The Kansa and the River They Named Everything After
Near Kansas City, Missouri
The people who gave this river, this city, and this state their names were called the Kansa, sometimes written Kaw, a word that likely derives from their own term for themselves: People of the South Wind. They were a Siouan-speaking nation of the central plains who had lived along the Kansas River and the lower Missouri River for centuries before European contact, farming the river bottoms, hunting bison on the surrounding prairie, and trading with neighboring peoples across a network that extended hundreds of miles in every direction.
By the time French traders and explorers began moving through the Missouri River valley in the early seventeen hundreds, the Kansa were one of the most significant political presences in the region. In seventeen twenty-four the French explorer Bourgmont found them in a large village on the Missouri River near present-day Doniphan, Kansas, and later their main village lay farther up the Kansas River, near the Big Blue River. The French established a trading relationship with them. The Spanish, who controlled the region briefly, did the same. The Americans who arrived after the Louisiana Purchase in eighteen oh three found a nation that had been doing business with Europeans for nearly a century and was not surprised by new arrivals.
What followed was the standard sequence. The Kansa signed successive treaties, each ceding more land, each promising annuities and protections that came inconsistently or not at all. By eighteen twenty-five they had ceded virtually all of their Kansas River homeland. By eighteen forty-six, the Kansa were removed to a reservation near Council Grove, Kansas. In eighteen seventy-three, they were moved again, to Indian Territory in what is now northeastern Oklahoma, where the Kaw Nation is today a federally recognized tribe headquartered in Kaw City, Oklahoma.
The river kept their name. The state kept their name. The city kept a version of their name, spelled as Kansas City rather than Kansa, in the conventional elision that simplified things for English speakers. The people it named left more than a century ago.
