All movements in the territory, or elsewhere, made for its organization, were provisional, as they were subject to the rights of the various Indian tribes, whose reservations covered, by well defined boundaries, every acre of northeastern Kansas, except such tracts as were reserved by the Government about Ft. Leavenworth, and other military stations, but with the move for the organization of the territory came an effort to extinguish the Indian’s title to the lands and thus open them to white settlers. One of the most interesting books bearing upon the history of Kansas of that time was “Greeley’s Conflict.” He makes the following statement with reference to this subject: “When the bill organizing Kansas and Nebraska was first submitted to Congress in 1853, all that portion of Kansas which adjoins the State of Missouri, and, in fact, nearly all the accessible portion of both territories, was covered by Indian reservations, on which settlement by whites was strictly forbidden. The only exception was in favor of Government agents and religious missionaries; and these, especially the former, were nearly all Democrats and violent partisans of slavery. * * * * Within three months immediately preceding the passage of the Kansas bill aforesaid, treaties were quietly made at Washington with the Delawares, Otoes, Kickapoos, Kaskaskias, Shawnees, Sacs, Foxes and other tribes, whereby the greater part of the soil of Kansas, lying within one or two hundred miles of the Missouri border, was suddenly opened to white appropriation and settlement. These simultaneous purchases of the Indian land by the Government, though little was known of them elsewhere, were thoroughly understood and appreciated by the Missourians of the western border, who had for some time been organizing ‘Blue Lodges,’ ‘Social Bands,’ ‘Sons of the South,’ and other societies, with intent to take possession of Kansas in behalf of slavery. They were well assured and they fully believed that the object contemplated and desired, in lifting, by the terms of the Kansas-Nebraska bill, the interdict of slavery from Kansas, was to authorize and facilitate the legal extension of slavery into that region. Within a few days after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska act, hundreds of leading Missourians crossed into the adjacent territory, selected each his quarter section, or a larger area of land, put some sort of mark on it, and then united with his fellow-adventurers in a meeting, or meetings, intended to establish a sort of Missouri preëmption upon all this region.”