| 1-700CE | The Hopewell Culture occupied the Kansas City area with 30 recorded sites. The Hopewell peoples grew domesticated plants such as squash and Marsh elder but mostly they ate gathered and hunted foods—seeds, nuts, deer, raccoon, and turkey. They lived in permanent villages. |
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| 800CE-1600CE | The Mississippian culture flourished in what is now the Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas, as a well as other Midwestern, Eastern, and Southeastern areas of the Unites. Often known as Mound Builders because of the large earthen platform mounds, and often other shaped mounds. They lived in urban settlements and satellite villages linked together by loose trade. The largest city was Cahokia, located in Illinois, near St. Louis. Mounds have survived in the Kansas City area. |
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| Late 1500s | Sometime before 1600, the Osage and the Kansa tribes moved west of the Mississippi river, displaced by aggressive tribes who were escaping disease and warfare in the eastern lands that were now occupied by white settlement. The Osage first settled in south-central Missouri but soon moved further west to southern Kansas. The Kansa built villages along the Missouri and the Kansas rivers. |
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| 1600s | |
| 1673, mid-June | Louis Jolliet, Father Jacques Marquette and others journey down the Mississippi river, passing the mouth of the Missouri river at the end of June. Three maps of the expedition document the Missouri, Osage, and Kansa tribes up the Missouri river and its tributaries. |
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| 1700s | |
| 1700, July 10 | Father Gabriel Marest of the Kaskaskia mission (on the Illinois) compiled a report of information about the Missouri river, indirectly mentioning the Kansas river and the Kansa tribe. |
| 1702, June 20 | A memorandum by Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville of the Louisiana Colony listed some of the tribes along the Missouri river: Kansa, 1,500 families, Panimahas, 1,200 families, Panas, 2,000 families, Missouris, 1,200. The Osage are not mentioned, but the Otoes, Iowas and Sioux are noted as upper Missouri tribes. |
| 1712-1717 | Etienne Veniard de Bourgmont ascended the Missouri river in the company of members of the Missouris tribe. In his 1717? Report: “upstream is a smaller river which flows into the Missouri, called the ‘Riviere d’Ecanze’ [Kansas] and a nation of the same name, ally and friend of the French; their trade is in furs.” |
| 1717 | A map, Carte Generale de las Louisiane ou du Miciscipi by Vermale is the first known to show the “R. des canzes” and the nation “les canzes”. |
| 1723, November | Etienne Veniard de Bourgmont, established Fort Orleans on the north side of the Missouri river [Carroll county, MO] a few miles about the Grand river. Kansa chiefs may have visited there that winter or the spring of 1724 and received a French flag which they displayed in their village when Bourgmont insisted in July [presumably a village on the Missouri near Doniphan, KS]. Fort Orleans was abandoned in 1728. |
| 1724 | Bourgamont made several trips to meet with the Kansa, Missouris and other tribes to agree to a peace treaty. The following year, the summer of 1725, Bourgmont returned to France escorting members of the Missouris, Otoe, and Osage, and a “Princess of the Missouri”. |
| 1744 | Between 1724 and 1744, the Kansa moved from the Doniphan, KS area further down river to a Village roughly across from Weston, MO, about three miles north of Fort Leavenworth. In 1744, the French built a fortified trading post, Fort Cavagnial near the Kansa village. Cavagnial was abandoned in early 1764. |
| 1790-1791 | Auguste Chouteau, founder of Saint Louis, MO, was grant part of the trade with the Kansa and his son, Cadet [Pierre], spent the winter at the tribe’s village on the Kansas river, probably a few miles east of Manhattan, KS, to which they had moved between 1785 and 1790. Cadet fur trading was unsuccessful because of competition from Mississippi river Indian traders representing the English. |
| 1791-1802 | French traders from Saint Louis established a routine trade with the Kansa who were reputed to be excellent hunters. |
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| 1800s | |
