Treaties to Take Indigenous Lands: William Clark and the Kanza

Treaties were presented to Indigenous nations as guaranteeing sovereignty and resources in exchange for their ancestral homelands; nations like the Kaw Nation, shown here, spent much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries defending their treaty rights. The Illustrated London News, digitised by the Library of Congress.

"One of the most butifull Plains"

In 1804, near Independence Creek in what is now eastern Kansas, William Clark wrote that the plains were "one of the most butifull Plains, I ever Saw." He admired the "Leek Green Grass", "well calculated for the sweetest and most norushing hay", and shrubs in every direction "covered with the most delicious froot", and marvelled that such scenery could exist so "far removed from the Sivilised world." He passed over the many Indigenous people who had lived there and cared for that landscape since time immemorial.

Opening the West

Published accounts of the Lewis and Clark Expedition began to appear as early as 1807 and, as the U.S. government intended, fired the imaginations of Americans eager to move west. It was part of the design of American colonisation. To open the land to white settlement, the government negotiated treaties with Indigenous leaders; when leaders refused, the U.S. military used violent force until they changed their minds.

The Kanza treaties

• June 3, 1825: Kanza leaders signed a treaty ceding a large part of eastern Kansas to the United States. Many Kanza families were forced onto a strip along the Kansas River a tenth the size of their homeland. The U.S. negotiator was William Clark.
• 1846 and 1859: further treaties cut Kanza territory again.

Clark's description of the Kansas plains in 1804 began a chain of events that ended with the U.S. government, represented by Clark himself, forcing the Kanza from the "most butifull Plains" that had been their home.

Sources

• National Park Service, Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, "Treaties To Take Indigenous Lands," part of the series Pivotal Places: Stories from the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/treaties-to-take-indigenous-lands.htm
• Corrected: the engraving is credited to the "London Illustrated Times"; its masthead reads The Illustrated London News.
• Clark's spelling is his own, from his 1804 journal.