Illustration by Lana Grove
Artifacts from Ark City digs challenge what previously has been known about Plains Native Americans
After recent archaeological digs in Kansas, our understanding, and our teaching, of nomadic Plains Native American history and culture is changing. Because of the new information, the future of tourism faces a new challenge with how best to tell the stories of Native people and cultures in Kansas.
The digs, which began only eight years ago in Arkansas City, are uncovering evidence that massive populations of Native Americans lived for centuries in Kansas. Their society was complex, their trade network immense. Their riches … well, even greater. That their definition of wealth was different from European standards of the day may explain why so little has been understood.
The Etzanoans had a wide-ranging trade network, creating and supplying goods for Native people throughout much of the Northern hemisphere. “These guys were specialists,” says Donald Blakeslee, the Wichita State University anthropologist and archaeologist who has been overseeing the digs and research. “And the thing is, they were feeding not just themselves. They were supplying products to people where there weren’t any bison herds.”
Blakeslee describes these Native Americans as bison-hunting professionals who were processing bison in industrial amounts. “What we have found in the remains of Etzanoa and related sites are bison-processing tools, highly specialized tools,” Blakeslee says. “Eighty percent of the tools found were for dealing with bison.” They produced pemmican—a calorie-rich, years-lasting food that was a mixture of tallow, dried meat and dried berries. They could survive in abundance and offered packages of pemmican—among other items—to other tribes as trade goods.
And, he adds, these people were known across the hemisphere. “When DeSoto went through eastern Arkansas, when he crossed the Mississippi, he got repeated accounts of people living out in this level country with sandy ground in huge towns. So, they were supplying basic products, including food, robes, as well as weapons of war—bone and rawhide shields, helmets and body armor—to Native American tribes throughout much of North America, everywhere from the East to the West coasts and well down into Mexico.”
They lived in permanent lodges at least two seasons out of the year and were in teepees the rest of the time.
“They were often out hunting bison for different purposes in different seasons,” Blakeslee says. “In the summertime, that’s where you are going for the meat to dry—and you are killing mostly cows because their meat tastes better. And, their hides are better for leggings and teepee covers. In the wintertime, you hunt bison for the robes.”
This is where the old information begins to fall. It was commonly thought the Native Americans—before horses changed the culture—would drive bison over cliffs.
“That did not occur in Kansas or Nebraska or Oklahoma or Texas,” Blakeslee says. “People on foot hunted bison herds by surrounding them—that was the primary way. That takes a whole lot of people. It was people living in large communities that did that. It was a very organized kind of thing.” And, Blakeslee says, the city of Etzanoa is just the beginning in understanding the large populations of people on the Plains.
A complex of villages, which Etzanoa is linked to, stretched between Oklahoma north to Saline County and may have supported as many as 200,000 residents who lived in what is now Cowley, Sumner, Butler, Rice, McPherson and Marion counties.
“These towns extended for miles, originally,” Blakeslee says.
“Archaeologists have known for decades there were plenty of farmers on the Great Plains as well as nomads,” he says. “They just didn’t get the press.” Between the years 1450 and 1700, at least 20,000 ancestors of today’s Wichita Nation thrived in and near what is now Arkansas City. This complex, though, is thought to have been one of the largest Native American communities in the United States, one that archaeologists couldn’t find and scholars doubted existed.
What Blakeslee has found in Arkansas City, he believes, may rewrite not only Kansas history but also American history. The Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in western Illinois is currently considered the biggest Native American urban complex ever built.
Until now.
Etzanoa, Blakeslee contends, is as big if not bigger.
Onate’s battle
For four centuries, many historians suspected that the Spanish conquistador searching for the fabled city of gold exaggerated accounts of a town that stretched for miles. But Juan de Onate, the founding governor of New Mexico, didn’t exaggerate or make it up.
The Etzanoans, who lived at the Arkansas City site, are ancestors of the Wichita tribe. They were farmers who slaughtered bison and cultivated beans, maize, pumpkin and squash.
In 1601, Onate led 70 soldiers from New Mexico to a place in southern Kansas—a huge town of Etzanoans. As Onate and the Spanish continued, they were overwhelmed by the size of the village. To make matters worse, enemies of the Etzanoans—the Excanxaques—had come to attack the village that same day but attacked the Spaniards instead. Sixty of the 70 Spaniards were wounded.
The Spanish fought back with cannons and guns. At least three Spanish bullets and cannon balls have been found, along with a still-functional water shrine and other artifacts, including a Spanish horseshoe nail. Digs have uncovered burned pits where the Etzanoan houses once stood.
But there is more, Blakeslee says. At the time of the Onate battle, there were professional translators at Etzanoa who eventually translated between the Spanish and Etzanoans. When Spanish conquistador Francisco Vazquez de Coronado had led an expedition to Kansas in 1541, he also found professional interpreters; he is reported to have killed three people from Quivira settlements who spoke Nahuatl—the Aztec language.
