This is the fourth post in the Historicizing Adaptation blog series, edited by Shannon Stunden Bower, which is introduced here.
In July 1843, the Wyandot experienced a horrific forced removal from their homes in Tsaʔⁿduskeh (now Upper Sandusky, Ohio) to what would become Kansas City, Kansas, following the signing of the Treaty of 1842 with the US government. Lucy B. Armstrong, Wyandot leader John Armstrong’s wife, wrote about their family’s removal to Kansas in her diary several years later. She explained that the Wyandot travelled by wagon, horse, foot, and steamboat to Kansas. Once they arrived, “the sun was down and a heavy dew was on the grass,” and the boat captain forced the Wyandot off the ships to find any shelter they could to escape the elements.1 However, “there was only one small house which could be occupied… there was only a small spot which was treeless, and here the men, women, and children huddled together over night.”2 These conditions deteriorated over the following days and years, with severe weather compounding the challenges of resettlement. Despite these weather conditions, the Wyandots quickly acclimated to this new environment, establishing their new home they called Wyandott City.
This is the story of the Wyandot’s resilience—their ability to endure and adapt during an intense period of adversity and extreme weather events—in an unfamiliar land. Their strength laid the foundations for the modern settler metropolis of Kansas City and ensured the survival over generations of their community, known today as the Wyandot Nation of Kansas. This history contributes to our understanding of adaptation and resilience as both survival strategies and forms of resistance, highlighting the enduring connections between colonialism, land, and adaptation.
Dayǫ́weh (The People)
The Wyandots in Tsaʔⁿduskeh were part of the larger Wyandot transnational Confederacy with communities throughout their ancestral homelands in the Detroit River corridor and Quebec regions. In the historical records, the Wyandot have been called the Wyandotte, Wandat, Wendat/Wendat, and Huron. The Tsaʔⁿduskeh Wyandots had significant experience with forced removals and voluntary relocations as descendants of the Wendat Confederacy of the 1300s that the Haudenosaunee in 1649 forced from their ancestral homelands in Wendake (now Georgian Bay, Ontario). After this initial dispersal, the Wendat/Wyandot(te) began expanding their Confederacy, establishing communities in Quebec, Ontario, Michigan, Ohio, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Today, there are four recognized Nations in the modern Wendat/Wyandot(te) Confederacy including the Wyandotte Nation (Oklahoma), Wyandot of Anderdon Nation (Michigan), Wyandot Nation of Kansas (Kansas), and Nation Huronne-Wendat (Quebec).
Detraʔtari:nyǫʔ (Disease)
Like many other Indigenous Nations in the United States that experienced removal, threats to community did not stop when the Wyandots arrived in their new homeland in July 1843. After the Wyandots’ arrival in Kansas, they remained camped on the banks of the Kansas River for months in damp, swampy lowlands.3 This environment caused diseases to run rampant throughout the camp, killing sixty to one hundred people (roughly 16% of their population), likely from typhoid or measles outbreaks alongside incurable diarrhea.4 Many Wyandot also had severe inflammation of the eye from high winds in this prairie landscape, which blew sand/dirt into their faces, leading to blindness.5 This blindness was so severe in the community that the Tribal Council instituted a pension plan for those who became blind.6
The effects of disease and death went beyond physical repercussions and had social and economic effects, leaving the Wyandot in a vulnerable position. Reverend James Wheeler, the Wyandot’s Methodist missionary from Ohio that removed with the community to Kansas, commented:
Having been encamped so long, many of them were getting home-sick and began to wish that they had never left Sandusky. To add to their discouragements, they have suffered much since their arrival from sickness and the death of nearly all the younger part of their children.7
The loss of nearly all their young children threatened the future of the Wyandot because that meant the loss of a generation of future healers, caregivers, labourers, Elders, warriors, leaders, and Chiefs. This took a deep emotional toll on survivors.
Atehšęhtá:nǫh (Bad Weather)
These disease outbreaks were exacerbated by bad weather. Because so many Wyandots died during the removal and the following first year, the Wyandots who were not sick quickly established a cemetery, which remains in downtown Kansas City to this day.8 They built small temporary homes near the river; however, the weather during this first year was particularly severe, and inadequate housing caused more Wyandots to die.9 This type of weather was different than the weather Wyandots were used to in Tsaʔⁿduskeh, which had a fairly temperate climate with long summers, late autumns, and short winters, ensuring an excellent growing season.10 Kansas, by contrast, had a much greater risk of drought, flooding, tornados, hail, and blizzards.11
In spring 1844, the weather looked more promising as it was warm and dry. But, in May, the weather changed—it rained every day and night for forty days, causing the Kaw River to swell fourteen feet. This led to a flood in the region from 13 to 16 June 1844.12 As an eye witness recalled:
The seething, foaming flood water was not only dashing madly onward in the river channel, but it swept across the heavily timbered bottom of West Kansas, from bluff to bluff, with a roar almost deafening.13
The waters were so high that people saw buffalo carcasses rotting in treetops when the water receded.14 Wyandots David Frohman, Russel B. Garett, Ethan A. Long, Tall Charles, and Isaiah Walker used the ferry to save as many people and as much property as possible during the flood. This flood washed away the houses and improvements the Wyandot had built in the lowlands near the river, all of which then needed to be rebuilt.15
This is one of Kansas City’s worst floods in recorded history and has been memorialized in a plaque marking the waterline at Westport Landing, Kansas City, Missouri. The flood caused environmental instability in the region as heaps of vegetable matter decayed, increasing the spread of disease that caused “chills and fever, and bloody flux.”16 The flood’s destruction also increased pressure on resources, wildlife, and unaffected areas where food and medicines were gathered. By the late fall of 1844 (just over a year since their arrival), not a single Wyandot had not been sick.17
Tihákyeʔ (Forward Coming)
Community stories about the 1840s and 1850s describe the loss to disease and environmental crisis of a generation of Wyandots, including potential leaders, parents, spiritual leaders, educators, agriculturalists, healers, and contributors to society. For example, on 9 September 1849, Margaret Greyeyes Solomon’s son died of remittent fever. Two years later, her husband David died of consumption. In 1852, cholera swept through the community, killing at least one person a week—including Margaret’s young daughter, who died on 2 February 1852, marking three deaths in this family in three years. By 1855, Margaret was a single mother of two daughters, Elizabeth (fourteen) and Martha (six).18 Unfortunately, Margaret’s story is far too common in the Wyandot’s removal.
