WELCOME

We called the reservation on the Kansas River home for more than two decades. In that time our Potawatomi ancestors built homes, established business, and farmed small patches of land to support their families.

Missionaries and officials from the Office of Indian Affairs also put down roots and slowly constructed buildings and other elements infrastructure they deemed necessary for achieving their goals of assimilating us into American society.

Click through the next few slides to learn more about individual locations, or just use the map to explore some of these key sites. Each slide will have a colored bar to correspond with the correct location.

St. Mary’s Mission
In 1848, Jesuits working as missionaries among the Potawatomi traveled to the new reservation on the Kansas River and chose a site to build a mission and schools for boys and girls. They chose a site in the southern portion of the reservation, near good sources of water and timber.
St. Mary’s Mission

Joseph Bertrand, Jr. was born April 19, 1806 in Bertrand, Michigan to Joseph Bertrand and Madeline Bourassa. He attended McCoy Baptist Mission School and the school at Carey Mission in the 1820s. After his first wife, Mary Doan, died he married Elizabeth Ann Jackson. The two lived in Michigan until the entire family removed from the state in 1840 to live with the Potawatomi at Sugar Creek, Kansas. He served as an interpreter for treaties negotiated with his tribe and also worked as a trader. He died on November 6, 1848 at St. Marys, Kansas.

Annuities/Pay Station

The Pay Station, near St. Mary’s Mission, was so named because it was the location where Office of Indian Affairs officials met with tribal members on October 29, 1870. At this meeting they distributed payments to tribal members based upon the terms set in the treaty of 1861. The Pay Station still stands today and there is a museum on site.

Baptist Mission

Built in 1848, the stone building that housed the Potawatomi Baptist Manual Labor School. It is located near present-day Topeka. The school received money from the federal government to get established and a certain amount of money per student they enrolled. The girls learned domestic skills, like how to cook, sew, and manage a household. Boys were put to work in the fields and tended livestock.

Uniontown

Uniontown was a community that developed around the trading post just south of the Potawatomi reservation, where the Oregon Trail crossed over the Kansas River. The post was a place where Natives living on nearby reservations met and did business with non-Native residents and emigrants. Uniontown was struck with cholera epidemics in 1849 and 1850 that devastated the residents.

In 1854, after another cholera epidemic ravaged the population, Uniontown was burned to the ground in an attempt to quell the spread of the disease. Though some structures were rebuilt, the epidemics, coupled with growth of other trade stations on the Kansas River, led to the collapse of Uniontown as a business hub.

Bourassa Grist Mill

The grist mill, owned by Jude Bourassa, was operational from 1850-1860. It lay on Mill Creek, in present-day Wabaunsee County. The mill was partially funded by the U.S. government. Jude also ran a boarding house on the property.
Bourassa Grist Mill

Jude Bourassa was born on April 19, 1814 on the southern shore of Lake Michigan. He was well educated, attending both the Hamilton Theological and Literary Institute in New York and the Choctaw Academy in Kentucky. In 1840, Jude and his wife Catherine moved with their community to the Pottawatomie Creek reservation in Kansas. Jude was a successful businessman, running a grist mill and inn on Mill Creek. He died near Uniontown on the Kansas River in 1858.

Pisedwen's House

A few Potawatomi were able to successfully farm their parcels of land. As shown in this photo, some of these families were able to build cabins, barns, coops, arbors, and other structures necessary for a working farm.

Vieux Crossing

Vieux Crossing was the location at which the Independence branch of the California and Oregon Trails crossed Vermillion Creek on the Potawatomi Reservation. Louis Vieux owned and operated a toll bridge across the creek in the late 1840s and 1850s.

In 1849 cholera struck and more than forty emigrants traveling to the West died within a few weeks. They were buried near the crossing.
Vieux Crossing

Louis Vieux was born on November 30, 1809. In 1837, he left Michigan with his first wife, Charlotte, and moved to Council Bluffs, Iowa with hundreds of other Potawatomi who were removed.

He moved again, in 1846, this time to the Kansas River reservation where he became a successful farmer and part owner of a mill. He established a home on the banks of the Vermillion River, which intersected the Oregon Trail, and made a living providing services for emigrants moving west in the 1850s and 1860s. He ran a toll bridge over the river, sold supplies, like grain and fresh horses, to the travelers, and purchased items they decided not to carry with them on their journey. Vieux was also a member of the first Potawatomi Business Committee. He died on the Kansas River reservation on May 3, 1872.

Burnett's House

Abram B. Burnett was born in November of 1812, and in his childhood was known as Nan-Wesh-Mah. After his father died he moved from the St. Joseph River near Niles, Michigan to Fort Wayne, Indiana where he was adopted by his cousin, Abraham Burnett. Abram spent several years at the Choctaw Academy, a Baptist mission school in Kentucky. He served as an interpreter and moved west with members of his community when they were removed to Sugar Creek, Kansas.

He eventually settled near Topeka, Kansas and established a ranch on which he traded horses. He died at his home in Kansas on June 14, 1870. His wife and children eventually moved the new Citizen Potawatomi reservation in Indian Territory.

Gardner's Perspective

Alexander Gardner was a photographer who emigrated from Scotland to the U.S. in 1856. He is well known for his Civil War photos, as well as those he took of President Abraham Lincoln, and later his assassins. Following the war, Gardner was commissioned to photograph Native Americans who traveled to Washington, D.C. to negotiate treaties on behalf of their tribes. He also traveled to the West capture images of the proposed route of the Union Pacific Railroad. The stereographs he produced from this trip are some of the earliest of the state of Kansas and the Potawatomi reservation.