“Great Conceptions of Their Own Power”: Native and U.S. Diplomacy in the Old Southwest

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> In summer 1835, U.S. officials planned a treaty council designed to assert control over the Old Southwest and its Native inhabitants. The council instead furthered the diplomatic and economic goals of the Plains and removed Indians who were adjusting to new western contexts. The first few months of 1835 in Indian Territory were bitterly cold. The Arkansas River was frozen solid between Fort Gibson and the nearest American settlements on the Arkansas border, halting boat traffic and preventing news and supplies from reaching the southwestern frontier.1 But some U.S. government officials in the region had more important reasons than warmer temperatures to be anxious for the arrival of spring. They were anticipating finally being able to hold a treaty council with the Comanches, the powerful Plains nation that controlled the western portion of the area Congress had designated “Indian Territory” to help further its goal of controlling Native American migrations and forced removals into the trans-Mississippi West. In the early nineteenth century, Indian Territory was part of an expansive borderlands space where no single polity exercised complete sovereignty. Congress believed that the United States “owned” the land because of the Louisiana Purchase and made removal policies based on that assumption. However, the most powerful actors in the region—the Comanches—were reaching the peak of their economic and political dominance just as the U.S. government began forcing more Native removals into a western space federal officials had little knowledge about and virtually no control over. Brian DeLay and Pekka Hamalainen have demonstrated that the Comanches controlled a vast commercial empire on the Southern Plains in the …