“It was the language of trade all across the southwest and down into Mexico,” Blakeslee says. However, he says, the Spanish were caught off guard by the immense population of Etzanoa.
“These populations were huge, and they (the Etzanoans) were in contact with everybody. They were the economic engine of North America,” he says.
Why has it taken until now to put the pieces together? First, the Spanish were incredible note-takers. The scribes kept detailed notes of what happened on the Plains. Then, the notes were archived—for centuries. Second, Blakeslee is a tenacious archaeologist. He specializes in archaeology of the Great Plains, and his interests range from the earliest settlements in the Americas to the historic period. He is especially interested in Native trails and sacred sites.
Third, the internet helped—as did scores of other specialists who helped interpret and translate the Spanish records into English. As more of these records are translated, more information is expected.
“Most of what history tells us doesn’t do justice to what really went on,” says Sandy Randal, museum director of the Cherokee Strip Land Rush Museum in Arkansas City. “If you read the interrogatories—these were interviews they took with the soldiers. If you read the letters to the king at that time, the interviews with Onate and Coronado, you start to get a feel of how settled the Plains were. There were all types of things happening that you just don’t read about in the history books. Not everything was written down, but we are lucky because we have those interrogatories, which tell the firsthand accounts […,] their ways of life and how they were living—things we just haven’t known before.”
Catching a glimpse of the Lost City
The Cherokee Strip Land Rush Museum in Arkansas City has, in recent years, become the starting base for visitors wanting to know about the Etzanoan digs and research. It will take years for the preservation and development of Etzanoa to be made ready for year-round visitors, but in the meantime, Arkansas City historians and leaders are allowing the public to see some glimpses of what and where the mysterious city once was.
Tours of the remnants of Etzanoa, located on the bluffs near the confluence of the Walnut and Arkansas rivers, are available to the public on the first and third Saturdays from March through July for $10 per person.
Those tours take about 2½ hours, and visitors must provide their own transportation as guides take them to sites. People can arrange for the tours through the Cherokee Strip Land Rush Museum, which also offers a documentary on the discovery. Randal says the bulk of visitors are from the Midwest, but visitors, wanting to know about this tiny Kansas town built upon a city, come from across the nation and even the world.
Advanced tours are being planned that will be six hours long and cost $100. According to etzanoa.net, those visitors will “learn how to fly a drone, employ thermal imaging cameras, wield metal detectors … Drones provide useful low-level aerial platforms for recording views of historic buildings, monuments, archaeological sites and landscapes that were previously too difficult to access … This tour consists of a lot of standing and walking while using a metal detector.”
Plans for the Etzanoa site include designating the site as a National Historic Landmark, a National Historic Battlefield and a World Heritage Site, a visitor center museum and regional archaeological center. The Cherokee Strip Land Rush Museum hopes to promote projects that help “illuminate the 13,000-year history of Native Americans on the Great Plains.”
Some of the plans include the hope of acquiring land because much of the Etzanoan sites are on private residential property. Eventually, a river walk may be developed so that visitors can walk or kayak along the river to see some of the Etzanoans’ rock art. But that will all take time and money.
Randal estimates about 5,000 visitors a year currently come to the site, but that number is expected to increase as word of the new discoveries spreads.
Kansas had three major Spanish conquistador explorations into Kansas. Coronado was the first; in 1541 he led an expedition in quest of the seven cities of gold and traveled as far north as Salina. Another, in 1595, was led by two men, Humana and Bonilla, whom Blakeslee describes as “thugs.” They came as far as Rice and McPherson counties in search of gold and were all killed except for one when they began harming the Quiviran women. Then, there was the Onate expedition in 1601.
The location, size and significance of Etzanoa, “the Great Settlement,” as Spanish explorers labeled it after their 1601 expedition there, was lost through centuries of time.
For many decades, archaeologists debated these issues. But now, Etzanoa is found.
Kansas history may get a new spin
For centuries, this area—central and southeast portions of Kansas—claims some of the most prime farm and wildlife lands.
Because the land has long been sought after, it has spurred regional conflict—even more than the clashes with Spanish conquistadors. After Kansas was declared a territory in 1854 and, later, a state in 1861, the push for settlement began to dramatically change the look and feel of the Kansas prairie.
What happened next divided the state into an often violent, thundering clash of cultures and, in the end, forced American Indians from the state and spurred European-American settlement of the prairie. By the 1870s, most of the buffalo and Indigenous populations were gone from Kansas. Now, centuries later, the land is revealing the stories of what once happened here. Randal is convinced there may be archaeological digs at Arkansas City for years, with people who want to know more coming from across the world.
In the meantime, Etzanoa is just the starting point. But Etzanoa is part of Quivira, and Kansas was filled with other Native American towns and villages that were equally large, Blakeslee says.
Think of the possibilities.
