Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre-Civil War Kansas

Conclusion

135 Conclusion After attending an antislavery meeting held to protest the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Samuel N. Wood and his wife, Margaret, left their Ohio home in May 1854 to settle in Kansas Territory. In part because of their efforts and the hardships they and other free-state settlers endured during the territorial era, Sam and Margaret found themselves living in a free Kansas just seven years later. The Woods arrived in Kansas bringing only their passionate commitment to abolitionism and the possessions they could pack into their covered wagon. By the 1860s, however, the Wood family had acquired land south of Lawrence, a modest home that Sam and his father-in-law had built, and a printing press. While the Woods’s biography is compelling because it chronicles the struggle over slavery between abolitionists like themselves, their antislavery counterparts, and proslavery men and women, it is their printing press that tells the larger story of Bleeding Kansas.1 Jotham Meeker, one of the first Baptist missionaries among the Shawnee Indians in Kansas, first purchased the printing press in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the early 1830s and began printing the Shawnee Sun in 1834. The Sun, or the “Shau-wau-nowe Ke-sauth-wau,” was the first newspaper ever published exclusively in an Indian language and eventually became a popular bilingual paper in the region. After Meeker died in January 1854, the missionary board sold the press to George W. Brown, who began publishing the antislavery paper, the Herald of Freedom. After the press’s tenure at the Herald of Freedom and another like-minded paper, the Freedom’s Champion , Sam Wood acquired it and used it to publish several different papers that touted various social causes from impartial suffrage to spiritualism.2 The press, traveling from Ohio to Kansas, published stories that covered the lives of Indians and missionaries, antislavery and proslavery settlers, 136 bleeding borders and, undoubtedly, the Civil War. The press and the men and women who used it, witnessed the bleeding borders among gender, race, and region before the Civil War. Jotham Meeker used the press at the Baptist Mission to publish stories pertaining to Indian life in eastern Kansas Territory after the Shawnee and Delaware migration from the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes region in the 1820s and 1830s. The Shawnee and the Delaware had already experienced life among white missionaries and fur traders and were accustomed to dealing with the Great Father by the time they arrived on the banks of the lower Missouri. They had also endured conflicts with resident Indian tribes who jockeyed with emigrant tribes for land and hunting grounds. In addition, a good number of Indians intermarried with other tribes and with French and Anglo fur traders; together they produced a growing population of mixed-race children who were neither wholly Indian nor French nor Anglo. Indians and whites struggled to coexist peacefully in a region that would soon be characterized by overt conflict. Emigrant tribes fared better among white settlers in Kansas Territory than the resident Kaw, Kickapoo, and Osage tribes, in part because tribes such as the Shawnee and Delaware appeared more “civilized” and willing to adopt white social and cultural norms. Some practiced Christianity or a syncretic blend of native and Christian spiritual forms, and some had intermarried with white traders or settlers and produced mixed-race children . Mixed-blood Indian couples such as Abelard and Quindaro Guthrie utilized their knowledge of multiple languages and cultures, trading and doing business with various Indian tribes and white settlers. Their ability to understand native and white ways enabled them to traverse the bleeding border successfully but would ultimately foreshadow how mixed-race Kansans , like other mixed-race people in the region, facilitated the wholesale displacement and dispossession of Indian land and culture by whites.3 Unlike the Shawnee and Delaware, the resident Kansas Indians received the brunt of white criticism and became the targets of various civilization and extermination efforts advocated by white settlers and the federal government. Refusing to relinquish their language and culture, the Kaw, Kickapoo, and Osage battled with government troops and local white militias over land and definitions of civilization. Because they resisted white encroachment and often defended their tribal sovereignty with violence , these resident Indians gained reputations as savage beasts destined for removal or extermination. These Indians refused to allow white 137 conclusion to bleed into red, and they consequently lost their right to...