Lenexa Wedding

Lenexa is a city in Johnson County, Kansas and a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri. The population was 40,238 at the 2000 census. It is well known for being home of "The Great Lenexa Barbeque Battle."

Twelve years before the town of Lenexa was platted in 1869, a young man named James Butler Hickok staked a claim on 160 acres at what is now the corner of 83rd and Clare Road. At about the same time, a census of the Shawnee Indians living in the area was being taken. One of the residents was listed as "Na-Nex-Se Blackhoof," the widow of Chief Blackhoof, who was the second signer of the 1854 treaty that ceded 1.6 million acres (6,500 km) of the Kansas Shawnee Indian reservation to the U.S.Government. A few miles east in Westport, Missouri, was the start of the Old Santa Fe Trail. It meandered through the southeast part of Lenexa on its way to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Life in eastern Kansas was about to change dramatically.