A Peaceful Interlude

Indeed, the city actually named itself after a troubled tribe that sought peace for awhile at the confluence of the Little and Big Arkansas rivers, attempting to avoid the struggles of the Civil War.

It's probably that humanism today that enhances the cooperative relationship between Indian and non-Indian in Wichita. To thoroughly understand the development of the Mid-America All-Indian Center, one must first comprehend the role the Wichita Indian nation played in the history of the city.

Maybe an anonymous Omaha Indian author, who penned a brief and fatalistic verse, can best shed some light on the Wichita Indians' troubles toward the end of the Civil War.

"I shall vanish and be no more,
But the land over which I now roam
Shall remain...
And change not."

The earliest record of the Wichita Indian nation places them in the area of Great Bend when Francisco V. de Coronado conducted his infamous search for gold in the mid-1500's. They were a peaceful, agrarian oriented people, at times roaming the prairie with the nomadic travels with their staple, the buffalo. Eventually they settled in an area about 50 miles southwest of present-day Oklahoma City. They remained there for many decades.

Driven from that traditional home on the quiet banks of the Washita River, the Wichitas came north in the early 1860's to avoid hostilities at the outbreak of the Civil War.

Jesse Chisholm, 1805-1868 James R. Mead, 1836-1910

According to one founder of the City of Wichita, James R. Mead, they were led to Kansas by Jesse Chisholm, a half-breed Cherokee Indian who had been adopted as a member of the tribe. Chisholm today is remembered as the founder of the famous Chisholm Trail, and as a co-founder of the City as a trading post.

In his writings, Mead says the Wichita tribe settled in the southeast border area of Kansas that first year after leaving Oklahoma, surviving an extremely hard winter (1862-63) only with the help of the Osage Indians. At that time the Osage tribe literally owned most of southern Kansas.

In the summer of 1863, Mead wrote, the Wichitas moved north to the mouth of the Little Arkansas River and were allowed to settle there with the permission of the Osages. That is when Mead first came into contact with them.

"They were a kind, gentle, honest people," he wrote.

Their new home, in what today is Riverside Park, only lasted a quiet handful of years until 1867 when orders from Washington forced their return to the banks of the Washita. It was to be a long and disastrous trip south, one that is sadly recalled by Native Americans.

The winter of 1867-68 found them traveling south along the Chisholm Trail. As when they came north a few years earlier, the winter was again extremely harsh. Many had previously been exposed to cholera while camped the summer before at the two rivers site. They set up temporary winter quarters along the banks of the Ninnescah River, but a prairie fire destroyed the majority of their unusual rounded grass lodgings and the tribe's population was drastically reduced.

Chisholm died in March, 1868 and shortly thereafter the Wichita tribe scattered into small groups, eventually finding their way back to the Washita where a few hundred descendants of the proud people continue to live today.

But their peaceful interlude on the banks of the Little and Big Arkansas rivers is well remembered. Their short-lived prosperity here was recorded by Mead.

"The men could make their saddles and equipments, arms and clothes, while the women were industriously at work planting gardens, which in time yielded abundantly."

They had herds of buffalo to hunt and came to call this area their home. Today many small towns to the west of Wichita bear names as a tribute to the tribe's philosophies, from Little River, Maize and Pretty Prairie, to Peacecreek and Deerhead.