Savage battles, skirmishes and depredations on both sides raged up and down the frontier. Proving again to be a savage foe, the Potawatomis were awash in bloodshed. But at the climactic Battle of the Thames in Chatham, Ontario, an army of 3,500 under William Henry Harrison — the governor of the Northwest Territory and future U.S. president — crushed British and Indian combatants. Tecumseh was killed in the fighting.
With Tecumseh’s death, the Indian confederacy shattered and any hope of holding back the Americans vanished for good. An armistice was reached between the United States and the Indians. Harrison, however, initially refused to make peace with the Potawatomis. He called them “our most cruel and inveterate enemies.”52
After 50 years of nearly continuous bloodshed, government negotiators spoke of friendship and peace. Money, gifts and whiskey changed hands. Treaties were drafted with solemn, ceremonial pomp and authority. And the tribes, one by one, signed away their birthrights. They had little choice. Game was diminishing, the fur trade had declined and often-violent friction with white settlers was unrelenting. Metea, a Potawatomi chief, lamented that whites were coming into Indian land so fast that “the plowshare is driven through our tents before we have time to carry out our goods and seek another habitation.’’53
The Indian Removal Act of 1830 cleared the way for the final chapter in the conquest of the eastern tribes. Through treaties, coercion, bribes, duplicity and threats, Indians east of the Mississippi River were relocated to lands farther west. The tribes in the south — Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee-Creek and Seminole — traveled the infamous “Trail of Tears” to what would become Oklahoma. Tribes from the Old Northwest came to Kansas Territory. In 1834, virtually the entire West was designated as “permanent Indian country.” Trade with the Indians was to be strictly regulated and white settlement forever banned.54
More than 10,000 eastern Indians eventually were removed to Kansas.55 Delaware, Shawnee, Wyandot, Miami, Shawnee, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Chippewa and Ottawa: Tribes that had fought to hold on to the Old Northwest now found themselves crowded into reservations in arid, windswept Kansas Territory, far from the woods, rivers and lakes of their homes.
They drifted west like ghosts, in small groups and large, on foot and by riverboat. In early September 1838, a group of about 850 Potawatomis were forced out of northern Indiana under the watchful eyes and guns of a military escort.56 Their destination was Kansas.
Among this band was a 26-year-old chief named Nan-Wesh-Mah, better known as Abram Burnett. He was probably as close to royalty as the Potawatomis had. His great-great-grandfather was Chief Nanaquiba, a renowned and respected Potawatomi chief who’d fought beside the French. His grandfather, Chebaas, and his great-uncle, Topinabee, were war chiefs who had led their people against the Long Knives.
After his biological father passed when Nan-Wesh-Mah was young, the boy was adopted by a mixed-blood man, Abraham Burnett, and his name was changed to Abram Burnett. Abraham Burnett’s father, William, had been a prominent white trader from New Jersey who’d established himself among the Potawatomis in southern Michigan after the Revolutionary War.57
The Potawatomis’ two-month trek from Indiana to Kansas was brutal. The Indians suffered greatly from dehydration in the heat and dust of late summer.58 The food provided by the government was wretched. Worse, a typhoid epidemic sweeping across southern Indiana and Illinois infected the exiles as they slowly passed through. More than 300 fell sick.59 By the time the group reached Kansas, 40 had died, including numerous children and newborns.60 The journey would become known as the “Trail of Death” among the Potawatomis.
In Kansas, the Indians settled initially along the Marais des Cygnes River around Osawatomie, near the Missouri border. Then, in 1848, Chief Burnett and others moved to a permanent Potawatomi reservation further north, about 70 miles west of Kansas City. The new reservation was a swath of prairie roughly 30 miles square on the edge of the plains, near where the Oregon Trail and California Road crossed the Kansas River.61 A ferry had been established at the river crossing six years earlier by two French-Canadian brothers, Joseph and Ahcan Papan.
