Signature Event

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This dramatization represents how the commercial requirements of the Santa Fe Trail and the European American westward expansion changed the lives of the Kanza people and the history of the Kaw Nation. This road provided the backdrop for many of the events that formed Council Grove. The town was named after an agreement was made between the government and the Osage nation allowing settlers’ and traders’ wagon trains to pass safely through the area and proceed southwest to Santa Fe, (New) Mexico.

This westward push of the European American settlement became known as “Manifest Destiny.” This was the belief that the United States was destined to expand from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Advocates of Manifest Destiny theory believed this expansion was not only right and good, but that it was obvious (“manifest”) and certain (“destiny”).

Since the late 1600s the Kanzas lived in eastern and northern Kansas. In the early 1800s their estimated “domain” was comprised of approximately 20 million acres. A treaty arranged by the U.S. government in 1825 assigned the Kanzas to a two-million-acre reservation in northern Kansas. That same year the Kanzas signed another treaty promising safe passage to European American traders on the Santa Fe Trail. This trail served both as an international commercial trade route and a military highway stretching over 800 miles from Missouri to Santa Fe. In 1846, a second treaty relocated the tribe onto a 256,000-acre reservation encompassing the site of Council Grove, a “rendezvous” (meeting and organizing point) on the Santa Fe Trail. It passed through the heart of the Kanza reservation and had a significant negative impact on the well-being of the tribe. In 1859, the U.S. government arranged a third treaty reducing the Kanza reservation to approximately 86,000 acres. The continuing encroachment by white squatters and legislation passed by the U.S. Congress in 1873 forced the removal of the Kanzas to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma.