The Louis Vieux Winery is owned by Gary and Cheryl Clift of Manhattan, Kansas. The winery is named after Louis Amable Vieux, a wealthy man of Potawatomi and French Canadian ancestry. Originally from Green Bay, Wisconsin, Vieux like other Potawatomi were forced to relocated from the Great Lakes, later to Iowa, and finally to Kansas. Being an entrepreneur, Vieux operated a toll bridge on the Vermilion River west of Wamego, Kansas for pioneers traveling west on the Oregon Trail. Vieux also owned vast quantities of real estate around Pottawatomie County. Vieux elected to remain in Kansas when the Potawatomi tribe was forced to move to Oklahoma in the 1860s in order to keep the cohesiveness as an Indian nation. Vieux’s descendant was Jim Thorpe, one of America’s most versatile athlete and 1912 Olympic gold medalist in the pentathlon and decathlon respectively.