| This study examines the development of the Arkansas River valley into a borderland where Native Americans largely controlled their relationships with Europeans, and subsequently into a region of the United States dominated by Anglo-American settlers. The Arkansas valley was an important hunting and trading ground for a wide variety of native peoples, including the Quapaws, the Osages, and a number of Caddoan-speaking peoples. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, other Indian groups, such as the Cherokees, moved into the region to escape settler pressure in the east.; The various peoples of this contested region needed to establish a stable set of relations that would secure their rights to live, hunt, and trade in the Arkansas valley. This study argues that, under the constant pressures of new arrivals and conflicts over land, each group tended to fit other groups into two simple categories: friends and enemies. In general, a friend was someone with whom one could share the land, as one could not with an enemy. Friendship did not imply equality or harmony. Friends often disagreed on the responsibilities inherent in friendship, the ways in which friends dealt with enemies, or even who was an enemy. But friendship was the only way for outnumbered peoples (Indian or European) to protect their precarious existence on this crowded borderland, where isolation or neutrality could be deadly. The native peoples of the Arkansas valley incorporated the French, the Spanish, and, initially, the United States into their networks of friends and enemies. But after the War of 1812, Anglo-American settlers argued that all Indians were savage and therefore enemies of the American republic. By 1828, they dispossessed the region's native peoples of their homelands.; While Anglo-American settlers' views of friends and enemies prevailed in the early nineteenth century, until then, native peoples controlled the Arkansas valley. Historians have too often portrayed the colonization of North America as Europeans imposing their will on Native Americans. But in the colonial Arkansas valley, Indians more often controlled Europeans than vice versa. For more than a century, colonialism met, not accommodation or resistance, but incorporation. |
