They left few descendants, and their language is nearly extinct.

But the mystery surrounding the Kanza American Indian tribe – the “people of the south wind” who gave Kansas its name – will be lifted somewhat by two new earthen-home dwellings in Kansas that will give the public a glimpse of what tribal life was like centuries ago.

Volunteers have spent months building one of the homes in Atchison that will be dedicated this weekend, and a second home is being built in Council Grove.

Both replicas, paid for with a grant by the National Park Service, will stand in places where the Kanza once lived.

“We weren’t as good as the Kanza at doing certain things,” said Chris Taylor, executive director of the Atchison County Historical Society, which helped plan and build the Atchison home. “The more we did it, the more we realized how smart the Kanza people were.”

The Atchison replica sits near the mouth of the Missouri River at Independence Creek, the same spot where the explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark came upon an uninhabited Kanza village 200 years ago.

Chris Taylor fans a fire inside a full-size replica of a Kanza earthen lodge. Historians, including Taylor, are helping to shed light on how the Kanza Indians lived in northeast Kansas from the mid-1600s to the late 1700s. Taylor, executive director of the Atchison County Historical Society, prepared the site Tuesday for this weekend's Lewis and Clark bicentennial celebration in Atchison, which is about 60 miles northeast of Lawrence.

It will be dedicated at 2 p.m. Sunday as part of the Lewis and Clark bicentennial, and members from the Kaw Nation of Oklahoma – a tribe descended from the Kanza – will be on hand.

The replica south of Council Grove will be part of a larger park, Allegawaho Heritage Memorial Park, that sits on land the Kaw Nation has owned since 2000. It once was the site of the last reservation where the Kanza lived before an act of Congress moved them to a reservation in Oklahoma in 1873.

“I think this whole park is going to be a wonderful learning experience for people all over,” said Mary Honeyman, curator of the nearby Kaw Mission Historical Site in Council Grove that has helped supply volunteers for building the home. “It’s going to become an avenue of instruction for the Kaw Nation to show other people what their culture was like and is like today.”

The 1,600-person Kaw Nation has been involved in the building of both replica homes, but representatives of the group could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

Mike George, an expert in native dwellings from Oregon, Mo., helped design both homes to mirror those tribal members built hundreds of years ago, from the mid-1600s to the late 1700s. The Atchison home has four supporting posts, logs all the way around except at the door and a smoke hole above.

But Taylor said work crews suffered setbacks trying to do what the Kanza did regularly: build something people could live in that would withstand Midwestern weather.

A Kanza earthen lodge, which averaged 25 feet in diameter like the replica above, was built of log framing and sod and was designed to stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark wrote about a large, uninhabited Kanza village when they camped in 1804 at Atchison.

The floor of the homes, paved with mud and manure, had to be hard and water-tight.

The woven mats that lined the log walls had to be wound so tightly that water beaded up on them as it would on a leaf. The floors were sunk 2 feet below grade to make the homes cool in the summer and warm in the winter.

For months, Taylor and his group stacked log on log, spread sod and failed at experiments with flooring. To keep the rain out, they settled on plastic rather than woven mats to line the log walls. Where the Kanza tribe would pack the mats with mud and let grass grow over the mound naturally, Taylor said his group decided on sod.

“You first say you’re going to do this, it sounds pretty simple,” he said. “It was an adventure, to say the least.”

He said the goal is to establish a summer educational program at the Atchison home where students can learn about the roles and responsibilities of Kanza children hundreds of years ago.

“It will become a part of the land that will open windows of appreciation for a lifestyle we barely know,” he said.