William Walker

William Walker (March 5, 1800 – February 13, 1874) was a Wyandot Native American leader and the first provisional governor of Nebraska Territory which also encompassed the present-day state of Kansas.

Background

Walker was born March 5, 1800, in Wayne County, Michigan Territory. He was the son of William Walker, Sr., a white man who was captured by Lenape Indians in 1777 in Russell County, Virginia. Walker, Sr. was later sold to the Wyandot and grew up among them. William, Sr. married Catherine Rankin, who was one-fourth Wyandot. The couple had ten children.

Walker was educated in a Methodist school in Worthington, Ohio, and spoke English, French, Wyandot, Lenape, Shawnee, Miami, and Potawatomi; and read Latin and Greek. He was described as an eloquent speaker and forceful writer on political and literary subjects. He married Hannah Barrett (d. Dec 7, 1863) on April 8, 1824. She was a student in a Christian mission school at Upper Sandusky, Ohio, and was probably partly Native American. She served as private secretary to Lewis Cass, the governor of Michigan Territory. He became chief of the Wyandot in 1835. After the death of his first wife, Walker married Evelina J. Barrett, a widowed sister-in-law of his first wife, in 1865. She died on August 28, 1868.

The move to Kansas

Despite their adaption to American mores, political pressure increased on the Wyandot in the 1830s to exchange their lands in Ohio for land in what would become the state of Kansas. In 1832, Walker headed a delegation of five Wyandot to explore their proposed new lands. The report of the Wyandot, written by Walker, was highly unfavorable toward the land they saw and the white people they encountered on the frontier, an "abandoned, dissolute, and wicked class of people," many of whom were "fugitives from justice."