This item was written in 1917 by Kansas State Historical Society Secretary William Elsey Connelley. Included is both the handwritten draft and typed draft of the work. In the item, the closing piece of his history of the Potawatomie Prairie Band Indians, then located on a reservation in Jackson County, Kansas, Connelley provides his assessment of the probable future of the Prairie Band. Having witnessed their attributes firsthand, Connelley argues that the Prairie Band convinced him that his "faith in the competency and efficiency of the Indian race was well founded." In order to reinforce this belief Connelley then points to events then happening in Europe, stating that "savages, you say. Savages? Look on the reeking battlefields of Europe. All the cruelties perpetrated by the Indians on their despoilers through ten generations could not equal those heaped on France and Belgium in four years by a civilized and enlightened nation." In the end, Connelley maintains that the closure of the frontier in the West will likely spell the end for the "proud possessors of the greatest continent."
Kansas Memory
Kansas Historical Society
Fate: What is to be the fate of the Prairie Band? - 13