Chief Burnett was, by any standard, an educated man. Among Native Americans, he was exceptional. Born in 1812, he attended Indian schools in Fort Wayne, Indiana; Carey, Michigan; and Bearswallow, Kentucky. The schools in the Northwest were organized by the Reverend Isaac McCoy, a Baptist minister who — for better or worse — dedicated his life to civilizing Indian tribes. Young Burnett evidently was a bright child. At 10 years old, he served as McCoy’s interpreter in the reverend’s travels among the Potawatomis. McCoy held the boy in high esteem.62
Bridging the white and Indian worlds was a role Burnett was destined to play throughout his life. He negotiated and signed a number of treaties with the Americans on behalf of the Potawatomis. His first wife was Indian, but after she died, Abram married a young German emigrant, Mary Knoffloch, in 1842.63 And though he wore white man’s clothes and had been educated in Christian theology, Abram continued to follow the traditional and religious ways of the Potawatomis.
One thing about Chief Burnett: If you ever saw him, you didn’t forget him. The chief tipped the scales at 450 pounds, had a large, round face, and often wore a frock coat and a tall, wide-brimmed, black felt hat. Despite his girth, he was a man of great strength. Once, a stranger passing through the territory stopped at Burnett’s cabin. The stranger weighed 300 pounds and had a reputation as a strong man. He challenged Burnett to a contest of strength. The chief pointed to a huge rock nearby and told the man to lift it. After a struggle, the man managed to get the rock off the ground. Chief Burnett then told the man to sit on the rock. Once the stranger was seated, the giant Indian calmly walked over and lifted the rock with the added weight of the man.64
Burnett built his cabin on the open prairie, a few miles southwest of the ferry on the Kansas River and just north of the Shunganunga Creek, a meandering, timber-lined stream that drifted northeast before flowing into the Kansas River.65 A half mile beyond the creek, due south of Burnett’s cabin, was a treeless, cone-shaped, rock-strewn hill. The prominence rose 265 feet above the Shunga Valley and commanded the countryside for miles around. The hill consisted largely of limestone and shale, remnant materials of an ancient seabed from 40 million years earlier and testament to the vast inland ocean that once covered the central plains. The mound itself was relatively young, carved from the long-dry ocean floor by glaciers that stabbed southward during the last ice age, 600,000 years before.
Supposedly, a tragedy took place soon after the Potawatomis were relocated to northeast Kansas, and from it, the legend of the mound was born. No proof of the tale’s veracity exists; no written documentation has been found. Yet the story’s resonance among both Native Americans and whites down through the years suggests some basis in fact. The tale, as told by an ancient Potawatomi to a couple of boys playing on the mound early in the 20th century, went something like this: One day, the weather took a dark and foreboding turn. A storm came up and a tornado, or “crazy cloud,” dropped from the sky, touched the ground and roared straight for a Potawatomi camp. When it was over, many Potawatomis lay dead. The casualties were mourned and, in keeping with Indian tradition, buried atop the hill to be that much closer to the heavens. As part of the burial ceremony, a medicine man asked the Great Spirit to bless the hill and forever protect the surrounding region from tornadoes. The Great Spirit granted this request, it was said, providing that the burial site was never disturbed. The hill became known as Burnett’s Mound.66
Whether Chief Burnett was involved in the burial ceremony is unknown. But it seems possible, given the proximity of the hill to his cabin site and his role as a ranking chief. In any event, life for Burnett and his wife, Mary, slowly improved as the years unfurled. Mary had come from Germany when she was eight and was “stocky built and low, a good woman and a fine cook.” The couple eventually had six children.67 Burnett farmed the ground near his cabin. But his real calling was liv
estock trading. And for that, he was in the right place at the right time. Settlers lured by rich land in California and Oregon Country had begun pushing west from Independence and Westport, Missouri, in the early 1840s along a trail that cut across northeast Kansas to the Platte River in the Nebraska Territory. The wagon trains grew more numerous through the ’40s, and after gold was discovered in California in late 1848, a flood tide of emigrants surged west through the territory. The ferry manned by the wily Papan brothers did a booming business, floating wagons across the wide Kansas River at $4 per wagon. The crossing was a week or so out from the jump-off in Missouri. Emigrants would camp near a grove of locust trees on the open plateau above the river to await their turn to cross.
Shrewd trader that he was, Chief Burnett would send one of the young Potawatomi braves to the wagon train camps. The Indian would walk among the settlers’ livestock, examine the horses and oxen, and shake his head or make a long face. The nervous pioneers — many of whom probably hadn’t encountered a “wild” Indian before — would finally ask him what he was doing.
