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.