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Chapter 1 A Bordered Land, to 1540 The Arkansas River begins in the West, high up in the Rocky Mountains. For hundreds of miles, it crosses dry plains and prairies, now the states of Kansas and north-central Oklahoma. In the central Arkansas Valley, the channel narrows to cut between the blue-green Boston Range of the Ozark Mountains and the rolling green Ouachita Mountains, now eastern Oklahoma and western Arkansas. Finally, in the marshy lower Arkansas Valley , smaller creeks and ox-bow lakes merge with the main stream, as it winds along the lowlands to the Mississippi. The White River flows sharply southeast to meet the Arkansas’s mouth. Other deltas lie to the north and south, all part of the lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley. The St. Francis River enters the Mississippi at the current state border of Arkansas and Missouri. Farther north, the Missouri River runs roughly parallel to the Arkansas River from the Rockies to the Mississippi. The Ouachita River crosses southern Arkansas and northeastern Louisiana, and the Red River lies farthest south. Across the Mississippi, the Ohio River, and from it the Wabash, Cumberland, and Tennessee rivers, connect the Mississippi to the eastern half of the continent. Archaeological evidence indicates that at least 10,000 years ago people lived along the Arkansas River and in surrounding hills and mountains. It is difficult to reconstruct the history of people who left no written or oral records. Still, archaeological findings combined with written accounts from the Hernando de Soto and Francisco Vázquez de Coronado expeditions of 1541 reveal some of the ways the native peoples of earlier centuries lived and interacted with one another and make it possible to imagine how those practices developed. Historians of the colonial period often assume that Europeans brought unprecedented change. In reality, change and cross-cultural exchange are as old as human residence in the Americas. * * * We do not know why the first people settled in the mid-continent. They may have come to hunt the region’s giant bison, mammoth, mastodon, and deer. The earliest settlers may also have come for reasons we can only imagine, pushed by conflict or overpopulation wherever they had lived before or pulled by prophecies or charismatic leaders. Whatever their reasons for coming , by 7000 b.c. their population had grown through immigration and natural increase. The region certainly abounded in natural resources. For food and apparel, the upper Arkansas Valley provided bison, which wandered eastward from the Plains in the hot summer to cool themselves in the shaded woods of the central valley. In the mountains and valleys, deer, elk, turkeys, beavers, bears, wildcats, woodchucks, foxes, squirrels, rabbits, opossums , muskrats, and raccoons fed the central valley’s people. In fields and forests, people found hickory nuts, acorns, black walnuts, pecans, poke, lamb’s-quarter, wild potatoes, sunflower seeds, mulberries, Jerusalem artichokes , and wild onions. The river and the lower valley’s swamps provided fish, mussels, turtles, and frogs. Ducks and geese migrated along the marshlands of the Mississippi flyway. People established hundreds of settlements, from the Mississippi to the Plains, and from the Ozark Mountains north of the Arkansas to the Ouachita Mountains in the south.1 As the population increased, different groups of people began encountering one another more often as they visited seasonal resource bases. Fall and winter ranges for hunting began to overlap. If one band burned brush at the edge of a forest to clear space for plants that deer liked to eat, those hunters would have been frustrated to find others killing deer that their own practices had lured there. Seasonal harvests probably brought groups into contact and potential conflict. Discovering that another group had picked clean one’s summer blackberry, raspberry, dewberry, or muscadine patch must have been particularly disappointing. Arkansas Valley persimmons grow and ripen in the summer and fall, staying unbearably tart until first frost opens a short window for harvesting the sweet fruit before it rots on the ground. Bands who knew the place and time for the persimmon harvest had to determine how to share or win the fruit. High-quality chert for knife and spear blades pervades mountains above the central Arkansas Valley but is hard to find farther downriver. When the land became warmer and drier after about 6000 b.c., people began to cluster near the region’s rivers, bringing them into closer contact. Living, hunting, harvesting, and quarrying at the same places and times created the potential...

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