The California Road

Franklin County, Kansas

By Diana Staresinic-Deane

On a rise above Ottawa Creek in Franklin County, Kansas, a shallow depression roughly six feet wide hugs the southern boundary of a battered cemetery before it veers north and vanishes into a fence line. Today it is barely visible, a valley of grass and weeds a slightly different shade of green than the field surrounding it. During the years leading up to Kansas’s statehood, this strip of green was a road that saw hundreds of wagons and thousands of cattle heading west to California and Oregon.

“California emigrants are passing in great numbers,” Reverend Jotham Meeker wrote in his journal from the Ottawa Baptist Mission on April 27, 1852. “Four companies encamped near us last night with 1,300 cattle. On this evening three more companies encamp with 700 cattle. These are exclusive of probably 5 or 600 oxen with 60 or 80 wagons.”

The Ottawa of Blanchard’s Fork and Roche de Boeuf and Oquanoxy’s Village were among several bands of Native Americans forced into present-day Franklin County after losing lands in Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio in the 1830s. More than half of the Ottawa had died by 1837, when Jotham and Elenor Meeker arrived to establish a Baptist mission among them.

Born in 1804, Jotham Meeker trained as a printer before becoming a missionary among the Ottawa, Chippewa, and Potawatomi in Michigan. He became fluent in multiple Indigenous languages, and he developed a phonetic method using Roman type to print in several of them.

When the Indian Removal Act pushed tribes into the Plains, the Meekers were sent there, too. In 1833, at the Shawnee Mission, Meeker set up what is thought to be the first printing press in what would become Kansas Territory. He would print thousands of books and other materials in the Native languages of the various tribes moving to Indian Territory.

In October 1836, Meeker received orders to set up a mission among the Ottawa as soon as a printer could be sent to take his place. By the spring of 1837, construction had begun on the first five-acre mission site, which was situated along the Marais des Cygnes River and the Fort Scott Road. This site was partially destroyed in the flood of 1844 — a flood whose high-water mark was thought to be nearly seven feet higher than the flood that drowned much of Eastern Kansas in 1951.

The Meekers rebuilt on higher ground, situating the mission church, cemetery, house, well, and farm on a rise above Ottawa Creek. Although missionaries were undeniably part of the larger colonial machine that devastated Indigenous populations to make way for white settlement, Meeker’s journals and the memories of the Ottawa themselves suggest that the Ottawa and Jotham Meeker had a relatively respectful relationship. Meeker’s journals narrate days filled with visiting families, caring for the sick, and comforting the grieving.

Meeker also documented those traveling along the California Road that passed by the south side of the new mission site. He first mentions the “California emigrants” and a cholera outbreak in 1849. Beginning in 1850, springtime meant hundreds of emigrants passing the mission.

Wagon trails are integral to the history of the American West, and Kansas was often seen as the liminal space that travelers passed through to reach their true destination. Two of those major trails — the Oregon-California Trail and the Santa Fe Trail — passed through Kansas, each traveler on their own journey to somewhere else.

But those trails did not exist in a vacuum; thousands of miles of lesser roads connected the major trails to military forts, Indian agencies, missions, homesteads, water sources, and hunting grounds, and still more roads connected many of those places to each other. Any Kansas road that ultimately linked to the Oregon-California Trail might be called a “California Road,” and one such road carried travelers through present-day Miami County before turning due west into Franklin County and passing through the Ottawa Reserve and Meeker’s Baptist Mission.

“It has now been four weeks since California emigrants commenced passing and we think to this time about 800 wagons and 10,000 cattle have gone along this road,” Meeker wrote in his journal on May 15, 1852. “About 30 wagons and 300 cattle pass to-day.”

Emigrants purchased oats, corn, and potatoes at the mission, but they were less interested in religion, and Meeker wrote that few observed the Sabbath. Emigrants also brought cholera, and on June 15, 1852, Meeker wrote, “California emigrants are returning, fleeing from the cholera. They report that great numbers are dying with it on the Plains. They have two cholera cases with them.” At least one emigrant never left the mission site; the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Gabriel Smith is buried in the cemetery.

