The general disorder so long prevailing in Kansas Territory. . . [has] been very injurious to the interest of many of the Indian tribes. . . and . . .prevented the full establishment. . . of . . .civilization and improvement. . . They must meet their fate upon their present reservation in that Territory, and there be made a civilized people, or [be] crushed and blotted out.
Commissioner of Indian Affairs
Annual Report, 1856
Levi Flint’s western Johnson County, Kansas farm stretched over 800 acres, the size of New York’s Central Park, four times larger than the National Mall. When he abandoned it, the farm was worth more than $10,000; today it would command over $3 million. A considerable sum for anyone to amass, including an “uneddicated Injun” as he caustically referred to himself years later. He wasn’t uneducated, and only part Indian, like his wife.
Flint lived amidst “the general disorder”- a cholera epidemic, the dissolution of the school he attended, the chaos and plunder of the Bleeding Kansas and the Civil War years, and fruitless efforts to secure the US government’s performance of its treat obligations. He retreated from “injurious” Kansas in 1871.
He was born in 1834 in Kansas, son of the Reverend Joseph Flint (Psih e qua cum me) and Jane Blackfeather (Qua he qua)-prominent members of the Shawnee tribe. Flint was schooled at the Shawnee Indian Manual Labor School. In addition to his academic work-arithmetic, declamation, geography, grammar, Latin, penmanship, and philosophy-Flint learned a trade, blacksmithing, that he would pursue throughout his life. In 1853 he used that training to land a position with the Kansas Indian Agent as an assistant blacksmith.
He married Stella Anna Harvey, an Omaha, the year before he took that job, in 1852. Stella was a midwife. Together, they had two sons and nine daughters. Like his parents, Flint rose in the ranks of the tribe. He taught in its Sunday schools, was its sheriff, and ultimately a member of the tribal council.
He took his place on it just as the tribe was navigating the turbulence of the influx of white settlers following the opening of Kansas territory with passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. That was the same year a new treaty with the US government dramatically shrunk the size of the Shawnee holdings in the territory-to accommodate the new settlers.
One of the first difficulties he encountered was the dissolution of the Manual Labor School. A cholera epidemic had swept through the neighboring tribes. By 1854, many of the Shawnee had withdrawn their children, as did members of the Delaware, Kaw, Peoria, and Pottawatomie tribes; the school had ended manual training and only offered limited accommodations for students.
The Shawnee tribal council petitioned the US government to close the school. Many of the Shawnee were abolitionists, opposed to the pro-slavery stance of the Methodist Church, South which sponsored the school. The petition asked that funds dedicated to students attending the school be available for them to attend other, nearby schools:
As District Schools are being established among the Shawnee settlements, to which some of the Shawnees desire to send their children; and as others desire to send to select schools and high schools, both within and without the Territory: the School consequently, has failed to realize the object contemplated; we recommend to the Government of the United States, the propriety of closing the aforesaid contract.
This petition was submitted to federal officials in 1858; the tribe submitted a similar petition again in 1860 before, in 1862, the US government ended its contract with the Methodist Church to operate the school.
By this time, the tribes in northeast Kansas were under pressure from growing numbers of white settlers, and the turmoil of the Bleeding Kansas conflict over whether Kansas would enter the Union free or slave. Many of the Shawnee fled their land then and during the Civil War. When they returned, they discovered that whites had overrun their farms and houses; unscrupulous land agents fraudulently sold and trafficked in Indian properties. As the Commissioner of Indian Affairs reported:
In the strife between the anti-slavery and pro-slavery parties. . . and in which the rights and interests of the red man have been completely overlooked and disregarded, the good conduct. . . of the latter contrast favorably with the disorderly and lawless conduct of many of their white brethren.
The depredations of the Bleeding Kanas-Civil War era hit the Black Bob especially hard. They were a traditionalist clan of Shawnee living in western Johnson County who, among other traits, retained communal ownership of their land, in contrast to both the white settlers and many of the other Shawnee. In 1867, 1870, and for a final time in 1873, Flint and the council, petitioned Congress to reverse its decision to withhold payments for the losses the clan suffered during the Civil War:
These Shawnees, on account of their loyalty to the Government, secured the ill-will and enmity of the bushwhackers, who frequently made raids over the Shawnee reservations into Kansas . . . and . . . robbed the Black Bob of all their horses and other property. . . and burned up their houses.
After the war was over. . . these Black Bob Shawnees found themselves too poor to build houses. . .besides they found a large portion of their lands occupied by white settlers. [T]hey did not desire to put themselves in a position where they would incur an angry contest with a white settlement.
The petitions went unheeded. The Black Bob left Kansas, most resettled in Oklahoma.
Like the Black Bob, Flint yielded to the chaos and left Kansas, settling on Cherokee land in Oklahoma. In 1874, Flint took a position with the Quapaw Indian Agency in northeast Oklahoma, returning to his trade as a blacksmith. He remained there five years. After being discharged he moved to Seneca, Missouri-immediately east across the state line from Indian lands in Oklahoma-and resumed blacksmithing.
