A Kansas City Founder "Proud of His Position:" Race, Exploitation, and the Rise of William Gilliss
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Americans are largely accustomed to the history of western expansion and enslavement by slaveholders. Questionable government policies led to the removal of Native American tribes further west. In Missouri, French Canadian traders moved to continue their business with them, and eventually, white settlement along the invisible border between Indian Territory and Missouri replaced indigenous peoples. William Gilliss, born in Maryland about 1797, is a prime example of an enterprising trader who, because of his reliance upon Native American tribes, followed his source of income west. His relationships with multiple Native American women resulted in at least three children. His relocation to Jackson County, Missouri and involvement in the Town Company which established Kansas City made him one of the most important and one of the area’s richest early settlers. This, however, along with his Southern sympathies, made him a target of the Union and antislavery settlers. By the time he died in 1869, his work as a trader, relationships with Native American tribes, and role as a town builder were soon overshadowed by headlines over the contestation of his will by his Native American children and grandchildren. Through depositions in these cases from Native Americans, former traders, one of his children, the formerly enslaved, and prominent residents of Kansas City, an analysis of a Kansas City businessman and the community in which he lived can be assessed with great detail.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".