The Reconstructed Kaw House

This small stone hut is a reconstruction of a home built for the Kanza, the people who gave Kansas its name. In the early eighteen sixties the United States government constructed a number of these stone houses on the reduced Kaw Reservation near Council Grove, intending to make farmers of a people who had always lived in earth lodges and bark and mat dwellings. The plan failed almost completely.

Few Kaw, if any, ever lived in the stone huts. Preferring their own traditional homes, they reportedly used the government houses to shelter animals. The Kanza endured disease and starvation here in the Neosho Valley for barely a generation.

In eighteen seventy-three, despite a moving plea to Congress from Chief Allegawaho, the government removed roughly five hundred Kanza to Indian Territory in present day Oklahoma. A local club rebuilt this model using stone from one of the original houses.