Fool Chief's Village

After the flood the board ends on, the village moved and then the people did. Richard W. Cummins, the agent to the Kansa, reported the Kansas River in 1844 'overflown from bluff to bluff, sweeping off all the fencing, houses.' Fool Chief re-established his village at the mouth of Vermillion Creek, and two years later a new treaty sent the Kansa to Council Grove. An archeological study in 2012 found about 20 probable houses; excavators worked five of them and a large deposit of animal bone, mostly deer, and found silver earrings and spun-back buttons.

What the plaque says

Fool Chief's Village The Kansa, for whom the state is named, once occupied 20 million acres of land in eastern and northern Kansas. In 1825 the U.S. government reduced the lands to a reservation west of Topeka. In 1846 tribe members were sent to a 256,000 acre reservation near Council Grove and by 1872 they were forced onto 137 acres in Oklahoma. Today they are known as the Kaw Nation. Near this site was a Kansa village with a population between 700 and 800. Occupied between 1828 and 1844 it included 80 bark-covered houses, about 30 feet in diameter with a central hearth. It was the largest of four nearby villages. The leader of this village was Fool Chief (Gahíge Wadáyinga). Gahíge means "chief;" Wadáyinga means "brave and courageous even to rashness." The villagers had increasing contact with European and American goods and customs. They planted corn, beans, and squash and also had wheat or barley and domestic horses and hogs of European origin. The village was abandoned after the 1844 Kansas River flood. Between 2006 and 2013 the site was excavated before the reconstruction of the intersection of Menoken Road and U.S. 24, which buried most of the site. Erected by the State of Kansas

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park — 5.4 mi
  Monroe Elementary in Topeka, one of four grade schools the city kept for Black children, now the museum of the case that thirteen Topeka families brought and the Supreme Court decided in 1954.
• Prairie Peoples Park (Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation) — 16 mi
  The Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation's powwow grounds west of Mayetta, on the reservation the band held when most Potawatomi in Kansas took allotments and the promise of citizenship.

More markers nearby

• Capital City of Kansas — 4.9 mi
• St. Marys — 18 mi
• Historical Kansas — 20 mi
• Bluestem in the Flint Hills / Beecher Bibles — 20 mi