St. Marys

For the Potawatomi who reached this place in 1848, the road had begun ten years earlier in Indiana. On September 4, 1838, militia marched about 859 Potawatomi from Chief Menominee's village at Twin Lakes toward Kansas, some 660 miles in 61 days, a removal later called the Trail of Death; 42 died, 28 of them children. Menominee, who had refused to sign the treaty that gave up their land, died in Kansas in 1841 and never saw Indiana again. The Mission Band lived at Sugar Creek in Linn County from March 1839 before moving here.

What the plaque says

St. Marys This city and college take their name from St. Mary's Catholic Mission founded here by the Jesuits in 1848 for the Pottawatomie Indians. These missionaries, who had lived with the tribe in eastern Kansas from 1838, accompanied the removal to this area. A manual labor school was operated at the mission until 1871. From it developed St. Mary's College, chartered in 1869. In 1931 the college became a Jesuit seminary. A boulder on the campus marks the site of the first cathedral between the Missouri river and the Rocky Mountains. Built of logs in 1849, it became the See of Bishop Miege, "Bishop of the Indians." Vice President Charles Curtis, part Kaw Indian, was baptized in this parish on April 15, 1860. The mission was an important stopping point on the Oregon trail. Here also was the U.S. Pottawatomie agency. This building still stands 600 feet northwest of this marker. Erected by Kansas Historical Society and State Highway Commission

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 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.
• Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park — 23 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.

More markers nearby

• The Vieux Crossing — 7.8 mi
• Bluestem in the Flint Hills / Beecher Bibles — 9.6 mi
• Historical Kansas — 9.6 mi
• Louis Vieux — 11 mi