The road also brought news and change. On June 1, 1854, Meeker noted that, “Nebraska and Kansas Territories are organized,” referring to the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which passed just two days earlier. He also wrote of emigrants who “are squatting around us in great numbers,” signaling the beginning of white settlement in Kansas Territory and what would soon be the end of Indian Reserves in Franklin County.

Jotham Meeker died January 12, 1855, leaving behind hundreds of pages of journals documenting life with the Ottawa in Kansas before it was Kansas. His wife Elenor died in 1856 and is buried in the mission cemetery next to Jotham. The mission fell into ruin, though the cemetery would continue to be used by both the Ottawa and white settlers. Shortly after the Civil War, the Ottawa were forced to sell their lands in Kansas and move to Oklahoma.

The California Road, which was drawn into the official government land survey maps created between 1856 and 1864, was no longer an official road by the time Leonard F. Shaw and G.D. Stinebaugh published their map of Franklin County in 1878. Later travelers followed section line roads, and later still, Kansas Highway 68 and Interstate 35. Although these roads allow for faster and safer travel, they can’t offer the intimate knowledge of a road that hugs the curves of the land, climbing hills, splashing into creeks, and passing through thousands of acres of wildflowers at the pace of a wagon train.

I am fascinated by old trails, and I am forever searching for remnants of paths that once connected us to other people and places. Where we are is shaped by our ability to get there, and I have spent many hours standing in the depressions that still remain, thinking about the people and goods and animals who once followed that path in their journey.

Today at the old mission site and cemetery, a steady Kansas wind carries the sounds of faraway travelers: the drone of high-speed traffic on I-35 and K-68, the buzz of a small plane, the horn from a distant train, chatty bluebirds and nuthatches hopping from perch to perch in the trees. The only stillness is in the old California Road itself. Yet, as I stand in the swale of this former road, I can imagine a time when the Meekers and the Ottawa could hear lowing cattle and creaking wagons hours before they reached the mission on their way to somewhere else.

Diana Staresinic-Deane grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, and currently calls Ottawa, Kansas, home. She is the executive director of the Franklin County Historical Society in Ottawa and a member of the Humanities Kansas Speakers Bureau. She is the author of the book, Shadow on the Hill: The True Story of a 1925 Kansas Murder. Diana can often be found exploring old cemeteries and searching for remnants of historic trails.

Read Jotham Meeker’s journals at the Kansas Historical Society, or visit their archive for a more complete Meeker collection.

The post Jotham Meeker – Franklin County, Kansas appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Main Street
Metamora, Indiana

By Heather Chacón

My first memory of Metamora, Indiana, is of being twelve and sitting on a wooden bench on the front porch of an old house-turned-shop with my friend, Holly. It is December. Above us hang several pieces of artwork for sale, paintings of landscapes and animals on reclaimed barn wood done by a local artist. We are sipping hot chocolate with lots of whipped cream and laughing while her parents shop inside the crowded building, the laughter making what happened next all the more startling. A man suddenly grabs a painting off the wall above our heads and takes off running. He nearly makes it off the porch before being tackled, suddenly and fully about the waist. Other people, whether patrons or employees we do not know, secure the painting. There are murmurs of “shoplifter” amongst the crowd, and eventually the store owner appears to loudly berate the man and ban him from the store. I do not remember any police being called, but the collective scorn from that crowd frightened me regardless.

Had I been more familiar with the history of Metamora, I would have also understood that the concepts embedded in this event — artistic ownership, community censure, thwarted commerce, repurposed materials as the start of mythos-building — were as much a part of this town’s history as the nineteenth-century buildings and homespun atmosphere I loved.

