While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
The Miami
were called Twightwee by the Early English writers. They were sometimes
spoken of as the Crane people. Little Turtle, their chief, replied when
asked the bounds of his country by “Mad” Anthony; “My forefather kindled
the first fire at Detroit; from thence he extended his line to the
headwaters of the Scioto; from thence to its mouth; from thence to the
mouth of the Wabash; and from thence to Chicago, on Lake Michigan. These
are the boundaries within which the prints of my ancestors' houses are
everywhere to be seen.”
The Miamis were an important tribe in the Ohio Valley,
where they bore a part in all the border wars. They are of the Algonquian
stock and have the social organization of that family. There are ten clans
in the tribe:
1. Wolf
2. Loon
3. Eagle
4. Buzzard
5. Panther
6. Turkey
7. Raccoon
8. Snow
9. Sun
10. Water
By the time of general treaty-making to divest the
Indians of their land east of the Mississippi, the Miamis were mostly in
Indiana. By the treaties of 1839 and 1841 they were possessed of a
reservation adjoining the State of Missouri, immediately north of the land
of the New York Indians, south of the country of the Wea, and east of the
Pottawatomie. Miami County was made from a portion of this reservation.
They arrived and began a settlement on Sugar Creek in 1846.
By the end of 1847 there were eleven hundred of them on their reservation,
but half of them died the following year. Many of them returned to their
old homes east of the Mississippi. The remainder moved to the Marais des
Cygnes, in the south part of Miami County, where they established what was
called Miami Village. The Baptists and Catholics had missions among the
Miamis in Kansas.
The Miami reservation
contained about five hundred thousand acres. The land was as good as can
be found in Kansas. The land-stealers soon came to demand it. A treaty was
concluded June 5, 1854, by which the reservation was sold to the United
States for two hundred thousand dollars. There was excepted a tract
containing seventy-two thousand acres. This tract was later secured by the
white settlers by the usual methods in use for getting possession of
Indian land. In 1871 the Miamis removed to a reservation on the Spring
River, in what is now Oklahoma.
The Chippewa are one of the largest of the Algonquian
tribes. The correct form of the name is Ojibwa. It signifies “to
roast till puckered up” and has reference to the puckered seam in their
moccasins, it being peculiar to the tribe, no others making the moccasin
in that way.
The original territory occupied by this tribe bordered
both shores of Lake Huron and Lake Superior, and extended westward to the
Turtle Mountains, in North Dakota. This land was beyond and beside the
trails and courses of the first settlers, and as a consequence the
Chippewa were not embroiled in so many of the border wars as were other
tribes less fortunately situated.
The Chippewa, as did many other Indian nations, became
widely scattered as a result of the settlement of the country by
Europeans. A number of small bands settled and remained about Lake St.
Clair. The band on the Swan Creek of that lake came to be known as the
Swan-Creek band. The Black River flows into Lake St. Clair, and the band
living on that stream came to be called the Black-River band. By a treaty
made May 9, 1836, these bands ceded their lands on the stream named, and
were guaranteed a reservation west of the Mississippi of eight thousand
three hundred and twenty acres. This tract was finally located a few miles
west of Ottawa, in Franklin County, Kansas. Only a few families were
settled on these lands. To these the whole reservation was given. By the
terms of the treaty made July 16, 1859, the Munsee or Christian Indians
were united with these Chippewa and made joint owners of the reservation.
This band was composed of the Christian Indians of the Munsee tribe, and
this tribe has had notice in our account of the Delaware. In the treaty
of 1859 provision was made for allotment of lands in severalty. In the
course of time this was done. In 1871 the surplus land was sold. The
Chippewa then asked that they be permitted to sell all their lands and
move to the Indian Territory. This was complied with, but the process was
slow. It was 1901 before the transaction was completed and the Indians
received the proceeds of the sales of their lands.
There was a Moravian mission among these Indians. Little was ever
accomplished in the way of Christianizing the Chippewa, however. Their
missionary once remarked that he had little hope of meeting any of them in
heaven.
There were twenty-three clans among the Chippewa:
