In the summer of 1673, a Quapaw Indian spotted two canoes full of Frenchmen descending the broad, brown waterway that Algonquian speakers named the Mississippi, the “Big River.” When the people of Kappa, the northernmost Quapaw town, heard the news, they prepared to welcome the newcomers. Several Quapaws paddled their own canoes into the river, and one held aloft a calumet, a peace pipe. As the Quapaws hoped, this sign of peaceful intentions, recognized by native peoples across North America, allayed the fears of their French visitors—Quebec merchant Louis Jolliet, Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette, and their handful of companions....

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...

On a sunny morning in late June 1541 , the town of Pacaha was bustling. In fields outside the town walls, women used their imported stone hoes to weed and break up the ground around the new corn and bean shoots, while other Pacahans collected the rabbits caught in the snares dispersed throughout the cornfields. A canal brought water from the nearby Mississippi River to the moat that surrounded Pacaha on three sides, 100 feet wide, by one visitor’s estimation. A palisade of tall mortared posts enclosed the town’s fourth side. The broad hill that the town sat upon granted...

In 1998, near the mouth of the Arkansas River, archaeologists found the remains of a multicultural society, probably the late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Quapaw town of Osotouy. They found evidence of the town’s ties to other peoples regionally and beyond the Atlantic. Pottery shards remain from vessels made locally by Quapaws, across the Mississippi in Natchez country, and in New Spain, France, Italy, and England. Mixed with silt from the river lie glass beads fired in Europe and thick green pieces of bottles that once held French brandy. The lead musket balls and shot found here came from Europe, but...

The Quapaws were not the only people living near the Mississippi River who maximized their own French trade at the expense of their enemies to the west. In 1719, the year of La Harpe’s only successful visit to the central Arkansas Valley, the Osage Indians enthusiastically welcomed trader Claude Charles Du Tisné and his interpreter into their towns on the Osage River, north of the Arkansas. As with the Quapaws, the Osages’ welcoming tone changed when their visitors voiced their intention to continue their mission by journeying south to the Taovaya towns of the central Arkansas Valley. After much discussion,...

In 1773, Quapaw leaders told the Spanish commandant of the Arkansas Post that they remained “very irritated at the Osages, because they are not good nor will they ever be.” They pointed out that in the seven months since the Osage-Spanish peace agreement in St. Louis, the Osages had already robbed three hunting parties on the Arkansas River. The Quapaws had two problems. First, the Osages threatened to undermine Quapaw power. Previously, the Quapaws had maintained relatively friendly terms with the Osages. An Osage party had struck some Quapaws in 1751, but the two groups apparently healed their differences diplomatically,...

In 1790, a group of Delaware Indians arrived on foot at the French settlement of Ste. Geneviève, on the Mississippi River between St. Louis and the Arkansas Post. They carried their saddles, vividly demonstrating that an Osage band had stolen their horses. Many Indians and Europeans were suffering from Osage violence. The Delawares, Shawnees, Miamis, Illinois, Abenakis, Chickasaws, and Choctaws—beginning to hunt and settle in Louisiana as game diminished and settlers increased in the East—found that Osage attacks endangered their plans. The Osages occasionally raided French settlements, including Ste. Geneviève, whose people well understood the Delawares’ frustration. French...

Between the 1790s and 1820, some 5,000 settlers crossed the Mississippi to build farms and ranches along the Arkansas River between the Quapaw and Arkansas Osage towns and to hunt deer, bear, and buffalo for profit on Osage lands upriver. Beginning in the 1810s, these settlers engaged the Arkansas Osages in a bloody decade-long war, simultaneously waging a political battle to convince the United States government to view the Osages as an enemy of progress and to compel land cessions from them. The settlers eventually defeated the Osages militarily and politically, ending those Indians’ century-long domination and forcing them off...

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...

In Andrew Jackson’s annual message to Congress in 1830 , the president reflected on the continent’s Mississippian past. According to Jackson, “in the monuments and fortresses of an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the West, we behold the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated or has disappeared to make room for the existing savage tribes.” He concluded that, because the “savage tribes” of the colonial era and early republic took the mound-builders’ place, Anglo-Americans should not lament that these Indians were in turn disappearing.¹

Jackson had both his history and his present wrong. Colonial-era...