The Nation's own history begins in the Great Lakes. After the 1833 Treaty of Chicago gave up the rest of a 28-million-acre homeland, the Potawatomi were moved west, to Missouri's Platte Country and to Council Bluffs, and after the treaty of 1846 to Kansas, onto a reservation of 568,223 acres that took in part of present Topeka. The Kansas-Nebraska Act brought squatters before any treaty did. In the treaty fights that followed, about 1,400 Potawatomi chose allotments and eventual citizenship. A group of 780 held to land in common, believing no single person owned it, and became the Prairie Band. The treaties of 1861 and 1867 sent more than 338,000 acres to a railroad, and by 1867 the holdings had fallen 87 percent; the Prairie Band settled on 11 square miles in the northeast corner.
The band refused to recognize the allotments the Dawes Act of 1887 forced on it. The government withheld its payments, and the Nation counts close to 50,000 acres lost under the law. In 1954 Congress listed the Potawatomi for termination; petitions and delegations to Washington, in the years the Nation ties to Minnie Evans's leadership, took the name off. The Nation also keeps William Mzhickteno's account of a hunting party that found the Nicodemus settlers hungry and gave them half its buffalo meat. In 2001 it bought back 10,300 acres for the reservation.
Prairie Peoples Park, at 150th and M Road, was refurbished in 2002. The Nation holds its annual powwow here, planned by a tribal committee; the 2025 powwow ran June 6 to 8.
The closest stops worth working into your route
Roadside plaques and monuments within a short detour