Home / Robert S. Grumet (2014) / Passage

Beyond Manhattan: A Gazetteer of Delaware Indian History

Robert S. Grumet (2014) 800 words

[Robert S. Grumet (2014)] along Tonganoxie Creek, a tributary of the Kansas River, was built around the frame house that Tonganoxie operated as an inn that catered to passing travelers. The community named for him was platted just after the Delawares left for Indian Territory in 1866. The place was formally incorporated as a town two years later. Sandusky Road (see above in Ohio) in the town probably refers to the place where Tonganoxie lived before coming to Kansas. WESTFIELD (Wyandotte County). The Westfield Shopping Center at the west end of Kansas City bears the name of the Moravian mission built to accommodate the Christian Munsees who moved Beyond Manhattan, Robert S. Grumet 143 MONTANA DELAWARE (Powell County). Delaware Creek is a small stream in the Flathead National Forest that flows into Youngs Creek, a Beyond Manhattan, Robert S. Grumet IDAHO DELAWARE (Ada, Bonneville, Canyon, and Lewis counties). Streets named Delaware located near others named Hudson in the cities of Boise, Idaho Falls, and Nampa probably preserve memories of Tom Hall, Jim Simonds (also known as Delaware Jim), and several other Delaware Indian employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company who married into, and served as intermediaries for, Nez Perce and other Indian communities in and around the Snake River valley during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The Delaware Street in the City of Kamiah located near others named Washington, Montana, and Indiana may refer both to the state and to descendants of Tom Hill who joined their Nez Perce brethren forced to move to reservation lands in Idaho. Beyond Manhattan, Robert S. Grumet the name of a prominent Delaware Indian family (see the entries for Fall Leaf in Kansas and Fallen Leaf in California). KETCHUM (Craig and Nowata counties). The Town of Ketchum was named in 1899 for Delaware Indian leader and Methodist minister James Ketchum (1816-1880), whose remains repose with those of many other family members in the local Ketchum Cemetery. The Ketchums are a prominent Delaware Indian family that traces descent to Captain Ketchum, Tah-whee-lalen, “catch him” (Weslager 1972:372). A supporter of the Americans during the War of 1812, a signatory to the Treaty of St. Mary’s in 1818, and a warrior raised to the rank of chief in 1829, Captain Ketchum was the principal leader of the Delaware main body in Kansas at the time of his death in 1857 (Weslager 1978:387-388). Most of the people living in the original Town of Ketchum moved several miles to New Ketchum established along the right of way of the Missouri, Oklahoma, and Gulf Railroad in 1912. New Ketchum became just plain Ketchum when the original town along the banks of the Grand River (an alternate name applied to the lower allotted for use as a burying place to Foster A. Lenno, a registered member of the influential Delaware Ketchum family, stated that the Eastern Oklahoma Delaware man, in 1907. name came from a Delaware Indian word meaning “look forward” in an interview recorded during the late 1930s (Stockton n.d.:445Beyond Manhattan, Robert S. Grumet 153 446). Heckewelder (1834:395) wrote that the name of the widely respected Ohio Munsee leader Wingenund meant “he who is fond of, or values some quality of the mind.” English traveler Nicholas Cresswell (in Gill and Curtis 2009:76) described Wingenund as a “Dellawar Warrior” whose “hieroglyphic Indian war marks” were explained to him at Whites Eye Town (see above in Ohio) on September 2, 1775. Wingenund later became known as the noble Indian captain who encouraged the doomed American captive Colonel William Crawford to bravely suffer his fate at the hands of vengeful relatives of Moravian Indians massacred by other Americans at Gnadenhutten (see above in Ohio) ALASKA KILLBUCK (Bethel Census Area). Although Delaware Indians are known to have worked along the Northwest Coast as Hudson Bay Company trappers and traders during the early 1800s, the Kilbuck Mountains, the Killbuck Elementary School in Bethel in southwestern Alaska, and Cape Mohican, are the only names associated with Delaware Indians who lived in the state on present-day maps. These places bear the family name of the Kansas Munsee Indian Moravian missionary John Henry Killbuck (1861-1922) and his wife, Edith Romig Kilbuck (1865-1933). Both worked together among the Western Alaskan Yupik people during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The son of a Munsee father and Mahican mother, John Henry Killbuck was a great grandson of Gelelemend, the eighteenth-century Delaware Indian leader known among the English as John Killbuck (see above in Indiana, Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania West in Part 2). MOHICAN (Bethel Census Area). John Henry Killbuck named Cape Mohican at the westernmost tip of Nunivak Island to honor his mother’s Mohican nation. Killbuck’s acceptance of his father’s this state name occur in the cities of Pasadena and Westminster. 164 Beyond Manhattan, Robert S. Grumet COLORADO MUNSEE (Park