| 1803 | Napoleon sold the Louisiana territory, acquired three years earlier from Spain, to the United States on April 30, 1803. Formal transfer occurred on December 20, at New Orleans. In January of that year President Jefferson had quietly proposed establishing Indian trading houses on the U.S. frontier and an expedition to “to trace the Missouri river to its source, to cross the Highlands, and follow the best water communication which offered itself from thence to the Pacific Ocean.” Congress approved $2,500 and Jefferson chose Meriwether Lewis to head the expedition and at Lewis’ suggestion, William Clark and coleader. |
| 1804 | The expedition departed up the Missouri from near Saint Louis with 45 men in a 55-foot keelboat and two pirogues. On June 26 they encamped “at the upper point of the mouth of the river Kanzas” where they remained three days. Their journals remark on the Kansa tribe whose village is located near the mouth of the Big Blue river [Manhattan, KS]. Their population had been reduced to about 300 warriors and 1,300 in all. |
| 1808, Autumn | Col. Eli B. Clemson’s company of U.S. Infantry began building the fortification that would be Fort Osage (previously named Fort Clark) at a site chosen by William Clark. Intended for the protection of the Osage Indians it was also the location of the governments trading post operated by factor, George C. Sibley. The Kansa actively traded at the post as did other tribes in the area. |
| 1813, October 5 | Death of Tecumseh, Shawnee chief and warrior who fought the loss of Native American land to an expanding U.S. He formed the Native American confederacy of the Great Lake region, including warriors of the Shawnee, Miami, Pottawatomie, Wea, Kickapoo and Piankeshaw. He promoted intertribal unity, which ended with his death at the Battle of the Thames (near Chatham, Canada) during the War of 1812, and the end of Indian wars. His younger brother, Tenskwatawa, known as the Shawnee Prophet, founded a religious movement for Native Americans to reject European influences and return to a more traditional lifestyle. From 1809 until 1813, there were a number of skirmishes and battles, the most famous the Battle of Tippecano (November 7, 1811), from which the confederation never recovered. After Tecumseh death the demoralized confederacy dissolved. Tenskwatawa retained a few followers, but had no significant position among the American Indians. In 1824, the Prophet assisted the federal government in removing the Shawnee from west of the Mississippi River. |
| 1819, March 3 | Civilization Fund Act passed by Congress to encouraged benevolent societies—Christian Missions—to provide education for Native Americans and authorized funds to stimulate the "civilization process”. While traditional Native Americans opposed the schools, "progressive" tribe members, which often included the senior leaders, accepted the schools, believing they were a way for their people to learn to deal with with the increasing number of European Americans with whom they were in contact. Men with education and spook English generally rose to leadership positions within their tribes.Statute-1819, March 3 |
| 1819 | Francois Chouteau and his cousin Seres (Gabriel Sylvester) Chouteau built the trading post Four Houses, about twenty miles above the mouth on the north bank where Cedar Creek empties into the Kansas river, west of Bonner Springs, KS. As implied by its name, there were four log buildings set in a square with their corners touching around an interior courtyard. It served as a trading depot with the Kansa and was abandoned when a new Chouteau Kansas Post was open on Horseshoe Lake in 1828 or 1829. |
| ca. 1819 | Louis Bartholet, known as Grand Louis, with his wife Margaret Gauthier, likely came to the mouth of the Kansas as part of an advanced team for Francois Chouteau. Originally settling in the West Bottoms on the south bank of the Kansas mouth, they were chased off by unfriendly Indians and moved to the north bank of the Missouri river at Randolph Bluffs. |
| 1819, August | The steamboat, Western Engineer left Fort Osage traveling up the Missouri river to Cantonment Martin (the first military post in Kansas located roughly halfway between Atchison and Leavenworth), with a brief excursion (August 12th) about a mile up the Kansas river “The bow of this vessel exhibits the form of a huge serpent, black and scaly, rising out of the water from under the boat…his mouth vomiting smoke, and apparently carrying the boat on his back.” |
| 1821 | |
| 1821, March 31 | Responding to lobbying by fur trading companies such as the Chouteau enterprise and the American Fur Company, Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri spearheaded an end of the U.S. factory system—the government’s means to control trade with the Native American tribes. With the end of the system, traders had a greater freedom to build posts and access to the tribes. |
