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

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 as we know it." But to see Europeans as colonizing guileless Indians would badly misinterpret this scene, granting a foresight to Native Americans and Europeans that neither could possess. Deliberately, the Indian delegation told the French exactly what would draw them to the lower Mississippi Valley. With a united front, the Quapaws, Osages, and Chickasaws promised an environment of peace, abundant hides, and a river that would easily carry those hides to sea. By no means a concession to colonialism, their meeting in Kaskaskia was part of a consistent strategy for controlling the region themselves.

The Arkansas Valley had seen conflict and migration long before Spaniards arrived from the south, French from the north, and, in the eighteenth century, British from the east. By 1000 A.D., most residents of the Arkansas Valley lived within a chiefdom or a confederation, and these groupings allied or fought with other allied peoples. Over the centuries, chiefdoms and cities rose and fell, and peoples expanded, contracted, and moved as political, economic, and environmental circumstances changed.² The transformations that occurred when Europeans arrived, as devastating as they could be, were simply a new chapter in a long history of change in the region.

As in other parts of the Americas, European diseases and weapons changed the balance of power in the Arkansas Valley, creating opportunities for some native peoples and debilitating or destroying others. In the late sixteenth century, disease, probably combined with natural disasters, caused major upheavals in the societies around the Arkansas River. By the time of the Quapaws' and Osages' visit to Kaskaskia in 1680, European diseases had transformed the Arkansas Valley, and a new trade good, guns, threatened to do the same by giving some native peoples an advantage over those who did not have access to European trade.³

Still, it was Indians who instituted the new political economy that would preside in the Arkansas Valley for the next two centuries. As populations declined or migrated because of disease and war, cross-cultural alliances and goods exchange (especially for guns and ammunition) increased in importance. Those who were well positioned geographically to exploit European trade networks and who had the cultural or military ability to persuade others (Indian or European) to serve their interests were most likely to succeed in the new order. The Quapaw and Osage peoples would take advantage of European weapons and the power vacuum left by disease to establish their own power over the Arkansas Valley.

A Changing World

From its source high up in the Rocky Mountains, the Arkansas River stretches for one thousand...