Beginning in 1825, and continuing well into the mid-1840’s, the federal government forcibly removed nearly one hundred thousand Native Americans into "Indian Territory," land which later became Oklahoma and Kansas. Among the relocated tribes were the Shawnees, Delawares, Wyandots, Kickapoos, Miamis, Sacs and Foxes, Ottawas, Peorias, and Potawatomies. Such action required that the Kaws sign treaties whereby vast acreage was ceded to the government in return for annuities and promises of educational, agricultural, and other forms of material assistance.
   

1825 The Kaws agreed to a reduction of their twenty million acre domain, which comprised roughly the northern half of future Kansas, to a two million acre reservation. The eastern boundary of this reservation was just west of future Topeka near the headwaters of the Saline and Solomon Rivers. For this huge cession the Kaws were awarded a $3,500 annuity for twenty years, a quantity of cattle, hogs, and domestic fowl, a government blacksmith and agricultural instructor, and schools to be funded from earlier Kaw land sales in the Kansas City area.
   

And, as a special concession for Chief White Plume’s vigorous support of this treaty, 640-acre plots along the north side of the Kansas River just east of the new reservation were granted in fee-simple to all twenty three half-bloods of the Kaw tribe. The rest of the tribe received no such benevolence thereby greatly encouraging factionalism.
   

In 1825, Sibley, Benjamin H. Reeves, and Thomas Mathers, members of the government survey team, met several Kaw Chiefs at the Sora Creek crossing of the Santa Fe Trail, just south of present-day McPherson. Here the Kaw chiefs and headmen agreed to allow the survey party to continue its work unmolested for $800 in cash or merchandise paid directly to tribal leaders. The trail was to be "forever free for the use of the citizens of the United States and of the Mexican Republic."
   

The treaty language stipulated that a government agent, farmer, and blacksmith were to reside at or near the principal villages. Yet in the two decades after the treaty was ratified, this provision was loosely enforced or completely ignored. Never did the agent (or subagent) live closer than twenty miles from the main tribal villages. In some instances the distance was between fifty and seventy-five miles. Moreover, a chronic turnover in official personnel assigned to the Kaws, along with continual reorganization of the Department of Indian Affairs at the agency level, resulted in a confusing array of agents, subagents, assistant agents, special agents, commissioners, blacksmiths, and farmers. Often there was no one to look after the government’s obligations to the Kaws.
   

The next major land cession treaty was signed by Kaw chiefs in 1846. The Kaw sold their two million-acre reservation established in 1825 to the U.S. government for just over ten cents an acre. This money was to be dispensed to the Kaw tribe over a thirty-year-period at a rate of fifteen thousand dollars a year. The Kaw were to be relocated to a twenty-mile-square reserve located in preset southern Morris County and northern Lyon and Chase counties.