"William Walker Jr. led the six-man expedition chosen by the tribe. He took them by horse to Cincinnati, steamboat to Kansas and overland to the Little Platte River Valley in Missouri.

The journey took three months, and when the group came back, the answer was no. Quite specifically, no. Walker had some hefty criticisms: no sugar maples, no good soil, not enough game. They would have to share the land with other tribes for nine years, and the whites around there were no better than the whites back home. He called them “fugitives from justice from the states of Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee.” Also, Walker pointed out, Missouri was a slave state. “Slaveholders are seldom very friendly to Indians.”"

The Beginning of the End

William Walker Jr. was no fool. The son of a white man captured by Indians and a part- Wyandot woman, he was business-savvy in both worlds. He was a Wyandot chief, expert on Wyandot history, prolific writer, manager of a general store and postmaster of Upper Sandusky, Ohio.

He did not want his tribe to give up their Ohio lands and move to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi.

Why should they? The Wyandot reservation in 1831 might have been small, but it was a fine piece of property. Fifty miles south of Lake Erie, it still had canopies of trees, a curvaceous river and soil almost magically fertile. Those 100,000 acres held a mill, a mission church and a school. Hundreds of log homes clustered on its protected plains.

Who would trade it for the unknown?

Not Walker. And not his tribe.

The federal government thought otherwise.

One year after President Andrew Jackson rushed his Indian Removal Act through Congress, James B. Gardiner, an ardent Jacksonian, came knocking at the Wyandots’ door. He had been hired to make treaties with Indians. He wanted to know if they would like to trade this reservation for a roomier one out west.

No, they said. They would not. They had told him so in the past.

Gardiner pointed out that other Ohio tribes had agreed to make the move, including the Shawnee, Ottawa and Seneca.

The Seneca actually welcomed the removal act and the money Congress put behind it. They had been asking the government for years to move them away from the harassment and bad influence of their white neighbors. And they only lived 30 miles north of the Wyandot.

The Wyandot understood harassment, and they knew that the increase in white settlers meant a decrease in hunting grounds. But the majority of Indians, led by Christians and businessmen such as Walker, thought they had something that could never be replaced.

The government had told them so only a few years ago. Federal inspector John L. Leib reported that they were the only tribe that was “entirely reclaimed” by civilization. It would be cruel to remove them, he said. “They ought to be cherished and preserved as a model of a colony.”

Another government man once told them that they should never sell their land. And wasn’t that man Lewis Cass, the current Secretary of War, who was now calling the shots on removal? Talk about speaking with a forked tongue.

The answer about moving was no. But this would be for their own good, Gar diner said.

That’s what President James Monroe said back in 1825, and now this was what President Jackson was saying. Even their longtime friend, Indian agent John Johnston of Piqua, was saying it. He said the Indians must leave sooner or later.

“Would it not be better,” he wrote the Rev. James Finley at the Upper Sandusky Methodist mission, for them to “have a country which would be theirs forever?”

Finley, who had been converting tribe members, fired back. Had Johnston for gotten that he once promised the Indians could have these lands forever?

No, the Wyandot said again. We will not leave. After all, why should we pick up and move to a place we’ve never seen?

Gardiner turned away but came back with money for an all-expenses-paid trip to Indian territory in the West.

That was more like it.

William Walker Jr. led the six-man expedition chosen by the tribe. He took them by horse to Cincinnati, steamboat to Kansas and overland to the Little Platte River Valley in Missouri.

The journey took three months, and when the group came back, the answer was no. Quite specifically, no. Walker had some hefty criticisms: no sugar maples, no good soil, not enough game. They would have to share the land with other tribes for nine years, and the whites around there were no better than the whites back home. He called them “fugitives from justice from the states of Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee.” Also, Walker pointed out, Missouri was a slave state. “Slaveholders are seldom very friendly to Indians.”

The discussion was over. Gardiner fumed. He accused members of the expedition of going into the trip with a negative attitude and spending most of their time bear hunting.

He didn’t last long on the job.

Still, other Indian agents came knocking.

They came in 1834, when the Ohio legislature passed a resolution asking the federal government to get rid of the tribe. All that good land was going to waste, just when the canal and the railroad were coming through.

They came in 1836, non-Christian Wyandot furious when the tribe’s Christians turned a treaty down again. Warpole, one of the chiefs, got so mad he pulled a knife at a tribal council meeting. He and two others landed in jail.

They came in 1837 with liquor, offering plenty of drinks before getting Indians to sign a petition saying they wanted to leave. The petition was not recognized.

And they came in 1839, inviting Indians to take another look out West.

As always, the Wyandot community was tormented by the news. Would they go? Would they stay? Momentum slowed, the reservation went unkempt, and people were drinking more.

William Walker Jr. was having trouble getting his work done. He was not re-elected chief.

The tribe wanted somebody tougher. They knew more government men would come knocking.