Lawrence, Kansas
Prior to Kansas Territory being established in May 1854, most of Douglas County was part of the Shawnee Indian Reservation (created in 1830). During this period, the Oregon Trail ran parallel to the Kansas River, roughly through the area where Lawrence would eventually be situated and a hill known then as "Hogback Ridge" (i.e., Mount Oread, which sits on the water divide separating the Kansas and Wakarusa River). This area was used as a landmark and an outlook by those on the trail. While this territory was technically unopened to settlement prior to 1854, there did exist a few "squatter settlements" in the area, especially just north of the Kansas River.
Kansas–Nebraska Act
Prior to the organization of the Kansas–Nebraska territory in 1854, the Kansas and Nebraska Territories were consolidated as part of the Indian Territory. Throughout the 1830s, large-scale relocations of Native American tribes to the Indian Territory took place, with many Southeastern nations removed to present-day Oklahoma, a process ordered by the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and known as the Trail of Tears, and many Midwestern nations removed by way of treaty to present-day Kansas. Among the latter were the Shawnee, Delaware, Kickapoo, Kaskaskia and Peoria, Ioway, and Miami. The passing of the Kansas–Nebraska Act came into direct conflict with the relocations. White American settlers from both the free-soil North and pro-slavery South flooded the Northern Indian Territory, hoping to influence the vote on slavery that would come following the admittance of Kansas and, to a lesser extent, Nebraska to the United States.