Indians could and did live in Christian County during this period. In my family, Alexander Young (who married Mary Susannah Chaffin, daughter of Samuel Chaffin and Elizabeth McConnell) in 1855 found a young Cherokee girl named Anne who apparently had become separated from her family while they were on their way to "the Indian territory" (either Kansas or Oklahoma at that time) near Nixa. (The "Trail of Tears" crossed the Mississippi north of Cape Girardeau and Cherokees took varying routes across Missouri to their new reservations.) She was raised by Alexander and Mary after they were married in 1857 and lived in their home in 1870. I cannot find her in the 1860 census (my earlier notes show she was in that census, shown as born in Tennessee), but she is identified as a Cherokee in the 1870 census and native American in the 1880 census. She married a black man named Al Young, who was known in the community as "Nigger Al" and shown as black on the census records of 1880, although he may have been mulatto. Their children are shown as mulatto in the 1880 census. The family lived on a 40-acre farm south of Battlefield on the northern cusp of Christian Co. The federal census records for this era show "taxed" Indians, who did not live on reservations and lived in the community under state laws. Censuses began showing such Indians in 1850, although not uniformly, and formal instructions on how to include and identify them were issued first in 1860. Indian Anne was the only native American in Christian Co. in 1870. The number of native Americans in Missouri was few -- 20 in 1860, 75 in 1870 and 113 in 1880, which does lend some credence to the belief that state law banned their residency. . Most were in St. Louis City or Jackson County. But early laws of Missouri are not available on the Internet, as far as I know, and your relatives may be referring to the murky legal status of Indians in most states before the passage of the 1887 General Allotment or Dawes Act. Even most Indians in the general population could not vote at that time under the contested terms of an 1884 Supreme Court case, Elk v. Wilkins. Despite early indications to the contrary, U.S. constitutional changes after the Civil War did not make Indians citizens (unlike blacks) unless they had been naturalized under other laws, which were passed as part of separate settlements with individual tribes. The Dawes Act provided for the division of older reservation lands among tribesmen and extension of citizenship to these individuals -- if they renounced their tribal affiliation. The Dawes Act had been designed to convert Indians into land-owning farmers, but succeeded largely in ensuring that, with government assistance, whites took control of most Indian reservation lands, which were declared "surplus.". Several states nevertheless refused to extend voting and other citizenship rights despite the Dawes Act; Congress finally enacted voting-rights legislation for native Americans in 1924. Randy McConnell