You see, Metamora got its name from the play Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags (1829), written by John Augustus Stone. Stone entered this play in a competition sponsored by one of the (many say the) most prominent American actors of the nineteenth-century, Edwin Forrest. Keen to find a play he believed would be well-suited to his style of acting and physical presence, as well as show that the young nation could produce works of literary and dramatic merit, Forrest offered $500 for the best original “tragedy, in five acts, of which the hero, or principal character, shall be an aboriginal of this country.” From among the fourteen plays submitted, the Committee of Award (headed by William Cullen Bryant) chose Stone’s.

Initially Stone was elated to win the prize and have his work performed by such an important thespian. This pleasure soon turned to worry and dismay, however, as Metamora became a meteoric success that helped establish Forrest’s professional reputation and personal fortune without yielding such stability for its author. The play’s popularity hinged, in part, on Forrest’s acting talent, but it also gave the American people the opportunity to celebrate a uniquely “American” history.

While some brochures and websites mention the town is named after a play, very few include any details of its plot or popularity. Set in 1600s New England, the melodrama tells the tale of Metamora, a fictional chief cast in the “noble Indian” mode, who eventually kills his wife to protect her from the terrors of settler colonialism and enslavement before being slain by white pioneers. Importantly, by 1829 New England was largely under the control of white settlers, thus allowing northeastern audiences watching Stone’s play the chance to experience catharsis rather than fear of Native American retaliation. Yet Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, passed in 1830, insured white Americans’ interest in stories dramatizing the usurpation of Native American lands and “disappearance” of their earlier inhabitants. The play became such a cultural phenomenon that it inspired the name of Metamora, Indiana, when the town was platted in 1838. This was not unique, as towns named Metamora can also be found in Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio — locations that had more recently been settled on the frontier.

Forrest performed Metamora to great acclaim until his death in 1872. The play spawned at least 35 additional “Indian” dramas and Forrest made thousands by playing the role. Stone, meanwhile, never saw additional remuneration above his $500 prize money, unless you count Forrest buying Stone’s headstone after Stone committed suicide by drowning in 1834. When Stone died many whispered that Forrest’s unwillingness to share the profits of Metamora contributed to Stone’s melancholy. The scandal clung to Forrest for a while, but ultimately did little to impact his popularity.

Today visitors to Metamora, Indiana, will find little evidence of why the town bears this name or the fact that it was established on land that used to be the home of Miami and Shawnee peoples. Instead, public memory centers largely on its identity as a “canal town.” Metamora was established along the proposed route of Indiana’s Whitewater Canal, an infrastructure project designed to transport raw materials from the state’s interior to the Ohio River. Construction of the canal section in Metamora began in 1836 and was completed by 1847. Yet the canal was unfortunately prone to flooding due to the relatively low elevation of the surrounding land and its proximity to the Whitewater River. By the 1860s, the railroad supplanted canal travel as the preferred means of transporting goods.

With this change, Metamora met challenges well known to much of the rural Midwest: declining populations, gradual shrinkage of family-owned farms, a dearth of well-paying jobs. A resourceful bunch, Metamora residents still used the canal to power several grist mills in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one of which still operates at the Whitewater Canal State Historic Site under the care of the Indiana State Museum. Their grits are extremely good, particularly on a summer day when you can watch them be freshly ground and placed directly in the bag.

In the last few years, interest in the town has risen somewhat, in part due to renewed interest in preserving historic architecture like Metamora’s nineteenth-century shops and municipal buildings. The town’s beautiful natural setting, affordability, and relative proximity to Cincinnati draw visitors who want to stroll around antique shops or take the family on a historic train or canal boat ride. It’s a pity most visitors to Metamora’s functioning wooden aqueduct, the only one still in existence in the United States, have no idea they’re also visiting a town named after the “last of the Wampanoags.”

Maybe it’s time to make sure that darker history is not also carried off into the night.

Heather Chacón is a proud native Hoosier and scholar of nineteenth-century American Literature. She is an assistant professor in the Department of English, Communications and Media at Greensboro College in North Carolina. When she isn’t grading or in the archives, she enjoys being outside and visiting historic sites—beloved pastimes she first developed in Indiana.

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