Ottawa and the Ottawa Nation

This city takes its name from the Ottawa Nation, and the story of that name is a story of removal, negotiation, generosity, and loss, all compressed into about thirty years.

The Ottawa people had lived for generations around the Great Lakes, near Lake Huron and the other Great Lakes. Under the Indian Removal Act of eighteen thirty, tribal leaders accepted new lands in Kansas along the Marais des Cygnes River, which translates roughly as River of Swans. They built a community here in Franklin County and, for decades, maintained it.

In the early eighteen sixties, during the Civil War, Baptist missionaries and tribal leaders reached an agreement: the Ottawa people would set aside twenty thousand acres of their Kansas reservation to found a school, which became Ottawa University. It was a remarkable act of community investment, even if it came under the duress of a government that was already pressing the Ottawas toward another removal.

The school struggled at first, as the frontier settled and the Civil War raged. But it survived.

The Ottawa people did not survive Kansas. In eighteen sixty-seven, under pressure from federal treaty negotiations, they sold their remaining lands and moved to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma, where their descendants, the Ottawa Tribe of Oklahoma, remain federally recognized today.

Close to this spot, in eighteen fifty-six, John Brown fought the Battle of Black Jack near Baldwin City, widely considered the first pitched battle of the Kansas-Missouri border war, and by some historians the true opening engagement of the Civil War. Ottawa and its surroundings were the contested ground of a nation's most violent argument with itself.