Shawnee Convergence: Immigrant Indians in the Ozarks

Abstract

FOR MANY YEARS A FRONTIER was understood to be simply a boundary between two or more societies with different cultures. When one side was characterized as native, the complementary understanding was that an inevitable decline and absorption of the weaker group would occur. In recent years, however, a much more complex understanding of the dynamic process in the confrontation of two societies has emerged. Central to the new vision is the replacement of a linear frontier by the image of a zone of interaction in which creative energies are released among the participating social groups, leading to new and possibly unique cultural formations. These complex phenomena are frequently referred to as occurring in the middle ground, a spatial and experiential metaphor with much greater utility than frontier.' The Ozarks area of Arkansas and Missouri in the early nineteenth century is an excellent candidate for analysis as a middle ground, for it became for several decades home to a number of different Native American groups. The accounts of Territorial Arkansas, with its political dramas enacted by white Americans with strong personalities, create the illusion that the progress from Louisiana Purchase to territory to statehood within the modem boundaries was inevitable, even planned. The reality, however, is that for its first few decades, the land that is now Arkansas was the stage for a number of imaginative experiments, some of which, if realized, Quatawapea or Col. Lewis, a Shawnee leader who settled in Arkansas and encouraged other Shawnees to do likewise. From Thomas McKenney and James Hall, The Indian Tribes of North America (1836-1844; 1933). Courtesy, Special Collections Division, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville. would have left a quite different social structure behind. From the still unplumbed 1805 plan of Aaron Burr until the 1828 treaty in which the who had relocated from their eastern homeland to Arkansas (the Cherokees West) returned the Ozarks to the United States, there were players on the scene who imagined quite different futures for the region. The story of the West is fairly familiar to many people.2 The Shawnees were also in the Arkansas middle ground in this period, but their story is less well known, probably because the records are so sparse. Bits of evidence left behind in the documents allow the outlines of this story to emerge, however, and even raise the tantalizing-but ultimately unverifiable-possibility that one Indian leader envisioned a future for Arkansas that included the establishment of a Shawnee nation in the Ozarks. The Shawnees were in Arkansas from the beginning of the nineteenth century up to the 1830s, when they moved on to Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma. The Ozarks region was truly international during that period. Not only was the area between the White and the Arkansas Rivers officially the Cherokee Nation from 1817 to 1828, these western were joined by Delawares, Kickapoos, Peorias, Miamis, Weas, Piankashaws, Michigameas, and Muskogees. The Shawnees-the focus of this study-were centered at Shawnee Town on Crooked Creek, a settlement that was later reoccupied by Anglo-Americans and renamed Yellville, county seat of Marion County. The background of the Shawnees is complicated, but a brief outline of their history here will help place the Arkansas story in context. Among the various groups of Native Americans in the Eastern Woodlands, the Shawnees stand out as unique in several ways. They claimed a great antiquity, for their traditions said that they were separated from the Leni Lenape (Delaware) in ancient times. No student of the Shawnees has seen fit to challenge this tradition and that closeness was certainly manifest in late historic times as the Shawnees and Delawares participated jointly in many ventures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even if the story is untrue, the Shawnee oral tradition is important, for it argues that they saw themselves as one of the significant players in the complex history of the Eastern Woodlands from ancient timeS. …