France turned over administrative control of the Louisiana Territory to Spain in 1763, but relations between Indians, Euroamerican settlers, and governing officials remained much the same as they had been under the French regime. Despite continuing declines in population, the Indians of the Mississippi Valley were still a vital economic, political, and social force in the life of the region.

Sofkey, by Acee Blue Eagle. Courtesy of the Gilcrease Museum.

This mutually dependent relationship between Indians and Euroamericans changed when the United States acquired the Louisiana Territory in 1803. The United States wanted land for its own growing population. Unlike the earlier colonists, they did not need Indian alliances to ensure the integrity of territorial claims. Nor was Indian participation necessary for the expansion of plantation agriculture across the South. With the Louisiana Purchase, the status of Indians quickly changed from valued economic and political partners to a dwindling group whose presence on the land conflicted with United States plans.

Cheraquis, by Lino Sanchez y Tapia. Courtesy of the Gilcrease Museum.

Many Indian communities responded to this marginalization by joining together to form new alliances. These alliances gave rise to the Choctaw, Creek, and Chickasaw confederacies east of the Mississippi and the Caddo confederacies located farther to the west. The Tunicas, having moved out of Arkansas at the end of the seventeenth century, retreated to southern Louisiana where they joined other displaced groups to occupy lands unwanted by American settlers. A group of Tennessee Cherokees moved to the St. Francis River in Arkansas at the end of the eighteenth century in an attempt to continue their traditional agricultural practices. In doing so they intruded on Quapaw lands. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the U.S. government forcibly removed other Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles from their homes to designated areas west of the Mississippi River. To make way for these immigrants, the U.S. government entered into a series of treaties, enacted between 1808 and 1835, that forced tribes already living west of the Mississippi—including Caddos, Osages, and Quapaws—to give up large parts of their homelands. A new region for displaced tribes, called Indian Territory, was set aside in present-day Oklahoma and Kansas.

The influx of Indians from east of the Mississippi created many difficulties for Indians whose homelands were located west of the great river. In 1808, the Osages were forced to cede their lands in northern Arkansas and Missouri to make way for displaced Cherokees and Shawnees. The Arkansas Territorial government then forced Quapaws to leave their homelands along the lower Arkansas River and move onto Caddo lands farther south along the Red River. Unfamiliar with their new environment and hit by a series of floods, the Quapaws lost crops over successive planting seasons and became destitute. Some Quapaws determined to persevere in their Red River settlement while others decided to return to the Arkansas River. Neither group succeeded in establishing security. The Arkansas River group moved to Indian Territory in 1833 and joined a Creek community, while the Red River group was removed to another reservation. A year later, the federal government found that Wharton Rector, the agent in charge of their move, had led the Red River Quapaws to the wrong location so they had to move again. No compensation was made for lost homes, land improvements, and crops.

Throughout the colonial era, the Osages managed a lucrative trade empire that controlled the movement of commodities between the Great Plains and major French and Spanish trading houses in St. Louis. This empire fell apart when the United States took control of northern Arkansas and Missouri. The region plunged into violence as immigrant tribes and white settlers fought the Osages for control of the land. Forced by government treaties to give up nearly all of their original homelands, the Osages in 1825 were moved onto a reservation in Kansas, where attempts to resume their former way of life were thwarted by the near extermination of buffalo at the hands of white American hunters.

Cados, by Lino Sanchez y Tapia. Courtesy of the Gilcrease Museum.

The Caddos relinquished lands not only to Quapaws but also to immigrant Alabamas, Cherokees, Choctaws, Delawares, Osages, and Shawnees, not to mention an increasing number of white settlers. The U.S. government forced Caddos to sell their Arkansas lands in 1835, but plans to move farther west that year were thwarted by the Texas war of independence with Mexico. The Caddos finally relocated to the Upper Trinity and Brazos River region in Texas in 1839, where they came under devastating attacks from white settlers. In 1854 the Caddos joined the remnants of several other tribes on a reservation along the Brazos River under the protection of U.S. soldiers from Fort Belknap. This move brought no relief from continuing attacks by white settlers, so the Caddos were moved again, in 1859, to another reservation along the Washita River in present-day Caddo County, Oklahoma. This unfortunate series of episodes substantially reduced the Caddo population. Many long-held traditions were lost as the multi-tribal groups of refugees were shuffled from one perilous location to another. These upheavals meant that the normal process of passing knowledge from one generation to the next could not take place.

