hunting and recreational cabin.

Modern Missourians often ask, or are asked by others, “How do you pronounce the word Missouri? What does it mean? Do you say Missouruh, Missoura, or Missouree?” Missouri had been pronounced ‘mih-zoo-ree’ by the Indians and that was continued by most white Europeans. The Indian meaning for Missouri was “big canoe people”as Indians were the early traders of NW Missouri.

Missouri Indians In Summary

Because of the Indian removal acts of the early 1800s, culminating with the Platte Purchase of 1837, almost no Indians live in Missouri today. Missouri may be an Indian name but there are no federally recognized Indian tribes in the Show Me state. The tribes themselves aren’t extinct, but they live elsewhere. Excepting a small number of individual descendants of Indians who escaped the systematic governmental removal after 1800 that we’ve described, Indians don’t live in Missouri anymore.

The native American Indians who lived in what is now Northwest Missouri led a Stone Age lifestyle, having only stone tools and weapons. They had never used horses before Europeans came and they had no knowledge of the wheel. 


They were semi-nomads, which meant that part of the year they lived in bark huts and farmed, but during buffalo hunting season they traveled and lived in tents. As previously mentioned, the Indians of NW Missouri were not the Plains Indians depicted in cowboy movies. They weren’t warlike and didn’t dress flashily. A white man’s dress comparison might be between the overalls of a Midwestern farmer and the pinstripe suit of a Wall Street lawyer.

By the time of the Platte purchase in 1837 the Otoe-Missouria Indians were gone from NW Missouri, leaving nothing behind but artifacts of living made from stone, like arrow heads and axe heads. When Uncle Jack said, “Indians used to live here,” he was right. 

 What didn’t correctly translate into my young boy mind was that the pastures hadn’t teemed with Indians. The Indian population had been small, but places and traces showed where they had actually lived. Similarly, when Grandma (or any one of us) leave farms or lands many artifacts are left behind to show that we have been there.

Uncle Jack was right, and grandmas’s family seemed proud to recover some small part of Indian heritage. Indian relics and having Indian ancestors may now seem a badge of honor but the actual history of the Indians has not been honorable for those of us with European ancestors. 

Hopefully, Uncle Dick’s collection of arrowheads is with one of us siblings. It was told that I had it, but I don’t recall having seen it since I was 5/6 years old in Uncle Dick’s bedroom. Uncle Dick left a plastic tub full of memorabilia but the arrowheads were not in that tub. Similarly, with Grandma’s axe head, it would be a shame if it were not somewhere among us.

Coming from that area over 100 years after ‘Indians lived there’, finding who NW Missouri Indians were, and what their history was, has satisfied some of my curiosity. Partial knowledge of these people that Uncle Jack referred to has brought some satisfaction to me. I hope it has to you.

NW Missouri Indians – Part III

Posted on by
Reply

The Indian Removal Act

Enforced removal of Indians (native Americans) had begun with the 1776 Declaration of Independence and was far along by the early nineteenth century in Northwest Missouri. The completed Platte Purchase in 1837, however, finalized the removal of Native Americans from what was soon to become the state of Missouri. When Uncle Jack said, “Indians used to live here,” he was right, but what remained of their life and civilization were the artifacts of living that remained behind. That Grandma’s farm and family had tilled up so many stone Indian artifacts really was a kind of proof that Indians had lived there before them.

Why had they left? Why did we have only their discarded arrowheads and axes? Clearly, the concept of Manifest Destiny, the right to fill this land from sea to sea, meant Europeans right to fill newly discovered lands. The encouragement and proliferation of Indian culture was not a consideration as ‘explorers’ made their way across America. 

Indians of whatever kind seemed in the way and were thought to have little to teach white European settlers. Europeans represented a dominant, more technologically advanced culture meeting a closer to stone age native American society. While cultures have meshed and clashed throughout history, they inevitably rub off on, influence, each other. As Europeans settled America, though, they thought and behaved as a dominant culture.

