Nonetheless, Robert Green (Shong-ge-weesh) was intent on crossing, determined to reach the prayer meeting on the opposite bank Baptist missionary Johan Meeker was conducting. He didn’t. “Brother Green” drowned in the torrent.
Meeker lost an assistant who had been at his side for seven years, first in their native Ohio then in Kansas.
Sophia Green (Sup-pee) lost her father. She was five.
Meeker first went to Kansas in 1833, sent there by the Board of Baptist Missions to establish an Indian mission. A trained printer, a printing press was one of his few possessions he brought.
Meeker developed his own phonetic system to print Indian languages using English characters. Among the sixty-five publications-in ten different Indian languages-Meeker published, one was a volume of the laws of the Ottawa tribe in its native language and English. As well as his assistant, Brother Green, an Ottawa, was Meeker’s translator.
Green and over 100 of his tribe followed Meeker to his Baptist Indian Mission a few miles into Kansas Territory. They had been forced out of the Maumee Valley, Ohio (southwest of Toledo), after enactment of the Indian Relocation Act,
Sophia was born there, in 1840. She was the last child Meeker baptized. Her mother, Cecilia (Se-se-el) remarried after Robert’s death, to Thomas Looker (Pe-nas-se-quon) and they had a daughter, Sarah (Mush-e-naugh), Sophia’s half-sister.
In 1851, when she was eleven, Sophia began four years of study at The Indian Manual Labor School (vocational education) at Shawnee Indian Mission in what is now Fairway, Kansas. Children from the Ottawa, Shawnee, and Wyandotte Tribes made up almost all the Indian population of the school. Forty miles from home, Sophia was not, however, without familiar faces around her. Approximately twenty-five other Ottawa boys and girls attended with her, one of the largest segments of the student body
Seventy to ninety students attended per year-including white students-roughly evenly divided between girls and boys. All studied arithmetic, geography, and English. Girls learned needlework. In their separate classes, boys were also taught Latin, geography, philosophy, penmanship, and speech. All were required to attend Sunday church services.
The boys and girls lived in separate buildings, for the entire ten months of the school year. Cholera and typhoid racing through their tribes and was a constant worry. As the superintendent of the school wrote in one of his quarterly reports to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in St. Louis. “Our plan last year was, henceforth will be, to teach ten months without any vacation – throwing the other two months all in our vacation – so to arrange it that this may fall in the hottest most sickly part of the year.”
The Kansas-Nebraska Act passed Congress in 1854 and the same year, the Shawnee receded to the US government virtually all their land, keeping only a fraction surrounding Shawnee Mission itself. The stage was set for both the controversy over slavery that roiled the territory and the influx of white settlers, land speculators, and industry that forced all the tribes out of Eastern Kansas. That dislocation rivaled in numbers the displacements in territories farther west after the Civil War.
The same year, the Ottawa, with Meeker’s blessing, removed their children from the school. The Delaware, Kaw, Peoria, and Pottawatomie Tribes had stopped sending students years earlier. It was Sophia’s last year at the school.
She married, in 1874, David Barnett, an Ottawa chief. The marriage produced five children: Ellen, Florence, Joshua, Mary, and William. She would marry again, first to a white man, (first name unknown) Donneley, and the final time, a Chippawa, Joseph McCoonse.
Before she died, a photographer persuaded Sophia into a studio and left history with this photograph of the little girl who was fatherless at five, survived epidemics that killed many in her community, and witnessed the dislocation of nearly every Indian from Kansas.
Barry, Louise. The Beginnings of the West: Annals of the Kansas Gateway to the American West, 1540-1854. Kansas State Historical Society. 1972.
Files of the library of the Shawnee Indian Mission, Fairway, Kansas.
Kansas State Historical Society.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030118193208/https://www.kshs.org/research/collections/documents/personalpapers/findingaids/meeker.htm
Miner, Craig and William E. Unrau. The End of Indian Kansas: A Study of Cultural Revolution, 1854-1871. University Press of Kansas. 1977.