Medicine Lodge Peace Treaties

The council's other speeches show what the board's chosen words leave out. Satanta, the Kiowa leader Set'tainte, whose name means White Bear, told the commissioners on October 19, 1867: 'All the land south of the Arkansas belongs to the Kiowas and Comanches and I don't want to give away any of it.' Ten Bears answered for the Comanche: 'I love the open prairie, and I wish you would not insist on putting us on a reservation.' Margaret Adams, half Arapaho and fluent in English, Kiowa and Arapaho, interpreted for Little Raven.

What the plaque says

Medicine Lodge Peace Treaties At Medicine Lodge Creek in 1867, as many as 15,000 Apaches, Kiowas, Comanches, Arapahos, and Cheyennes gathered with a seven-member peace commission escorted by U.S. soldiers to conduct one of the nation's largest peace councils. The American Indian nations selected this traditional ceremonial site for the nearly two-week council. Chiefs Satanta, Little Raven, and Black Kettle gave speeches, held ceremonies, and entered negotiations. They produced three treaties that reduced the size of each of their lands and allowed for the construction of railroads and eventual settlement. "I come to say that the Kiowas and Comanches have made with you a peace, and they intend to keep it. If it brings prosperity to us, we of course will like it the better." —Satanta, Kiowa chief Some chiefs signed the treaties without popular support; others misunderstood the agreements and later renounced them. When the agreements failed, the government re- sponded with force. Thirteen months later Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle died in an attack by the Seventh Cavalry at Washita Creek, Oklahoma. Erected by the State of Kansas

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Medicine Lodge Treaty Site and Memorial Peace Park — 0.3 mi
  The council ground where five Plains nations met the Peace Commission in 1867, found again in 1926 by a Kiowa sergeant who was there as a boy, beside the town's pageant park.
• Carry A. Nation Home and Stockade Museum — 1.8 mi
  The small brick house on US-160 where Carry A. Nation lived from 1889 to 1902 and first led Medicine Lodge's temperance women against the town's liquor, shown together with a replica of the 1874 stockade.
• Gyp Hills Scenic Drive — 5.3 mi
  A 22-mile loop of mostly gravel road west of Medicine Lodge through red Permian mesas capped with white gypsum, past open range and cedar canyons in a county with more than a hundred cataloged gypsum caves.

More markers nearby

• Carry Nation — 19 mi