Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1987
Abstract
The story is complex with many actors-- white missionaries, church officials, land speculators, town boosters, government officials, and Ottawa Indian leaders from opposing factions. Good intentions are mixed with deceit. And in the final chapter, there is neither a happy nor a tragic ending, only a belated settlement. William E. Unrah and H. Craig Miner, two highly capable historians at Wichita State University, have produced this case study of the chicanery associated with the creation of Ottawa University in Ottawa, Kansas. They expose how the desire of Baptist missionaries to create a college for Ottawa Indians became entangled with land speculation and town building enterprises and how e\"en in the eyes of the churchmen the goal of establishing the college took precedence over the rights of the Indians.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 7:1 (Winter 1987). Copyright © 1987 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.