“You’re never going to make it across the Great American Desert with animals like these,” the brave would say. Fortunately, he’d point out, good livestock was available nearby. He’d direct the settler to Burnett’s cabin. Burnett would then offer to sell the emigrant fresh horses or oxen, albeit at extremely high prices. The traveler would protest vehemently. “Why, that’s highway robbery,” they’d say. “That’s five times what a horse cost me in St. Louis!”
“Then go back to St. Louis and get another one,’’ Burnett would reply, although he might lower his price if the emigrant agreed to trade in his existing animal. Burnett would then graze the horse or ox for a week or two behind his cabin and sell it to the next wagon train that came through. And in this way, the chief grew rich and survived in the white man’s world.68
That world was about to roll over the Indians of Kansas. In 1854, Congress ignored its earlier prohibition against white settlement on the plains and opened Kansas Territory to homesteaders. The move was designed to ease a growing sectional impasse over whether new states coming into the Union would be free or slave. In Kansas, Congress decided, settlers themselves would vote to determine if the territory’s allegiance would be to the North or the South.
What followed was a bloody free-for-all. Pro-slavery Southerners and anti-slavery Northerners quickly poured into the territory in an attempt to gain the upper hand. Many of the Southerners came from neighboring Missouri, which had become a slave state in 1821. In the North, particularly Boston, emigration to Kansas became a cause célèbre, not unlike joining the Freedom Riders or voter registration drives in the Deep South 100-odd years later. Groups were organized to move en masse to Kansas.
Rival bands threw up towns across eastern Kansas Territory: the abolitionists in Lawrence and the slavers in Lecompton and Atchison. In between, clashes became common. When the vote to choose a territorial legislature was held in the spring of 1855, it was a fiasco: Heavily armed Missourians poured over the border, stuffed the ballot boxes and defied authorities to stop them. Both sides prepared for the worst. John Brown and his boys came from New York State, armed to the teeth. Southerners grew evermore incensed with the “nigger-loving abolitionist sonsofbitches” pouring into the region. Violence flared. Towns were sacked, homesteads burned and men on both sides stabbed, shot and bludgeoned for their beliefs. For all practical purposes, the embers of civil war ignited along the Missouri-Kansas border long before Confederate guns stoked the blaze in Charleston Harbor in 1861.
Amidst this danger and chaos, nine strangers made their way up the Kansas River from Lawrence in December 1854 to find a suitable location for a new free-state town. Several had been to the area surrounding Papan’s Ferry before, and it seemed as good a place as any to start. Traffic to the ferry would support trade and commerce. Good timber was in ample supply along the river, and the rolling, open ground to the south offered room to grow.
When the question of what to call their new community came up a few weeks into the adventure, the group mulled various possibilities before settling on Topeka. The word, pronounced “Tah-PE-Ka,” was the Kansa name for the area. Literally it meant “a good place to grow potatoes,” a reference to the wild tubers that grew in abundance in fertile bottomlands along the river.69
Progress came quickly. Within a year, a two-story hotel had been built.70 Steamboats came up the river, disgorging Northern emigrants and picking up agricultural goods.71 The town found purchase. Property values soared; the founders made their money (which, of course, was a primary aim); new stores, hotels and homes went up; and by 1859, just four years after its founding, Topeka boasted a population of 700 people.72
Statehood for Kansas came on January 29, 1861 — the 34th in the Union. The war that had begun along the Missouri-Kansas border erupted nationally a few months later and in the region that had spawned the first violence, the conflict became even more personal, savage and bitter. Bands of Kansans known as Jayhawkers prowled the countryside, raiding Missouri towns and farms and indiscriminately killing, looting and plundering. Missouri Bushwhackers crossed into Kansas and did the same. Many times, it was hard to tell who was who. North or South? Yank or Reb? Give the wrong answer to a group of armed riders on a lonely road and you’d be dead just like that. Topeka was far enough from the border that the worst of the marauding missed the young town. But at sunrise one August morning in 1863, more than 300 Missouri guerrillas led by a blond-haired, blue-eyed killer named Bill Quantrill fell on Lawrence, the hated abolitionist stronghold 30 miles east. The raiders burned the town and proceeded to slaughter just about every man and boy they could find. Nearly 200 died.
