BLACK BEAVER continued


his daughter, Lucy Pruner, was still writing in vain to the government, trying to collect the monetary damages promised to her father more than 25 years before. The Delawares had suffered significantly


during the war. Their two communities were harrassed by bushwhackers, who, according to one oral history, “robbed them and then shov- eled live coals from the fireplaces onto their mattresses, setting fire to their cabins.” The in- famous marauder, William C. Quantrill, oper- ated in their territory for a time. According to one account, White Turkey, a Delaware scout and trapper, pursued Quantrill after his famous raid on Lawrence , Kan., in August 1863, pick- ing off some of the border ruffian’s men. Writing in September 1863, John G. Pratt,


the Indian agent of the Central Superinten- dency, described the Delaware’s plight: “The Delawares are affected by the unsettled con- ditions of the country. Many of them are in the army. Their families are consequently left without male assistance. The large children are withdrawn to labor at home.” By the end of the conflict, Interior De-


partment officials advocated removal of the Delaware from Kansas. In two treaties, signed in 1866 and 1867, tribal leaders reluctantly agreed to sell all of their lands in Kansas and to remove to lands in the Cherokee Nation, purchasing Cherokee citizenship rights. Kan- sas and Washington politicians, traders and railroad officials profited greatly from the deal. Included in the profiteering was John


C. Fremont, the Delaware’s “friend,” who was now a railroad magnate. Black Beaver


lived his remaining years


at Anadarko as an “Absentee Delaware,” surrounded by Caddo in southwestern Indian Territory. In 1872, he was the Absentee Delaware representative in an Indian delega- tion to Washington. He continued to play the role of media-


tor. Visiting the Kiowa-Comanche Agency in 1874, he begged these southern Plains Indians “to stop raiding, to send their children to school, to settle down and do as their friends the Quakers wished them to do.” The former rugged mountain man died in 1880, shortly after he had become a Baptist minister. In 1954, a bust of Black Beaver was exhib-


ited in the rotunda of the state capitol at Okla- homa City. It was later moved to Anadarko, where Black Beaver was subsequently hon- ored as the first person to be inducted into the Indian Hall of Fame. The advances in military technology devel-


oped in four years of war were soon employed in “pacification” campaigns against Indians defending their homelands on the Great Plains and in the Southwest. The congressio- nal passage of the Transcontinental Railroad bill in 1862 and the railroad’s completion in 1869 contributed to the disruption of tradi- tional Plains Indian life. It resulted in the ex- termination of bison herds, brought massive non-Indian population westward, increased Indian–white tension and conflicts, and led


THE ANTEBELLUM DELAWARE


in northeastern Pennsylvania, and southeast- ern New York. From their first contact with Europeans in the early 1600s, the tribe’s exis- tence was frequently undermined by disease, wars and colonial, state and federal policies. Most Delawares were uprooted and forced to remove further west through Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Indian Territory and Kansas. Other Delawares and related groups went to Wisconsin and to Ontario, Canada. The Delawares’ long experience in the fur trade, dating back to the early 17th led them later to be hired as trappers in


T century, 42 AMERICAN INDIAN SUMMER 2015


he Delawares were originally a Middle Atlantic coastal people. Their home- lands included the present states of New Jersey and Delaware as well as


the Rocky Mountains by the American Fur Company. In the1840s, after the decline of the Rocky Mountain fur trade, they were hired as guides, scouts, interpreters and hunters for western explorers, military and surveying expeditions and wagon trains on the overland trail west. Unfortunately, while individual Delawares were busy in these entrepreneurial pursuits, American policy makers were busy reducing their land holdings and removing them further and further west. Thus, by the time of the Civil War, two


communities of Delaware had evolved in the environs of the Indian Territory. A band of nearly 500 so-called “Absentee Delaware,” had broken away from the main group in the late 1700s, drifting southwestward through


Missouri, Arkansas and Texas. A second, larger band represented the main historic body of the tribe, removed from southwestern Missouri in 1829 to lands in Kansas near Fort Leavenworth. The Absentee Delawares were removed in 1859 to the “leased District,” in the Wichita Indian Agency in Indian Terri- tory. While Black Beaver continued to hold official membership in the Kansas tribe, he acted as chief of the Absentee band. Both of these tribes exist today in Oklahoma, the Delaware Nation of Oklahoma headquartered at Anadarko and the Delaware Tribe of Indians at Bartlesville.


– Laurence M. Hauptman


This poster was circulated in Central City and the Front Range area of Colorado in the late summer and early fall of 1864 as a recruitment tool for the 3rd Cavalry. The 3rd


Colorado was the volunteer regiment involved in the Sand Creek Massacre in November 1864.


to reservation existence and overall Indian dependence. It further opened the Trans-Mis- sissippi West for non-Indian settlement and resource development, putting even more pressures on Native peoples and their lands, eventually leading to federal allotment poli- cies and to even more dispossession. Thus, to American Indians, the war brought only mis- ery, followed by even more misery. X


Laurence M. Hauptman is SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History. He has written several books on American Indian participation in the Civil War.


HISTORY COLORADO, DENVER, COLO. NO. 10025731


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