Book Description

Excerpt from The Kansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 1 By an act of congress of May 26, 1830, the United States government, as if in the belief that its domain embraced land enough for all its people to grow in, magnanimously set aside an indefinite area, some six hundred miles from north to south and two hundred miles in width, as Indian territory. To this region, which lay west of the territory of Arkansas and of the ten-year-old state of Missouri, extending northward to the Platte and Missouri rivers, all Indians from the eastern portion of the country were to be removed as rapidly as the government could persuade them to cede their ancestral lands and take other lands, far to the west, in exchange. The plan of the government seems to have been to make over these various Indian groups, once they had been transplanted to their new homes, into self-supporting communities. To this end, provision was made for teachers and missionaries to accompany them, and for agricultural tools and supplies, paid for out of funds held in trust for the Indians by the paternal government, to be distributed under the benevolent direction of agents appointed from Washington. The teachers were to teach the Indians their letters and the rudiments of civilized deportment. Farmers and artisans employed by the government were to teach them to plow, sow, and reap, and such elementary industrial arts as blacksmithing. Missionaries were to persuade them to give up the evil ways of barbarism and become Christians. Meanwhile, the evacuated Indian lands east of the Mississippi could be distributed to land-hungry pioneers. There is abundant record of how that grandiose plan, in its execution, fell somewhat short of expectations. And there would be no place for even a mention of it here except for the fact that one of the missionaries who accompanied a certain band of Indians into the far west had started life as a printer and in his new career combined printing with preaching. Jotham Meeker was the name of this printer-missionary. He had been born in or near Cincinnati, Ohio, November 8, 1804. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.