The Ioway call themselves Báxoje, gray snow, for a time when soot from their fires darkened the snow on their lodges. Their Oneota ancestors lived along the Missouri in the northern half of the state in prehistoric times, and early in the nineteenth century the Ioway came back to the Chariton and Grand rivers. In 1824 the leaders Great Walker and White Cloud gave up their claim to the land north of the Missouri, and most of White Cloud's people moved to the Platte country, the triangle between the state's straight western line and the river, which was set aside for Native nations.
Robidoux's boy
Jeffrey Deroine was born in St. Louis on May 14, 1806, to an enslaved Black mother and a trader of French and Spanish descent, and so was born enslaved. As a boy he became the property of Joseph Robidoux, whose trading post in the Blacksnake Hills would become St. Joseph. In 1822 a woman named Rachel Camp, who said she was his grandmother, filed a freedom suit for him in St. Louis, charging that Robidoux had beaten him so badly in October 1820 that they had despaired of his life. Robidoux's money and connections kept the case from ever reaching a jury.
Deroine went up the river for Robidoux instead, learning the trade and its languages. He never learned to read, but the London Illustrated News later said he spoke seven Indian languages as well as French and English. The Ioway needed that. Their leaders said a bad translation at Prairie du Chien in 1830 had made them cede the western third of present Iowa without knowing it. In March 1832 Robidoux agreed to let a third party buy Deroine's freedom for $600, and he became the Ioway's interpreter, though the Indian Office held back his pay until 1834 because it would not employ an enslaved man.
The purchase
In 1835 settlers met near Liberty to petition Congress, Senators Thomas Hart Benton and Lewis Linn carried the bill, and it passed in June 1836. On September 17, 1836, at Fort Leavenworth, William Clark met the Ioway and the Sac and Fox. Francis White Cloud signed for the Ioway, and Deroine stood beside him as interpreter. The nations gave up the land for $7,500, houses, broken and fenced fields, and a farmer, blacksmith and teacher on reservations across the river. Martin Van Buren proclaimed the addition on March 28, 1837. It was 3,149 square miles, now Atchison, Holt, Nodaway, Andrew, Buchanan and Platte counties, opened to slaveholding north of the line the Missouri Compromise had drawn.
The point
Deroine squatted on a quarter section in Holt County across from the new Ioway reservation, the first person of color to hold rights to land there. He sold them for $600 to William Banks, who built a trading post and named the spot Jeffrey's Point. From 1844 to 1846 Deroine was the voice of fourteen Ioway touring England and France with George Catlin, before Queen Victoria and King Louis Philippe. He died in March 1859 owning lots in St. Joseph and 180 acres north of town.