In 1873, a military scheme forced some of the Mexican Kickapoo to relocate to the Indian Territory. Many Kickapoo would eventually leave the Indian Territory during the Civil War and rejoin those in Mexico. Some settled on Wild Horse Creek in the Chickasaw Nation, and the others settled in Creek Nation near the confluence of the Canadian and Little rivers. Some Kickapoo decided to settle in two villages in Indian Territory. There, the Mexican government gave the tribe a land grant and eventually placed them at Nacimiento in exchange for protecting their northern borders.

In 1839, they were forcibly removed, and many traveled to Mexico. However, after the Texas Revolution, the Republic of Texas did not want them. Spanish officials gave them land in Texas. The Prairie Kickapoo band resisted acculturation and continued to migrate, going first to Missouri and then to the Spanish province of Texas before the 1821 Mexican Revolution. By the mid-18th century the Kickapoo lived in two communities, the “Prairie Band,” along Illinois’s Sangamon River, and the “Vermillion Band,” east of the Wabash River in Indiana. They first came into contact with Europeans in the mid-seventeenth century in southwestern Wisconsin. The Kickapoo are a Woodland tribe, speaking an Algonquian language, and were related to the Sac and Fox.

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