During their Louisiana Purchase 1804-1805 expedition to explore the “Washita River” and confirm the legendary hot springs, George Hunter and William Dunbar learned from a Dutch hunter on the Ouachita River that the Quapaw, along with some Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Shawnee had banded together to drive the Osage out of Arkansas for good. Not only was the alliance interested in removing the Osage threat to their hunters, but they also wanted to take over the Osage-claimed hunting grounds, “which are the most abundant hunting rounds, being plentifully stocked with buffalo, elk, deer, bear, and every other beast,” located primarily in the Ozark hills. Their efforts failed, however.[1]
White traders working with the Osage, might find themselves the victim of an attack from anti-Osage nations. On January 7, 1807, Choctaws attacked French-Canadian trapper Joseph Bogy on his way to transport approximately $10,000 worth of goods for trade with the Osage for pelts. These Choctaws allowed Bogy to live but carried off his entire cargo.[2]
One of the most significant issues for non-Osage hunting on Osage-claimed grounds was defined boundaries. When it came to their hunting grounds, Osage deemed some of the grounds theirs alone to hunt and other lands open to sharing with others. Following the treaty between Osage Chief Pawhuska and the United States in 1808, ceding 50,000 square miles of land between the Arkansas and Missouri Rivers, more Osages moved to live on the Arkansas River. This crowding caused more significant pressure on the Arkansas hunting grounds and, with that, more conflict.[3]
A few years later, John C. Luttig, representative of the Missouri Fur Company at Poke Bayou, today’s Batesville, reported to his employer, Christian Wilt of St. Louis, that the Osage were continuing to rob company hunters employed in Arkansas, “I have done everything in Power to get the Tallow down but the Osage are too cunning for our Hunters last Season, all their Property they took and even in the heart of the Settlement.” Luttig also noted that the Osage had attacked and robbed some of the Cherokee hunters he had traded. However, during the spring hunts, his hunters were more prepared “to meet resistance.”[4]
The Osage and the Cherokee remained in constant conflict from overhunting, and the ill-defined borders between their nations since some of the Cherokee had arrived from the lower Piedmont between 1810 and 1813. In 1813, Colonel R. J. Meigs, Cherokee Agent in Tennessee, ordered his assistant, Major William L. Lovely, to set up a Cherokee subagency closer to their settlements between the Arkansas and Missouri Rivers. In 1814, Lovely informed William Clark, governor of the Missouri Territory, of the continuing trouble between the two nations and that white hunters wasted buffalo and bear in the Osage and Cherokee lands. The white men killed animals in droves, skinned the buffalo and gathered the bear fat, and left the rest to rot in the hot sun. Furthermore, several white hunters stoked the hostilities between the Osage and the Cherokees, hoping that they might benefit financially in some manner. The natives attacked whites, the white hunters attacked the natives, and the natives attacked each other. Because of the hostile relations between the two Native American nations and the increasing encroachment of lawless American hunters committing indiscriminate slaughter, Lovely suggested the US military establish a post. Therefore, Fort Smith was established in 1817 to keep the peace between the Osage and Cherokee in their ongoing feud over hunting grounds and keep other hunters from destroying the bear and buffalo therein. The government expected those locations outside the American military range to defend themselves. However, the trouble between the Cherokee and Osage continued for years to come.[5]
Interestingly, in 1821, Arkansas Osage Chief Clermont claimed that when the Osage ceded lands to the United States, they did not give up their right to hunt there. When Jefferson sent Cherokee to settle Osage-ceded lands west of the Mississippi River, the president could not give them the rights to all wildlife, he claimed. “We Sold him Land but not the game on our Land,” the Chief argued. Wildlife ownership was not a 20th-century issue, and beliefs such as these continued to stoke the fires of conflict in the Arkansas River Valley.[6]
The Arkansas Cherokee wrote directly to President James Monroe, contending that the United States had failed to protect them in their new homes in Arkansas. “Our people have been most inhumanly murdered, butchered, and plundered by a hand of Savages who acknowledge the Sovereignty and authority of the United States and live under its protection.” When the Cherokee prepared to attack for the sake of revenge, they argued, the United States government representatives stopped them. The Cherokee were not the only Indian nation that the Osage attacked.[7] Thomas Nuttall discovered during his travels that the Quapaw and the Osage fought one another. “The Osages bear a very bad character with these hunting farmers,” he observed.[8]
The Frenchman Antoine Barraque, a veteran of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grand Army, arrived at Arkansas Post in 1816 to make his fortune trading with the Native Americans. He befriended Frederick Notrebe, another French veteran who had resided in Arkansas Post since 1810. Notrebe was a thriving trader, planter, and land speculator with connections to Little Rock and New Orleans. Barraque worked for Notrebe trading with the Quapaw and then married merchant Joseph Dardenne’s daughter, a metis of French-Quapaw blood. The Quapaw eventually accepted Barraque into their nation, and he lived on their reservation.[9]
In 1823, Barraque and a hunting party of about twenty whites and Quapaw traveled to the Red River Valley. Within days of their arrival, a war party of roughly one hundred Osages, under Mad Buffalo, then leader of the Arkansas Osages, attacked the hunting camp, killed seven of the men, and carried off or destroyed $4,000 in supplies, pelts, and horses. Barraque traveled to Fort Smith and reported the incident to General Matthew Arbuckle, the fort’s commanding officer. When Arbuckle reported the incident to the war department that December 1823, he stated that these incidents were expected and that if the military could keep other hunters out of the Osage hunting grounds, events like this would not happen. Following Arbuckle’s advice, the War Department issued orders to their officers to halt hunting and trespassing on Indian lands.[10]