Having lived on Cherokee land, he applied to be accepted into the tribe. Initially his application was granted, enabling him to buy a house on Cherokee lands, that he rented; it was in addition to the house he owned in Seneca. Despite this acceptance and a second one, the Interior Department later decided he had not lived on the reservation long enough to qualify for Cherokee membership and overruled both decisions.
Carlisle Indian School officials visited Seneca after Flint and his family moved there. They recruited his daughter, Lydia, and three other local Indian students. She entered it in 1887. He believed it would be a three-year course of study, and was dismayed to learn, in 1891, she would be required to stay away from home two additional years.
To Flint, the whites were reneging on their commitments, again. That deceit was compounded, in Flint’s eyes, when, as he saw it, they arranged marriage between his daughter and a fellow student. He asked that she be returned home; his request was not uncommon, scores of parents asked the same.
His letter protesting the extension of Lydia’s schooling and the school’s “matchmaking” was polite. But it’s courteousness was belied in his postscript. It reflected his belief of how the Carlisle authorities viewed him-a view formed after bitter years of white officials reneging on commitments. He signed the letter: an “uneddicated Injun.”
Lydia did not marry the student with whom Flint believed the school was conniving. After completing the additional schooling Flint protested but Carlisle demanded, she returned to Indian territory where she worked for the Indian Service in Wyandotte, Oklahoma. Her father died in Seneca, in 1911.
Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center. “Lydia Flint Student File.” https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/student_files/lydia-flint-student-fileChurch of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints. “Levi Flint”, Family Search. Shawnee Indian Mission Foundation. https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/LTTL-94Z/levi-collins-%22eli%22-flint-1834-1911
Committee on Indian Affairs, US Senate. “Memorial of the Shawnee chiefs and council in relation to the lands in the Black Bob Reservation in Kansas”, 1874. University of Oklahoma College of Law Digital Commons. https://digitalcommons.law.ou.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3610&context=indianserialset
Deer, Sarah and Joseph B. Herring. “The Enduring Indians of Kansas: A Century and a Half of Acculturation”, University Press of Kansas, 2022. Project MUSE. https://chooser.crossref.org/?doi=10.1353%2Fbook.94113
Delano, C. “Letter from the Secretary of the Interior Relative to the Condition of Black Bob’s Band of Shawnee Indians.” 1871. University of Oklahoma College of Law Digital Commons. https://digitalcommons.law.ou.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2969&context=indianserialset#:~:text=I%20would%20further%20suggest%20and,that%20they%20could%20get%20possession.&text=Respectfully%2C,~(l%20States%20Indian%20Agent.&text=OFI%3C’ICE%20SUPERINTENDENT%20INDIAN%20A,PARKER%2C%20Commissioner.
Department of the Interior. “Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1856.” https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/T-21891.pdf
Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma Digital Collection. “List of Shawnees who have borrowed money from the Orphan Fund through Joseph Parks.” https://ohiomemory.org/digital/collection/p16007coll27/id/7655
Estes, Roberta. “Black Bob Indians of Johnson County, Kansas”, Native Heritage Project, 2012. https://nativeheritageproject.com/2012/03/05/black-bob-indians-of-johnson-county-kansas/
JOCO Museum. “The Black Bob Band of Shawnee,” https://jocohistory.wordpress.com/2020/01/29/the-black-bob-band-of-the-shawnee/
“Memorial on Behalf of the Black Bob Band of Shawnee Indians,” Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma Digital Collection. https://ohiomemory.org/digital/collection/p16007coll27/id/4883
Oklahoma State University Libraries. “Treaty with the Shawnee, 1854.” Tribal Treaties Database. https://treaties.okstate.edu/treaties/treaty-with-the-shawnee-1854-0618
Oklahoma State University Libraries. “Treaty with the Shawnee, 1862.” Tribal Treaties Database. https://treaties.okstate.edu/treaties/treaty-with-the-shawnee-1862-22615
Paxson, Fredric L. “Kansas and the Indian Frontier”, Kansas State History. https://www.kspatriot.org/index.php/articles/16-territorial-kansas/624-kansas-and-the-indian-frontier.html#google_vignette
Shawnee Indian Mission Foundation. Library Files.
Shawnee Indian Mission Foundation. “Resolution-November 24, 1858.” https://shawneeindianmission.org/resolution-1858-november-24/
United States Senate. “Memorial of members of Black Bob’s band of Shawnee Indians,” Memorial of members of Black Bob’s band of Shawnee Indians against any attempt to force their people to break up their tribal organization, and against a division of their lands. University of Oklahoma College of Law Digital Commons. https://digitalcommons.law.ou.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=8960&context=indianserialset#:~:text=TRE%20STA’fE%20OF%20KANSAS,%5B%2C’EAL.%5D