Part II: Tribe, Family, Church, Relocation
We try to forget these things, but we would not forget that the white man brought us the blessed Gospel of Christ, the Christian’s hope. This more than pays for all we have suffered.
The Journeycakes, Charles and his parents and the other Delaware, may have thought their suffering was over when they moved west from their Ohio home, in 1827. During both the French and Indian and Revolutionary Wars, colonial soldiers massacred hundreds of them, and the tribe was vanquished from its traditional home east of the Alleghany Mountains. They were being relocated, again-but not for the last time.
In those remarks, fifty years later, Charles distilled that suffering-decades of deprivations visited on him and his family and his tribe by white society-juxtaposed against a life of “blessings” from those same hands. That complex duality marked his life and it intensified when he and his parents arrived in Kansas after a two-year journey, in 1829. They settled near the Shawnee Baptist Mission in what is now Roeland Park. Charles was baptized into the Baptist church in 1837, the first Indian baptized in Kansas.
The Baptists made Journeycake a missionary to the Ottawa, Seneca, Shawnee, and Wyandot tribes as well as the Delaware. In 1841, he moved north of the Kansas River to the Edwardsville area, Grinter Place. It was named for one his neighbors, Moses Grinter, one of the first white settlers in Kansas who, because he was married to a Delaware, was able to own land and farm on Indian territory.
Reverend John Pratt, the new minister to the area, led the effort to reconstruct the Baptist mission after a flood destroyed it, and Journeycake became a founding member. Unlike the nearby Shawnee Indian Mission School that emphasized training in manual skills, the Delaware Baptist Mission School’s curriculum provided an “English education” of English language reading and writing, algebra, and philosophy. Journeycake’s daughter, Nannie, attended before studying at Baptist College in Granville, Ohio.
In the spring of 1854, the commissioner of Indian affairs and the Delaware concluded a treaty that required them to begin receding their Kansas holdings. At the same time Congress was completing the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which permitted whites and their industry into both the land the Delaware were returning and land of neighboring tribes who entered treaties like the Delaware pact.
The Act also fueled a rush of settlers clashing over whether the territory would enter the Union free or a slave state-Bloody Kansas. Eighty-five percent of the Delaware men of military age fought for the Union during the Civil War, with Journeycake’s emphatic support:
If bad men of the South ask you to go to war against the President, stop your ears, don’t listen to them; they are your worst enemies. They are trying to destroy you and the country
A decade transformed Journeycake’s home, and the entire Kansas Territory, from Indian land to land owned and controlled by whites.
Journeycake became leader of the Wolf Clan of the Delaware one year after the 1854 treaty was concluded and then in 1861, he became leader of the entire tribe. Pratt, his fellow Baptist and now Indian agent for the Delaware, recognized him as principal chief, and it would turn out, the last. Unlike his predecessor and past chiefs, Journeycake did not rise to the position through blood ties and his elevation was not universally acclaimed. Many in the tribe regarded him an “interloper and usurper.” Some even whispered he and other tribal leaders accepted bribes from white officials to agree to the treaties that relocated the Delaware from Kansas.
Journeycake signed the 1866 Delaware Treaty, the final one between the tribe and the government. It ceded the last of the Delaware’s holdings to the fledgling Missouri River Railroad Company, realizing its ambitions to build a line west from Kansas City, furthering the government’s goal of a transcontinental rail network. The tribe was forced to relocate again, this time to the Cherokee land in what is now eastern Oklahoma. Ever after, the Delaware would be known as one of the “landless” tribes.
Pratt was not only Journeycake’s patron and missionary partner, but they were also tied by marriage. Nannie married Pratt’s son, Lucien, who at the time operated a lumber business in Leavenworth. But the marriage did not last long; he died in 1865. In 1868, she married again to Jacob Bartles who had returned from service in the Union Army to his father’s farm near Quindaro. His family had come to Kansas from New Jersey when the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened the territory to white settlers. When her parents left Kansas for Oklahoma in 1873, Nannie and Jacob followed. By virtue of his marriage to Nannie, Jacob was able to own land and conduct business on Cherokee land, becoming a successful farmer, merchant, railroader, and hotelier. The city of Bartlesville was named for him.
Journeycake lived the rest of his life in Oklahoma, the final ironic chapter in an entwined life among the Baptists and white society, forged by forced relocations. He helped found Bacone College, originally known as The Indian University. It was built on land the Cherokee granted to the American Baptist Home Mission Societies. He had been ordained a minister in the Baptists church and in 1890 established the Delaware Baptist Church. When he relinquished that role, a white minister replaced him.
Jane died in 1893. Almost exactly one year later, Charles died. But even in death he could not escape forced relocation. In 1963, the federal government seized the tract near Nowata on the Cherokee Reservation where Charles and Jane were buried-for a lake to supply water to Tulsa. Their graves were relocated. They are now interred in Armstrong Cemetery in Alluwe, Oklahoma.
1817-1894
His tombstone reads in part:
A kind and loving father and a friend to the needy. He died as he lived, a pure and upright man, after many years of faithful service in the ministry and as chief adviser for his people, the Delawares.
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