| 1821, August 10 | Congress approved the Missouri Compromise and granted Maine statehood in March 1820. The Compromise also banned slavery north of 30º30’ parallel latitude line running through the Louisiana Purchase. Although most of Missouri's territory is north of that line, it was exempted from the slavery ban. After additional concerns and compromise Congress granted Missouri statehood. President James Monroe signed the federal legislation making Missouri the 24th state in the union. |
| 1821, September | William Becknell, owner of a salt works in Franklin, MO, facing difficult financial problems, left Franklin for an extended trading trip of furs, horses and mules. With luck he found a convenient route to Santa Fe and arrived in mid-November finding an eager market for his goods. This is credited as the beginning of the Santa Fe trade. |
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| 1822 | |
| 1822 | Closure of Fort Osage. |
| 1822 | Though the date is in dispute, it is likely that Francois Chouteau in 1822 established his primary western Missouri trading post at the Randolph Bluffs site chosen by his man Grand Louis. Nineth Century historians believed it was on the Jackson county (south) side of the river, but realistically it was in Clay county. Francois’s brother Cyprien arrives in the region. |
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| 1823 | |
| 1823, September- | Between September 3 and October 16, Joseph C. Brown of St. Louis, surveyed the western boundary of Missouri from the mouth of the Kansas river southward. |
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| 1824 | |
| 1824, November | Augustus Storrs of Franklin, MO informs Senator Thomas Hart Benton that caravans had travelled from Missouri to Santa Fe in February, May, August and November, the last taking $18,000 in goods. |
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| 1825 | |
| 1825, March 3 | The President was authorized by congress to mark the Santa Fe trail from Western Missouri to New Mexico. The survey was started in the summer. |
| 1825, June 2 | Negotiations by William Clark, Superintendent of Indian Affairs at St. Louis, MO, with the Osage Tribe. In the 14 articles of the agreement the Osage ceded multiple territories to the United States government including lands within and west of both the State of Missouri and the Arkansas Territory, and all territories south and east of the Kansas River. Read the Treaty. |
| 1825, June 3 | Negotiations by William Clark, Superintendent of Indian Affairs at St. Louis, MO, with the Kansa Tribe. Notably one of the first treaty of land cession with the U.S. occurred four years after trade began by the Santa Fe. As the non-Native people moved through the region, its value became apparent for speculation and settlement. The Treaty of 1825 diminished the Kanza’s 20-million-acre territory to a 2-million-acre, thirty–mile-wide reservation, opening 18 million acres for certain U.S. citizens, and the location of immigrant Tribes like the Shawnee and Delaware. Read the Treaty. |
| 1825, November 7 | Negotiations by William Clark, Superintendent of Indian Affairs at St. Louis, MO, known as the 1825 Treaties of Saint Louis, the Shawnee Indians in Missouri. The Shawnees relinquished their land near Cape Girardeau and received for themselves and their nation living in Ohio a tract of land equal to fifty miles square west of the state of Missouri. Read the Treaty. |
| 1825, November 10 | Letter to James Barbour, Secretary of War from William Clark, Suerintendent of Indian Affairs transmitting the treaty made with the Shawnee Tribe and describing he agreement. Read the letter. |
| 1825, December 30 | Between June and November William Clark, Superintendent of Indian Affairs at St. Louis, MO, negotiated with the Osage, Kansas, and with the Shawnee Indians in Missouri a groups of agreements known as the 1825 Treaties of Saint Louis. In the National Archives these are “Ratified Indian Treaty 143A: Documents Accompanying the Message Transmitting the Osage, Kansa and Shawnee Treaties, 1825 (Ratified Indian Treaties 126, 127, and 143) to the 19th Congress.” Read the Treaties. |
| 1825, Fall | Frederick Chouteau joins his brothers Francois and Cyprien in western Missouri, eastern Kansas. By 1829 he was the Chouteau Kansa trader at Horseshoe Lake. |
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| Next Section of the Timeline: Shawnee Lands, 1826-1838 |