When the long war was over, Kansans made an uneasy peace with Missouri and then turned their gaze back to the West. Topeka boomed. Construction began on a majestic state capitol building in 1866. An estimated 400 structures, many of them brick and stone, went up in 1868 alone.73 Ex-soldiers, Union and Confederate, came to homestead on the prairie. And freed slaves came, too. The former slaves were called Exodusters, as in exodus, and many settled in the shanties of Tennesseetown on the edge of the growing community.74
One familiar figure on the muddy streets of Topeka was Chief Burnett. He’d take his wagon into town once a week to trade horses and buy supplies, his wide girth covering the entire seat of the buckboard. On Kansas Avenue, Burnett would attend impromptu horse races. Sellers would “prove” their horses for would-be buyers by racing from the watering tank at 6th and Kansas.75 Before or after a race, Burnett might mutter something about a particular animal. Because he was by now a legendary judge of horseflesh, all in attendance would strain mightily to hear Burnett’s words.
At one point, the renowned chief was invited to address the Kansas legislature, though the subject of his speech has not survived. As he approached the podium, several people made cutting remarks. One man pointed at the chief and snickered, “Heap Big Injun.” Burnett gave his speech, which was well received, then pointed to the man who’d made the comment and said loudly, “Heap Damn Fool.”76
As for his habits, it was said the chief was a voracious reader of newspapers, and supposedly he never missed a show when the circus was in town. He also was fond of dancing and was, by all accounts, graceful for a man of his size.77
But Burnett liked his whiskey. It was the curse of the Potawatomi and many other tribes. Burnett’s great-uncle Chief Topinabee (pronounced “Top-In-A-Bay”) had fought alongside Tecumseh before making peace with the Long Knives. At a treaty ceremony in Chicago in 1821, an angry and impatient Topinabee growled at the chief negotiator for the Americans: “We care not for the land, the money or the goods. It is whiskey that we want — give us whiskey.”78
Burnett would frequent some of the 15 saloons along Kansas Avenue, often conducting his horse-trading business with a jug in hand. Contemporaries recalled that his demeanor toward strangers was dignified reserve, but with intimate friends he was cordial and com
municative. One article from 1896 reported that, though stoic when sober, Burnett would often weep when drunk.79 Perhaps he was recalling the faces of the dead on the long march to Kansas or the lost lands of his youth.
In any event, Burnett would frequently get so drunk he’d pass out. Friends devised a ramp to roll his massive, unconscious form into the back of his buckboard, and his mustangs would always find their way back to the cabin on their own. The chief had a system worked out with his wife, Mary: If, after a night on the town, he regained consciousness by the time he arrived home, he’d toss his hat through the cabin door. If the hat didn’t come back, Burnett was welcome to come in. But if the hat flew back out the door, he kept his distance and slept in the wagon. Mary apparently had quite a temper and supposedly was the only person Burnett feared.80
The chief finally died on June 14, 1870. He was 59. The obituary noted that Burnett was “a steadfast friend of the Union” during the war, and in his business relations, “strictly upright and honorable.”81 He was buried along a branch of the Shunganunga, about a mile and a half west of the mound that bore his name. Rumors abounded after his death that Burnett had accumulated great wealth, and treasure seekers dug many holes on the mound and around the cabin after Mary remarried and moved to Oklahoma. They even ripped the old cabin apart looking for gold. But all the greed was in vain. No gold was found. One newspaper article reported that holes were still visible around the cabin site as late as 1928.82
Burnett’s passing came as civilization rapidly closed in on the Plains Indians. The railroads were bootstrapping themselves across Kansas in the late 1860s and ’70s, opening the western part of the state to settlement. Buffalo hunters passed through Topeka to slaughter the mighty herds for hides, for meat to feed the railroad workers, for bone meal and simply for sport. Cattle towns sprang up at each successive railhead to meet the longhorns coming up from Texas. In the streets of Abilene, Ellsworth, Newton, Wichita, Hays and Dodge City, lawmen and gun hands like Masterson, Earp, Hickok, Cody and Holliday writ their names large in Kansas legend.
And Hell Followed With It: Life and Death in a Kansas Tornado Page 8