What had been standard practice toward American Indians became law when President Jackson pushed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 through Congress.

Federal policy by the 1820s allowed the forced emigration of native peoples of the American East and upper Midwest. But the act triggered a mass migration of up to 10,000 American Indians to reserves in eastern Kansas during the next two decades, bringing major consequences for the native peoples of the area, such as the Kanza and the Pawnee.

“There were many people on this land who were of this land and viewed it as their home,” said Dan Wildcat, professor of American Indian Studies at Haskell Indian Nations University.

The stress that added native emigrants placed on land and resources in the area proved to be a catalyst for intertribal conflict, Wildcat said.

Until that time, intertribal warfare hadn’t been much of a problem, according to Randy Thies, Kansas State Historical Society archeologist. But warfare became a bigger problem, Thies said, “as groups were forced together because of the need for protection from other tribes.”

Beginning in the 1820s and increasing with the removal act, 27 to 40 different tribes were moved to Kansas, Wildcat said.

Due to increased competition between tribes, Thies said, some, like the Pawnee, built “fortified villages.” One such village in north-central Kansas contained 100 to 200 earth lodges and a surrounding fortification wall.

Wildcat calls the time of removal a “period of great compression.”

“All of a sudden, when the Wyandot’s come, the Kaws are saying, ‘Well, you’re going to have to move over here,'” Wildcat said. “Or when the Osages are pushed out of Arkansas and much of Missouri, they’re pushed into eastern Kansas.”

6News video: Immigration spurs intertribal conflicts

Native peoples from as far east as upstate New York were removed to the area following the Indian Removal Act, Wildcat said.

Among the tribes removed to eastern Kansas were the Ottawa, Miami, Cayuga, Seneca, Muncie, Wyandot, Delaware and Shawnee, according to Wildcat and historian Dale Nimz.

“These were people who had — some of them had — lived on the East Coast; they’d been moved to or pushed to the Ohio River Valley, and then finally, after 1825 and 1830, they were relocated to Missouri and then to Kansas again,” Nimz said.

Pressure upon the resident native peoples as well as on the native emigrants to eastern Kansas was high.

“Native people felt that pressure very palpably, I think, in their everyday existence, in their struggles really to survive and maintain identities and a sense of who they were as native people,” Wildcat said.

“And it’s sort of marvelous that they’ve been able to do that in many respects; in many respects very successfully.”

Next week, “River City Chronicles” explores the resilience of American Indians of 1830s and 1840s eastern Kansas amid growing pressures brought by the tide of native and European-American immigrants.