From the Baxoje to First Presbyterian Church
by Ken Pangburn
Des Moines Presbytery Meeting
May 20, 2025
In the Chiwere language spoken by the Ioway peoples a friendly greeting was for the men to say, “a-hoe” and the women to say “aha.” So, this morning I say, “a-hoe.”
My name is Ken Pangburn. Some of you already know me, but you probably don’t know my story as it pertains to the Land Acknowledgment. One of my maternal great grandmother’s maiden name was Lewis. She was a descendant of a brother of Meriwether Lewis. She moved to South Dakota from the Saint Louis, Missouri area in the late 1800’s and lived her adult life about eighty miles from where Lewis & Clark travelled up the Missouri River in 1804. President Jefferson had just consummated the Louisiana Purchase from France nearly doubling the size of the United States. This included present day Iowa. I wonder if anyone even questioned how France, Spain, or the United States could claim ownership of a land already inhabited for thousands of years by indigenous peoples. I have benefited greatly, as have most if not all of you, from the events that have transpired since that time. But all have not benefitted.
To begin the indigenous peoples’ story we need to go back about 12,000 years when the earliest ancestors of Native Americans arrived in the region. Over the thousands of years since then, paleontologists and historians at the University of Iowa say, as many as seventeen tribes called this area home. By the time Euro-Americans reached the area there were six primary tribes—- The Dakota or Sioux, the Sauk and Meskwaki (Fox), the Winnebago, the Iowa, and for a short time the Potawatomi.
I want to speak primarily about the Iowa and a little on the Potawatomi. The Iowa or Ioway, as we often refer to them, actually called themselves the Baxoje (BAH-kho-jay) or the “People of the Gray Snow.” Their earliest origins can be traced back to the upper Great Lakes region, specifically near Green Bay, Wisconsin. In precontact times… before contact with white people, they emigrated to Iowa. In the 1500’s they moved from the Mississippi River to the Red Pipestone Quarry Region of Minnesota, and by the early 1800’s they had reached the Platte River, where in 1804 Lewis and Clark visited their settlement. They were engaged in trading with the French and other local tribes.
The Baxoje (Ioway) had permanent settlements along major rivers where the women raised corn, beans and squash. The men were hunters who hunted buffalo, elk and deer. The women did the farming and the men were responsible for hunting and tool making.
We are not aware of any permanent settlements in the immediate area, but we have evidence that the hunters did have temporary settlements that they would set up and move as they hunted the area. There were other tribes that occasionally hunted the area also. The Missouria and Otoe would be two of them as they spoke the same Chiwere language and shared very similar cultures.
While the Baxoje moved from the Green Bay area, the Potawatomi, who were originally located in the lower peninsula of Michigan, were forced to relocate westward. They were part of the Neshnabek people who lived along the Atlantic coast near the St. Lawrence River. The Iroquois Confederacy raids of the 1640’s and 1650’s caused their westward move and they eventually located where the Baxoje had been around Green Bay and Door County and south along the western shore of Lake Michigan. By 1800 their tribal lands included Southeast Wisconsin, Northern Illinois, Northern Indiana, Southern Michigan and Northwest Ohio.
As you can tell, there is movement from the East to West by both tribes as the white colonies/states expanded West.
It was called the “Indian Problem” overtime and there was a belief among white settlers that they had a divine purpose to conquer and subdue the continent. The wording was often whitewashed by saying “civilize and Christianize” the continent. In reality, it was simply a removal of indigenous peoples and their culture to make room for white European settlers.
The Indian Removal Act of 1830, during President Andrew Jackson’s presidency, allowed the president to freely “persuade, bribe, and threaten” tribal leaders to sign relocation treaties. The Treaty of 1838 was part of a series of treaties that forced the Baxoje tribe to leave their land in Iowa and move to Kansas and Nebraska reservations. Later some of them were moved to the Indian Territory in Oklahoma. About the same time, in 1837, the Potawatomi were resettled in southwest Iowa. They were soon moved again into Kansas in the late 1840’s.
And this is where the rest of my story can be told. My great, great Grandfather Pangburn was born in New Jersey in 1820. At age 5 he moved with his family to an area near present day Rochester, New York. As a young man in the mid to late 1840s he travelled the Great lakes waterway to Wisconsin and in 1854 he moved to Fayette County, Iowa. In 1881 his son and my great grandfather left Iowa and moved to Faulkton, South Dakota. All of their moves came shortly after the “Indian Problem” had been resolved in the respective states.
I have been the recipient of my ancestors’ good fortune of a policy that the newspaper editor, John L. O’Sullivan, in an essay he wrote in 1845, termed “Manifest Destiny.” As this policy was implemented, “new lands” were opened up for settlement. Let us not forget that other peoples paid and continue to pay dearly, for this land was their home, and they were here first.