It’s sad to read about and to tell of America’s greatest genocide, That involved more than Northwest Missouri, but the history of Northwest Missouri’s dealing with Indians illustrates an example. Ironically, today in some ways the culture of the Indians is admired. ‘Indians used to live here’ is a point of pride. Some claim Indian heritage. Dad once said to me that we might be one quarter Cherokee. The question that automatically follows, though, is “Why don’t they live here now? Where are they.” If we look beyond the superficialities of American history, we begin to learn why they don’t live here now.

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 had been signed by President Andrew Jackson, making once more official the longstanding European-American practice since the Declaration of Independence. While Jackson was a hard liner on Indian removal, the actual enforcement of the act was mostly enacted under Martin Van Buren’s presidency from 1837 to 1841.

In NW Missouri, the Otoe-Missouria tribes were small in number but they gave up a lot of land in the Platte Purchase. After the Platte Purchase, where native Americans exchanged millions of acres of land for $7500, almost all Indians were allowed to exist only on reservations to the West of NW Missouri.

The Platte Purchase

By the late 17th century, the Missouria had settled near what had become known as the Missouri and Grand Rivers in Missouri. The confluence of the Grand and Missouri Rivers is geographically the area of the Platte Purchase. 

The Platte Purchase was the land acquisition in 1836 by the United States government from American Indian tribes. It comprised lands along the east bank of the Missouri River and added over 2 million acres to the Northwest corner of the state of Missouri. Grandma’s farm, 120 years later, was squarely within the Platte Purchase. 

The Platte Purchase was the size of the two modern states of Rhode Island and Delaware. It added 3,149 square miles to the state of Missouri, westward to the Missouri River and it included the settlement of St. Joseph, a jumping off point for European immigrants as they rushed relentlessly westward,

On March 28, 1837, President Martin Van Buren issued a proclamation supporting the annexation. The bill faced little opposition and was therefore easily passed. As previously stated, while President Andrew Jackson favored and signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, President Martin Van Buren would enact much of it.

While living in upstate New York, I frequently drove past nearby Lindenwald, Martin Van Buren’s post-presidency home. Little did I know then of his involvement in the Missouri history where I had grown up, where Uncle Jack had said, “Indians used to live here.”

Post Platte Purchase

After the Platte Purchase, and the removal it enforced on native Americans, the U.S. government was “to provide agricultural implements, furnish livestock”, and a host of other smaller items to the Indians. The tribes agreed at first to move to reservations west of the Missouri River in what was to become Kansas and Nebraska. It was agreed that the U.S. government was to “build five comfortable houses for each tribe, break up 200 acres of land, furnish a farmer, blacksmith, teacher, and interpreter”. The tribes gave up their 3.1 thousand square miles of land for reservations occupying 29 square miles, but most of what they were promised in return didn’t materialize.

Eighteen years after the Platte Purchase, compromising virtually all of Northwest Missouri, the Otoe-Missouria people were confined by the United States government to a reservation on the Big Blue River in southeast Nebraska.

Life on the Big Blue Reservation was hard. The tribe was not allowed to hunt for buffalo. The government urged a shift from a migratory lifestyle to an agrarian one without consideration of long established tradition or social structure. For years the tribe watched as acre by acre of their land was sold off by the government to non-Indians. They suffered as treaties were broken and food, medicine, livestock and basic essentials were not delivered as promised. Sickness was rampant, children starved and year after year the mortality rate climbed higher.

In 1881 the Otoe and Missouria were moved to Red Rock, Oklahoma, where the tribe is currently located. Children were taken away from their parents and sent to government boarding schools to be “civilized”. The children had to learn English. Tribal elders remember being punished for speaking their native language at school. 

The stigma of speaking the traditional language passed into the home. Some tribal members did not teach their children their language because they did not want them to be punished in school or because they thought it would be better for them to learn “white ways”.

Because so many of their traditions and their language were discouraged by the government, much of their language has been lost. Today the tribe is struggling to maintain what knowledge of their language and traditions still exist. Some of the information gathered by the tribe regarding their language has been documented by non-Indians, such as missionaries and government agents.