"Outcasts upon the World": The Louisiana Purchase and the Quapaws

Abstract

THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE SET IN MOTION one of the greatest demographic transitions in the history of Arkansas and the trans-Mississippi West. Within few short years of 1803, white American settlers vastly out-numbered Indians and colonists of French and Spanish descent in what would become Arkansas. Explosive population growth had propelled these settlers west. From 1700 to 1803, the population of the English-speaking settlements in the East had increased from 250,000 to 5.5 million. White Americans forcefully reworked the demography of the Mississippi Valley not only by their own migration but through the introduction of thousands of enslaved African Americans and the expulsion of Indians. Like so many places subject to America's westward expansion, Arkansas faced what Walter Nugent calls, a demographic inundation leading to complete political and cultural change.1 The Quapaws would feel the force of this flood as much as any Indian people. The wave of American immigration to Arkansas, while smaller than that hitting Missouri and Louisiana, overwhelmed them. At the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the Quapaw population stood at 555 in three villages located on the south bank of the Arkansas River. The first village (Kappa), under the tribe's principal chief Wah-pah-tee-see, had population of 160; the second (Tourima), under Etah-sah, had population of 166; the third (Osotouy), under Wah-to-nee-kah, was the largest with 229. By 1811, when the first census was taken, whites, 1062 of them, outnumbered the Quapaws two-to-one. During the next decade, the growth of the white population also outpaced that of other Indians immigrating into Arkansas from the East. Whites numbered 14,273 in 1820 and an estimated 30,000 by 1830.2 By the 1820s, enslaved African Americans-not counting those among the Cherokees-also outnumbered Indians. The shift in political and economic relationships wrought by these demographic changes would cast the Quapaws out of Arkansas entirely. Although white settlers began arriving on the west bank of the Mississippi well ahead of the Louisiana Purchase, the presence of the United States government would prove decisive for the Quapaws and other Arkansas Indians. Within two years after the purchase, the federal government established trading factory at Arkansas Post. Two more would be established within the boundaries of the territory before 1822. The mission of these factories was to establish fair trade with Indians in the region and impose new set of commercial regulations on that trade, including the prohibition of alcohol. The trading posts were followed by an increasing military presence on Arkansas's western frontier, intended to support the policy of Indian removal. This removal policy had two components that affected Arkansas: removal of Indians from the East into the less populated Arkansas River region; and land cessions demanded of Indians in Arkansas. The first component bred conflict as Indian immigrants like the Cherokees clashed with the Osages, one of the region's dominant tribes. More important and long-lasting for the Quapaws were the government's demands for land cessions, something they had not faced in their dealings with the French or Spanish. The American attitude toward land imposed boundaries and lines in areas of Arkansas that had only been recognized as hunting territory shared or fought over by Indians and small number of Frenchmen. The federal government began series of negotiations to acquire land from the Quapaws and the Osages. In 1816, the Osages agreed to quiet their claims to land in western Arkansas. Two years later, the federal government turned its diplomatic attention to the Quapaws in order to open lands south of the Arkansas. Before these negotiations began, United States officials had demonstrated little interest in the Quapaws, which was in itself an entirely new experience for these Indians when it came to dealing with white settlers and their governments. …