Although this history reflects significant loss, it also underscores the Wyandot’s resilience and ability to rebuild their home. Despite these severe illnesses and obstacles, they pressed on. They laid out their new home around the cemetery in what became downtown Kansas City, with streets named after prominent Wyandot families, including Armstrong, Tauromee, Northrup, Splitlog, McAlpine, and Barnett. By 1855, the Wyandot established beautiful homes, lush gardens and agricultural fields, businesses, a ferry system, schools, churches, and government facilities. Many of these original buildings, street names, and Wyandot families remain in downtown Kansas City today.
The Wyandot’s story demonstrates that resilience is not just about survival, but also about adaptation and rebuilding in the wake of genocidal colonial policies and environmental challenges. This history underscores how colonialism has historically exacerbated the impacts of environmental crises on Indigenous peoples—a pattern that persists today. It is essential to support Indigenous-led policies and practices to address environmental trauma and prioritize community healing, both ethically and practically, as we confront today’s global climate crisis. As climate change progresses and displaces people from their ancestral homelands, we must learn from and respect Indigenous knowledge systems, particularly from communities who have experienced removal like the Wyandots. Their generational knowledge offers insights into adapting to and recovering from environmental disasters.
Feature image: Plat Map of Wyandott City, page 07, date unknown, Kansas City, Kansas Public Library and Archives, Kansas Collection.
Notes
1. Lucy B. Armstrong, “Lucy B. Armstrong’s Account of Travel from St. Louis to Kansas on the Missouri Riverboat Nodaway,” c. 1843, Lucy B. Armstrong, Wyandot Nation of Kansas Archives.
2. Armstrong.
3. Rev. James Wheeler, “Letter from Rev. James Wheeler,” September 30, 1843, Missionaries, Wyandot Nation of Kansas Archives.
4. Janith English, “Unpublished Chronological History of the Wyandot Nation of Kansas” (Wyandot Nation of Kansas, N.D.), Janith English Private Archives.
5. Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas: Historical and Biographical: Comprising a Condensed History of the State, a Careful History of Wyandotte County, and a Comprehensive History of the Growth of the Cities, Towns and Villages, American County Histories – KS Only (Goodspeed Publishing Company, 1890), 430–31; Kathryn Magee Labelle, Daughters of Aataentsic: Life Stories from Seven Generations, McGill-Queen’s Indigenous and Northern Studies (Ottawa, Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021), 60.
6. Thelma R. Marsh, Daughter of Grey Eyes: The Story of Mother Solomon (Upper Sandusky, Ohio, 1984), 39.
7. Wheeler, “Letter from Rev. James Wheeler,” September 30, 1843.
8. English, “Unpublished Chronological History of the Wyandot Nation of Kansas.”
9. Marsh, Daughter of Grey Eyes, 37.
10. Glen Conner, “History of Weather Observations Cincinnati, Ohio 1789 – 1947” (9216 Holland Road Scottsville, Kentucky: Prepared for the Midwestern Regional Climate Center under the auspices of the Climate Database Modernization Program, NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, Asheville, North Carolina, December 2004).
11. Kansas Historical Society, “Weather in Kansas” (Kansas Historical Society, December 1969), https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/weather-in-kansas/14281.
12. A.T. Andreas, “Wyandots in Kansas Territory” (Wyandot Nation of Kansas, 1883 1844), Wyandot History in Kansas, Wyandot Nation of Kansas Archives, http://www.wyandot.org/1844.htm; English, “Unpublished Chronological History of the Wyandot Nation of Kansas.”
13. Loren L. Taylor, The Historic Communities of Wyandotte County (Wyandotte County, Kansas: Wyandotte County Historical Society and Museum, 2005), 524; A.T. Andreas, W.H. Miller, and William Elsey Connelley, “Wyandots in Kansas Territory” (Wyandot Nation of Kansas, 1883 1844), Wyandot History in Kansas, Wyandot Nation of Kansas Archives, http://www.wyandot.org/1844.htm.
14. Labelle, Daughters of Aataentsic, 61.
15. W.H. Miller, “History of Kansas City, Illustrated” (Wyandot Nation of Kansas, 1881), Wyandot History in Kansas, Wyandots in Kansas Territory 1844, The Great Flood of 1844, Wyandot Nation of Kansas Archives; Marsh, Daughter of Grey Eyes, 37; Taylor, The Historic Communities of Wyandotte County, 524.
16. Andreas, Miller, and Connelley, “Wyandots in Kansas Territory”; Larry Hancks, The Emigrant Tribes Wyandot, Delaware & Shawnee A Chronology (Kansas City, Kansas, 1998), 162.
17. Andreas, Miller, and Connelley, “Wyandots in Kansas Territory”; English, “Unpublished Chronological History of the Wyandot Nation of Kansas.”
18. Marsh, Daughter of Grey Eyes, 39–40.
