Native Americans in the Riverside area

In this blog post I want to cover some history of the area that I and my grandparents and great grandparents lived in. First, what was there for thousands of years before the Europeans arrived, who was there just before they arrived, and then a bit about the arrival of Europeans.

Not all of this would be considered genealogy, but it is my history because I wandered around in the Indian mounds, often walked the plowed fields after a rain in search of arrowheads and potshards, and participated in a Shippee dig on the Renner property in 1954 at the age of 13. The photo below is of some of the items I found walking the plowed fields after a rain, mostly arrowheads and potshards. Lower left is the grinding stone used for grinding grain.

My great aunt Carolina (Brenner) Renner encouraged the exploration of the prehistoric site on her property and several excavations were made during her lifetime. Gary Brenner was the driving force behind the creation of The Renner-Brenner Site Park, as is explained on his website here: https://www.rennerbrennersitepark.com/

The Renner-Brenner Site Park as the monument explains it: “This area was frequented by prehistoric people as early as 5000 B.C. This site is best known as the regional center of aborigional population in Hopewell times, AD 1-500, and occupied throughout the Woodland Culture into Middle Mississippian Times, 1200 A.D. It was discovered in 1921 by J. Mett Shippee on the property of Mr. and Mrs. L. R. Renner. This property has been placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1969. The park was formally dedicated in 1991.”

I was very lucky to be able to participate in the 1954 excavation on the Brenner property. I can imagine that I am the blond on the left at the sifter.¹

There were also many “Indian mounds” on the hills nearby, which had some excavations, but they were destroyed when I was a child by the Indian Hills housing development. Very little investigation was done on any of the mounds before they were lost to history. Gary Brenner’s page about the mounds is here: https://www.rennerbrennersitepark.com/mounds-vaults

Below are some photographs of old excavations of mounds in Clay and Platte Counties.

Archeological Investigations in Clay and Platte Counties Missouri

Indian mounds are described on page 1 of the 1897 book Annals of Platte County, Missouri by William McClung Paxton², a treasure for genealogists and historians.

“In 1877, a party of antiquarians. from Kansas City, opened four mounds on the Peter Brenner farm, below Parkville. and found stone enclosures eight feet square and four feet high. A number of human skulls were uncovered, some indicating large, and others very small. people. They suggested an earlier race than the Indians, but scarcely above them in intelligence. Near the mounds were scattered large quantities of flint arrow-heads, tomahawks, and spear-heads. They discovered a large number of small mills for crushing grain. See the Landmark for March 22, 1877.” He also discussed other mounds in Platte County, some of which were excavated in the 1800s.

Carolina Renner was not only instrumental in protecting the prehistoric site on her property and putting it on the National Register of Historic Places as the Renner Village Archeological Site. She was also the family historian. After her death in 1980, part of the property was sold by her estate to the city with the stipulation that a proper marker be posted with the wording to include the names of Brenner and Renner. It was the first property in Platte County to be designated to the National Register of Historic Places.³

Several Indian tribes lived in the area just before the European settlers arrived. Besides the native tribes in this area, various tribes were forced westward from states like Ohio.

The homes of the Indians in this area might have looked like this Osage Indian Lodge

In 1825, the federal government forced the Kansa and Osage tribes to give up their land along the Missouri River and move to reservations in Central Kansas. Platte County was included in the 1836 Platte Purchase in which the U.S. purchased land from American Indian tribes, making this area open for settlers.

Because Missouri was a slave state, we read that the first settlers were from southern states. Slaveholders from the Upper South (Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky) used slaves for labor-intensive crops like hemp and tobacco. A lot of land was also dispensed as military land warrants to veterans of the War of 1812.

My mother’s family (Anderson/Kimsey) is southern, pretty much all of them originating in Virginia and frequently moving west. Some/most of them first arrived in Howard or Cooper Counties, which are on the Missouri River about in the middle of the state. There was a tax census in Platte County in 1839 and several of my ancestors names are on that list. There were no birth records in Missouri until 1883 and there don’t seem to be much in the form of records in Platte County until the 1860 census. However, one ancestor, Scotch-Irish David McGee showed up in the 1830 census in Cooper County, Missouri, and in the 1840 census in Platte County. His wife’s father, Delaney Bowlin, arrived in Cooper County in 1811-1812 but the next census he shows up in is 1850 in Platte County.

The group of German immigrants who immigrated with Heinrich Brenner arrived in New York in 1843. One Klamm ancestor was naturalized in 1844, another immigrated in 1852. Our German ancestors who settled in the Riverside area were said to be from Parkville and often associated with Kansas City. Parkville had a post office in 1841 and the town of Kansas (later named Kansas City) was chartered in 1850. Parkville was originally a steamboat landing called English Landing and Kansas City grew out of Westport Landing.

Some references

As an aside, I probably would have become an archaeologist except I found out that archaeologists usually teach in the winter and work in the heat and the sun in the summer, often in some of the hottest places on earth. I did not think I wanted to teach and I hate the heat.
Annals of Platte County, Missouri by William McClung Paxton
The Renner-Brenner Site Park