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Chapter 8 The End of the Native Ground? 1815–1828 Initially, Cherokees had little difficulty representing themselves as more “civilized” than their white neighbors. In contrast to Cherokee Chief Thomas Graves’s neatly tended domestic animals, white settlers practiced traditional backwoods husbandry, setting pigs out to range and hunting them like game. In 1805, John Treat reported to the secretary of war that some white families grew wheat to sell but did not bother to rotate crops or fertilize their fields. Some grew cotton for their own consumption, but because they had no cotton gin or substantial slave labor, production for the market held little promise.1 Cherokee immigrants had more immediate effects on the residents of the Arkansas Valley than these isolated white settlers or the Louisiana Purchase itself. Yet both would come to have great importance for the valley. At first, Anglo-American settlers followed the Cherokee lead, settling along the lower river valley, hunting in the Ozark mountains, and distinguishing between the fearsome Osages and the more welcoming Quapaws. But after the War of 1812, these latest newcomers came in numbers large enough to overpower all of the other groups in the region. While elite white easterners advocated eventual Indian inclusion into the republic, Anglo-American settlers in the mid-continent rejected sharing the land and labeled all Indians, including Cherokees, savage. The Osages had preferred white settlers to Cherokees, but soon white settlers would define all Indians as the enemy and push them all to the margin, establishing the region as their own exclusive native ground. * * * Early Anglo-American settlers in the Arkansas Valley had little reason or means to argue against Indians’ right to their lands. The few AngloAmericans lived in isolated farms or small communities and had little access to government officials. One early settler recalled that his family lived on “buffalo, bear, deer, and elk and fish and honey.” The men and boys dressed in full suits of buckskin. The family bought their occasional cloth, dishes, and coffee from French traders and paid for them in “bear skins and deer skins and coon skins and bear oil, some beaver and otter skins and bees wax.” Yet neighbors addressed this settler’s father as Squire Billingsley and elected him to the first territorial legislature.2 In 1808, traveler Fortescue Cuming reported that the Anglo-American settlements in the Arkansas region “raise neither grain nor cotton, except for their own consumption.” A French hunters’ and traders’ village was even farther from the agrarian ideal than the more settled communities. It seemed to him “a poor place” because such people “never look for any thing beyond the mere necessaries of life, except whisky.”3 Like Cuming, traveler Henry Schoolcraft described whites in Arkansas as living “beyond the pale of the civilized world.” He found the region’s white women particularly disturbing. The girls wore “buck-skin frocks” arranged in a “careless manner.” Their clothes and bodies “were abundantly greasy and dirty.” He tried to make small talk with the women of a northern Arkansas settlement but, to his horror, found that they “could only talk of bears, hunting , and the like.” Having none of the social graces of civilized women, they only knew “the coarse enjoyments of the hunter state.” He attributed the low birthrate among white families in Arkansas to the “savage life” that the women lived, implying that their “disgust[ing]” appearance might be an additional reason for infrequent pregnancies. Schoolcraft concluded that “the state of society is not essentially different from that which exists among the savages,” and the most obvious sign of savagery was the coarse white women. Arkansas Cherokees and poor white settlers defied the simple dichotomy of savage Indians and civilized whites.4 Immigration to Arkansas became easier after 1820, when steamboats began to move up and down the Mississippi, Arkansas, and White rivers, transporting commercial goods, squatters, and speculators. The defeat of Tecumseh’s forces and the conclusion of the War of 1812 had decreased fears of Indian uprisings. As a result, the number of non-Indian settlers rose from fewer than 400 in 1803 to over 14,000 in 1820, making them the most populous group in the Arkansas region. And their numbers kept growing, reaching 30,000 by 1830. These settlers pursued new economic goals. Regular steamboat travel provided the transportation needed for commercial agriculture on an unprecedented scale. Cotton prices were soaring due to demand from textile mills in Britain and New...

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