The same year, Robert Crittenden, Secretary and de facto leader of the Arkansas territory, spoke before the territorial legislature, damning the United States government for not providing more assistance to Arkansas. “[Missouri] finds the army of the United States transported thousands of miles to protect her beaver-trappers in the invasion of Indian hunting grounds, at an expense of unknown thousands,” he blasted, “while we, inhabiting a country on which nature has showered her bounties with an unsparing hand…where the Indians are predominant, and at least 15,000 warriors could be assembled on our frontier in twenty days—surrounded on another by hordes of northern Indians.” For despite the U. S. Army establishing Fort Smith, Crittendon claimed, “all our petitions an inflexible silence has been preserved.” He also asked the US government to remove the eastern Native Americans from Arkansas that they had brought into the territory and remove the remaining Arkansas Native Americans either by treaty or force. [11]
The Osage did not limit their attacks to the western regions of Arkansas. Upon arrival at Cadron Bluff on the Arkansas River in 1818, the Benedict family “found a large block-house which had been built as a place of refuge against the hostile Osage Indians.” Russell Benedict believed that the settlers built the defensive structure a year or two before, explaining that the “Osage Indians who were then very troublesome and were bitter enemies to the few white settlers who were scattered from 20 to 50 miles apart in small groups two or three families in a neighborhood.” The Osage and other native tribes attacked other hunters because of competition, encroachment/trespassing, greed, and vengeance. However, there might be more to the explanation, at least for attacks against white hunters. [12]
The Osage directly targeted white hunters for encroachment on their lands and the destruction of the game resources. “The white hunter destroys all before him and cannot resist the opportunity of killing game, although he neither wants meat nor can carry the skins,” Henry Schoolcraft observed in December 1818. He witnessed a hunter on the White River in Missouri carrying five bear skins, all that he could endure, stumble into a small herd of buffalo. The man killed three and left them where they fell, not taking any meat or skin. “This is one of the causes of the enmity existing between the white and the red hunters,” remarked Schoolcraft. Both Indian and white hunters who killed for the market harvested every animal they could. More skins and meat and oil meant more money. However, the white hunter clearly cornered the market when it came to flat-out waste.[13]
When Schoolcraft met with a hunter and settler named Mr. Coker living on the White River in that same month, “he discovered the fear which appears to prevail on this river, respecting the Osage Indians and corroborated what we had before heard of their robberies.” The Arkansawyer explained that the Osage returned home to the Grand Osage River [Missouri] during the winter, and he believed they had not yet left Arkansas for that destination. Coker thus refused to serve as a guide for Schoolcraft. Indeed, theft was not the only danger early Arkansas hunters faced in the Bear State.[14]
[1] William Dunbar and George Hunter, “Observations made in a Voyage Commencing at St. Catherine’s Landing, on East Bank of the Mississippi, Proceeding Downwards to the Mouth of Red River…,” in American Register, January 1, 1809.
[2] Grant Foreman, Pioneer Days in the Early Southwest (Cleveland, Ohio: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1926), 72-73. In 1819, Bogy guided Thomas Nuttall from Fort Smith to the confluence of the Arkansas, Neosho (Grand), and Verdigris Rivers or the Three Forks region of Oklahoma.
[3] Duval, The Native Ground, 200, 203-205.
[4] John C. Luttig to Christian Wilt, April 16, 1815, in John C. Luttig Letter, University of Arkansas Special Collections, Box: LOC 385, Folder: MS L34 John C. Luttig (Mixed Materials).
[5] William L. Lovely to William Clark, August 9, 1814, NARA, Bureau of Indian Affairs Records, RG 75; Clarence E. Carter, ed. The Territorial Papers of the United States—The Territory of Louisiana-Missouri 1815-1821, Vol. XV (Washington: US Printing Office, 1951), 55. For more about Lovely’s Purchase, see Duval, The Native Ground, 209-210.
[6] Duval, The Native Ground, 210.
[7] Carter, The Territorial Papers, 273-274.
[8] Nuttall, A Journal of Travels, 57.
[9] Notrebe and Barraque became partners and eventually employed many hunters in Arkansas. For more information on Notrebe, see S. Charles Bolton, Arkansas, 1800–1860, Remote and Restless (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1998); Morris Arnold, Unequal Laws Unto A Savage Race (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1985); Boyd Johnson, “Frederick Notrebe,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 21 (Autumn 1962): 269–283.
[10] Carter, The Territorial Papers, 571-572, 610. Eventually, Mad Buffalo was hanged and a few others in the party punished. See also Ginger L. Ashcraft, “Antoine Barraque and His Involvement in Indian Affairs of Southeast Arkansas, 1816-1832,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 32 (Autumn 1973): 226-240. For more information about Mad Buffalo, see Duval, The Native Ground, 223; Arkansas Gazette, May 12, 1821. Mad Buffalo had appeared in Fort Smith in 1812 with about 400 warriors, angry that the United States was not taking his side in the fight against the Cherokee. The American fort had few soldiers to defend against the Osage if they had wanted to attack. This may have later caused the response to Barraque.
[11] Robert Crittenden, “Extracts from the Acting Governor’s Message,” Niles Weekly Register, November 22, 1823.
[12] Worley and Benedict, “Story of an Early Settlement,” 126.
[13] Milton D. Rafferty, Rude Pursuits and Rugged Peaks: School Craft’s Ozark Journal, 1818-1819 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1996), 79.
[14] Rafferty, Rude Pursuits, 64..
Arkansas Wildlife History 