Any walk to the west takes me across the 1818 Quapaw Treaty line, which is commemorated in Little Rock by several markers, including one on Third Street.
The line runs south from the Arkansas River to the Saline River and is the western border of the reservation that the Quapaws accepted in 1818; the southeastern border runs from Arkansas Post (on the Arkansas River) to the Ouachita River.
S. Charles Bolton writes in his history of Arkansas from 1800 to 1860 that the Quapaws, led by Chief Heckaton, gave up "vague rights" to land north of the Arkansas River and a "well-established claim" to lands south of the Canadian River and the Arkansas. (The Canadian River is the longest tributary of the Arkansas; it runs from Colorado through New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma.)
In exchange for accepting a reduction of their territory to about two million acres, the Quapaws received $4,000 worth of goods and an annual payment of $1,000 in goods.
The treaty only held until 1824. Walking west along Third Street, I pass the Hinterliter Grog Shop, where Arkansas' territorial legislature met (or not; that's another story) after the territorial government moved from Arkansas Post to Little Rock in 1821.
That legislature sent a petition to President Monroe complaining that the Quapaws (with a population around 400) had "at least 20 sqr. miles each Indian." According to Bolton, Arkansas politicians Henry Conway and Robert Crittenden pursued the case.
Conway claimed that the Quapaws wanted to sell their land and join the Caddo tribe. Crittenden, the territorial secretary, wrote Secretary of War John C. Calhoun that the Quapaws were a "poor, indolent, miserable remnant of a nation, insignificant and inconsiderable."
There is some sad truth in Crittenden's description of the Quapaws of 1823 as an impoverished remnant, but his use of "insignificant," even if he only meant in number, is outrageous, most likely born of ignorance of the extraordinary history and culture of that nation.
In weeks to come, we'll turn to the work of Morris S. Arnold on the Quapaw and the world they made with the French, Spanish, and English in colonial Arkansas. "The Quapaws, it is true, were caught in a net created by competing European expansionist ambitions," Arnold writes in "The Rumble of a Distant Drum," "but at the dawn of the 19th century, the French, the English, and the Spanish were all gone: The Quapaws, on the other hand, still lived not far from where they were when Marquette and Joliet had encountered them 130 years before."
The 1818 treaty at least allowed the Quapaws to continue to live near the place they lived when they met those first Frenchmen in 1673. The Quapaw Treaty of 1824 did not. Crittenden had been willing to allow the Quapaws to remain in Arkansas, albeit on a much, much smaller swath of land.
Calhoun, the great villain of this story (and a couple others I can think of), insisted that they leave the territory. S. Charles Bolton quotes Chief Heckaton's plea against removal: "The land we now live on belonged to our forefathers ... The lands you wish us to go to belong to strangers. Have mercy--send us not there."
The Quapaws started out walking from Arkansas Post in January 1826, and in the middle of February reached the Red River near the place that became Shreveport. The Caddos there initially rejected the Quapaws, but they settled in three villages near the Red River and planted crops only to lose them to flooding.
The Quapaws were starving by summer when a chief called Sarasin (or Saracen) led about a quarter of them back into Arkansas, where Gov. George Izard gave them corn and the territorial government permitted them to stay.
Further flooding of their Red River settlements drove the remaining Quapaws back to Arkansas between 1828 and 1830. Remaining near the Red River settlements had been a condition of their receiving annual payments from the federal government, however, so the Quapaws were deprived of that after their return to Arkansas, causing territorial governor John Pope to complain in 1832 to Secretary of War Lewis Cass that the Quapaws were "a harmless, inoffensive, and honest people ... much defrauded and wronged in relation to their annuities."
The government resumed annual payments to the Quapaw tribe in 1832, but they were not able to buy land in Arkansas. An 1833 treaty assigned the Quapaws to a reservation in Indian Territory, but many stayed in Arkansas. Sarasin died near Pine Bluff; his tombstone says 1832, but apparently he lived to a later date. Heckaton died in what is now northeast Oklahoma in 1842.
. . .
The weather was perfect (60 degrees) on Tuesday when I got to retrace an old commute as far as the state Capitol. I crossed the Quapaw line, passed the Hinterliter Grog Shop (now part of the Historic Arkansas Museum), then headed south to Capitol Avenue. I passed the offices of the Democrat-Gazette, where Eliza Hussman Gaines became publisher on Jan. 1, on my way to hear Sarah Huckabee Sanders give her inaugural address. The publisher of our state's newspaper and our governor are both women who are younger than I am.
In 1919, William Butler Yeats wrote, "things fall apart, the center cannot hold." I was delighted earlier this week to learn that W.H. Auden got a little tired of Yeats' "false emotions, inflated rhetoric, empty sonorities."
I got to the Capitol a little after noon on Tuesday, and the ceremonies were already underway. By the time I reached the office building at the corner of Capitol and Woodlane, folks inside were standing with their heads bowed in prayer. I paused with them, then made my way up to the lawn and found some friends from Arkansas State Parks, former colleagues I really miss seeing. Bright, competent people who all seem to enjoy the quiet happiness that comes to those who love their work. A C-130 flew over the Capitol during the national anthem.
The drumline was so good that if they had started to march off, I would have followed them back to Philander Smith.
I think the center's going to hold.
Brooke Greenberg lives in Little Rock. Email: brooke@restoration- mapping.com