Arkansas Territory

QUAPAW, Native American tribe of the Siouan language family and of the Plains culture area.

The Spanish did not return after 1543. France, however, was interested in exploring the Mississippi as a route for trade. In 1673 a French party of seven explorers, led by Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet, came down the river from the north. At the southern end of their journey they visited the four villages of a people now called the Quapaw, who lived where the Arkansas River flows into the Mississippi. One of their villages had a name recorded as Arkansea, which the French called Arkansas. That name was given to the river, the region, and later the state.

The Quapaw spoke a language of the Siouan group, and most of the languages in that group were spoken near the Great Lakes or the Atlantic coast. Thus historians and archaeologists are divided as to whether the Quapaw were a remnant of the Mississippian culture or had recently come to the area.

Tempted by the prospect of a trading empire on the Mississippi, French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, continued where Marquette left off. From Arkansas he followed the Mississippi to its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico in 1682. On the basis of this exploration he claimed all the land drained by the Mississippi for France, naming it Louisiane (in English, Louisiana). La Salle granted land in Arkansas to his trusted lieutenant Henri de Tonty, who in 1686 founded a trading station at Poste des Arkansas (Arkansas Post), near the Quapaw villages. This was the first French settlement west of the Mississippi and in the lower Mississippi Valley.

Besides the Quapaw, the French encountered other Native American peoples. The most powerful were the Osage, a Siouan-speaking tribe who lived in Missouri but sought to exclude the Quapaw and others from hunting in western Arkansas. Osage dominance limited the growth of the little colony at Arkansas Post. On the Red River lived the Caddo, who were probably descended from the peoples encountered by de Soto. They were weakened by disease and about 1805 were driven out of the state into Texas by Osage aggression. Another small tribe, the Taensa, had been pushed into the present-day state of Louisiana by 1673.

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In 1821 Little Rock, a new town 128 km (80 mi) up the Arkansas River from Arkansas Post, became the territorial capital. In 1824 and 1825 the Osage and Quapaw concluded treaties surrendering their lands in Arkansas. However, after 1817 the federal government moved parts of the Cherokee and Choctaw nations into western Arkansas from east of the Mississippi. This caused conflict between whites and Native Americans and hindered white settlement. After the Choctaw and Cherokee, in 1825 and 1828 respectively, traded their lands in Arkansas for new lands in the west, settlement proceeded rapidly. As the whites came in, the Quapaw were moved—first to Louisiana and, in the mid-1800s, to a reservation in Oklahoma. The Osage were moved by 1836, first to a reservation in Kansas and later to land they bought from the Cherokee in Oklahoma. The settler population of Arkansas Territory, which had been only 1,062 in 1810 and 14,273 in 1820, jumped to more than 50,000 by 1835 as more settlers streamed in. Spurred by the population boom, Arkansas petitioned for admission to the federal Union and received it on June 15, 1836, becoming the 25th state.

from: "Arkansas" Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2001 http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.