Delaware Crossing and the Grinter Ferry

The 'part Delaware wife' the board leaves unnamed was Annie Marshall Grinter, born Windagamen, a Lenape name meaning sweetness, in Miami County, Ohio, on January 8, 1820. Her father, William Marshall, was a white trader; her mother, Elizabeth 'Betsy' Wilaquenaho, was Lenape. She came to the Kansas River with about 1,000 Delaware in 1831 and married Moses around 1838; because she was Delaware, he could buy the Chouteau trading post on the reserve. When the 1866 treaty forced a choice, she was one of 69 Delaware who stayed in Kansas. She died in 1905 at 85.

What the plaque says

Delaware Crossing and the Grinter Ferry Just east of this marker, at a point where an old Indian trail led to the water's edge, Moses Grinter established the first ferry on the Kansas river. The year was 1831, and Grinter became the earliest permanent white settler in the area. His ferry was used extensively by travelers over the Fort Leavenworth-Fort Scott military road, and by traders, freighters, and soldiers traveling between the forts or to Santa Fe. This place was known as Military or Delaware Crossing, and sometimes as Secondine, and here the first non-military post office in Kansas was established on September 10, 1850. In 1857 Grinter built the large brick house still standing to the north and lived there until his death in 1878. He and his part Delaware wife are buried in the churchyard one-fourth mile beyond. The Union Pacific, Eastern Division, built through here in 1863-1864. In 1869, as the Kansas Pacific, it was the first railroad to reach the western border of the state. The Chouteau family, long prominent in the fur trade, operated posts in this vicinity as early as the 1820's. Dela- ware, Wyandot, Munsee and Shawnee Indians were among Eastern tribes resettled in this area beginning in 1830. Near here were the Delaware agency, smithy, and Baptist and Methodist missions. By the 1870's remnants of these tribes had been removed to reservations in present Oklahoma.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Quindaro Townsite — 7.6 mi
  The wooded ruins of a free-state river port built on a Wyandot woman's land in 1857, a crossing for people escaping slavery in Missouri and later the home of Western University.
• Shawnee Indian Mission State Historic Site — 7.7 mi
  Three brick buildings in Fairway from the manual labor school the Methodist church ran for Shawnee and other Native children from 1839, which the Shawnee Tribe now calls by its plain name, a boarding school.

More markers nearby

• Shawnee Friends Mission — 5.2 mi
• Kansas Indian Reservations — 6.3 mi
• This Gateway to Kansas — 8.0 mi
• The City of Leavenworth — 19 mi