The tribes who converged on this corner of Indian Territory had been uprooted from homelands spanning half the continent. Eastern Shawnee from Indiana and Ohio. Miami from Illinois. Seneca and Cayuga of the Iroquois Confederacy from New York. Ottawa from Michigan. Peoria of the Illinois Confederation. Quapaw from the banks of the Mississippi in Arkansas. Wyandotte from Ohio. Several Siouan nations also settled here -- the Quapaw, Osage, Ponca, Kansa, and Omaha -- peoples whose ancestral territories had once covered hundreds of thousands of acres across the Midwest. Because the land was originally given to the Quapaw Tribe, the area eventually took their name, though it had previously been known as the Neosho, Shawnee, and Seneca Indian Agencies. The agency office itself started four miles west of Seneca, Missouri, before moving to Wyandotte in Indian Territory.

In 1873, one of the most dramatic chapters of the agency's history began when 153 surviving members of a Modoc band arrived from northern California. Their leader, Kintpuash -- known to the Army as Captain Jack -- had already been executed by the U.S. military on charges of war crimes following the Modoc War. His people were relocated over 1,500 miles to share the Shawnee reserve at the Quapaw Agency. The agency did not receive sufficient supplies, and the Modoc suffered greatly in their first months, a grim echo of the deprivation that marked so many forced relocations. The Modoc would remain colocated with the Shawnee for decades, their California homeland reduced to memory. From the Oregon-California border to the Oklahoma prairie -- it was one of the longest forced relocations of the Indian Wars era.

Beginning in 1867, a federal Indian agent managed the complex relationship between Washington and the agency's many tribes, distributing annuities and supplies according to treaty obligations. But the agent's duties went far beyond government business. The Indian Agent frequently served as mediator in neighborhood and family disputes among the tightly packed communities. John D. Miles, a Quaker, held the position from 1872 to 1884 -- part of President Grant's peace policy of assigning Quaker agents to Indian agencies, in hopes that their pacifist convictions would temper the often-exploitative nature of the federal relationship. Daniel B. Dyer succeeded him, serving from 1881 to 1884 and leaving behind a photographic collection now housed at the University of Kansas that documents the faces and landscapes of the agency during this period.

The Oklahoma Organic Act of 1890 disbanded the Quapaw Agency, designed to extinguish tribal communal land claims and prepare the territory for white settlement. The nearby Miami Indian Agency, based in Miami, Oklahoma, was dissolved at the same time. The Dawes Act parceled out communal lands to individual households, dismantling the collective land base that had sustained tribal governance. All Native American claims were extinguished before Oklahoma achieved statehood in 1907. Yet something unexpected had grown from forced proximity. Due to the closeness of their reservations, there had been many intermarriages among the tribes. Several nations eventually merged their governments. The cultures that colonial-era warfare had kept separate found common ground in shared displacement, creating bonds that persist in the federally recognized tribal nations of northeastern Oklahoma today.