Removal of Osages and Quapaws from the central Arkansas River region made way for a large group of Cherokee immigrants, who took up residence in the Dardanelle region, near modern-day Russellville, after treaty negotiations with the federal government were completed in 1817. These “Western Cherokees” established a series of farming communities led by a group of strong Cherokee leaders including Duwali, Takatoka, Tolontuskee, and John Jolly. These communities pursued an agricultural routine much like that of their white American neighbors, growing corn and other crops on lands they tilled using horse-drawn plows. On the other hand, Indian social organization was based on traditional rules of kinship and community leadership. The Cherokees continued to perform traditional celebrations like the annual Green Corn ceremonies to renew social and spiritual relationships.

In 1820, John Jolly succeeded in convincing the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to send missionaries and teachers to Arkansas. From 1820 to 1828, Dwight Mission provided religious service and educational training for the thriving Cherokee community. Demands by white Arkansas settlers for access to their lands forced the Cherokees to cede the reservation in 1828. That year the community relocated to a new reservation farther up the Arkansas River in Indian Territory.

Trail of Tears, by Robert Lindneaux. Courtesy of the Woolaroc Museum.

By the 1830s, continuing expansion of white American populations east and west of the Mississippi River led to the removal of thousands of Southeastern Indians to reservation lands in Indian Territory. Most of these removals took place as forced marches led by the U.S. Army between 1836 and 1838, in which groups of Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, Seminoles, and others crossed Arkansas via several overland and riverine routes that came to be referred to, collectively, as the “Trail of Tears.”

The new communities established in Indian Territory were intended as refuges where Indians could take up a new livelihood patterned after the rural agricultural ways of the dominant white American society. Support in the form of money, farming equipment, and seed stock was sent to the reservations, but much of this was diverted by unscrupulous Indian agents and other privateers. The U.S. government also passed a series of laws designed to eradicate vestiges of Indian cultural traditions.

Circumstances grew even worse for Indians during the Civil War. Union troops held much of Indian Territory at first, but Confederate forces took control after 1861. A Confederate Indian army was drafted by General Albert Pike, an Arkansan appointed by Jefferson Davis to be the Indian Territory commissioner. Led by the Cherokee General Stand Watie, the Indian army (comprised mainly of eastern Indians who had been brought to Oklahoma during the Trail of Tears) harassed Union forces along the Arkansas River between Little Rock and Fort Smith. Many other Indians, including Caddos, Osages, and Quapaws, sought the protection of Union forces in Kansas. After the war ended, Indians returning to their reservations found their properties and improvements in a state of devastation. To make matters worse, U.S. Indian agents reduced federal assistance and seized additional lands in retaliation for the Indians’ “support” of the Confederacy. Once again, the Indians were left mainly to their own resources to pick up and start from scratch.

Further Reading:

Carter, Cecile Elkins

     1995 Caddo Indians: Where We Come From. Norman, University of Okalhoma Press.

Ehle, John

     1997 Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation. New York, Anchor.

Rollings, Willard H.

     1992 The Osage: An Ethnohistorical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains. Columbia, University of Missouri Press.

Sabo III, George

     2001 Paths of Our Children: Historic Indians of Arkansas. Fayetteville, Arkansas Archeological Survey Popular Series No. 3.

     2007 Native Americans. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture. Encyclopedia of Arkansas Link

Smith, F. Todd

     1995 The Caddo Indians: Tribes at the Convergence of Empires, 1542-1854. College Station, Texas A&M University Press

arkarcheology.uark.edu/indiansofarkansas/index.html