"A Good Relationship, & Commerce": The Native Political Economy of the Arkansas River Valley

Abstract

In 1680, a combined delegation of Quapaw and Osage Indians who lived north of the Arkansas River and Chickasaws from near present-day Memphis traveled up the Mississippi River to the French mission at Kaskaskia. These Indians had heard that the French would provide weapons and tools in exchange for animal skins. To demonstrate their affability and signal that trade to the south could be profitable, the delegation presented deerskins and other hides to the Frenchmen at Kaskaskia. As the delegates hoped, the French gave them a large number of hatchets but, to their disappointment, no guns. Beyond their own deerskins, the delegates offered to broker trade in the region. They told the French that the Mississippi was navigable to the Gulf of Mexico and invited them to come to their towns so that their people could introduce the French to the other nations of the lower Mississippi River and all could “dance the Calumet of peace.” Above all, the delegates declared, they wanted to “maintain a good relationship, & commerce with the French Nation.” 1 Although Indians soliciting European trade sounds like a colonialist fantasy, these seventeenth-century Indians believed that the French could serve their interests. We know now that Europeans, with their diseases, liquor, trade systems, and shady land deals, would bring disaster to the native peoples of the Americas. One might be tempted to caution the delegates: “Kill them, run away, do whatever it takes to avoid being drawn into their world, to the future