While Kenekuk’s village was prospering, many other Kickapoo communities were succumbing to alcoholism and poverty. Local traders plied the Shawnees, Delawares and Kickapoos with whisky in order to facilitate underhanded land deals. “Some freeze to death when drunk,” the Indian agent reported in October of 1839, and “several drunken Indians have been drowned in the Missouri this season.”11 This state of affairs eventually led many Kickapoos in other Kansas settlements to voluntarily relocate to Oklahoma, Texas or Mexico. Yet it was during this period that Kenekuk’s village grew. Under his guidance, they cleared and plowed fields, eventually producing a surplus of corn, beans, pumpkins, beef and pork, which they sold to local traders at a profit. In this period, the Indian agent found them “a lively, fearless, independent persevering people”—words we might use to describe a sovereign society.12 The thriving conditions at Kenekuk’s village attracted other bands into the Prophet’s fold, and in 1849 the Potawatomi Chief Nozhakem presented a formal petition to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for permission to join Kenekuk’s community.
A Christian missionary visiting Kenekuk’s Sunday services during this time reported that there were more than 300 congregants partaking of the Prophet’s message—an astronomical number of parishioners for any denomination on the frontier.13 Significantly, Kenekuk led this service in the church built by the US government for the Euro-American missionaries. Essentially Kenekuk’s community had repatriated the federal building to indigenous oversight and ownership. Kenekuk’s popularity, his congregation’s “occupation” of a federal structure, and their embrace of selective aspects of capitalism all suggest that much more was going on in this Native village than Indian agents or missionaries could fathom.