Chapter 10: Consent to Cession? (45.10)

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The following long quote from the Royce Document that accompanied the treaty map links some contemporaneous Missouri history to this 1817-19 Cherokee history. The point of including the quote in Chapter 10 was to best explain why the Arkansas Cherokee wanted more “eastern” Indians to join them in Arkansas. It was for strength and protection from the “savage Indians of the plains,” the Osage.

Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-american-indian/2024/05/22/quapaw-treaty-of-1818-a-treaty-that-was-honored-only-6-years/

A Separate and Distinct People

Early in 1818 a representative delegation from that portion of the Cherokees who had removed to the Arkansas visited Washington with the view of reaching a more satisfactory understanding concerning the location and extent of their newly acquired homes in that region. As early as January 14 of that year, they had addressed a memorial to the Secretary of War asking, among other things, that the United States should recognize them as a separate and distinct people, clothed with the power to frame and administer their own laws, after the manner of their brethren east of the Mississippi.

The Quapaw Treaty

“Long and patient hearings were accorded to this delegation by the authorities of the Government, and, predicated upon their requests, instructions were issued to Governor William Clark, superintendent of Indian affairs at Saint Louis, among other things, to secure a cessation of hostilities then raging between the Arkansas Cherokees and the Osages; furthermore, to induce, if possible, the Shawnees and Delawares then residing in the neighborhood of Cape Girardeau to relinquish their land and join the Western Cherokees, or, in the event of a favorable termination of the Quapaw treaty then pending, that they might be located on lands acquired from them.”
“During the year the Arkansas Cherokees had also learned that the Oneidas of New York were desirous of obtaining a home in the West and had made overtures for their settlement among them. The main object of the Cherokees in desiring to secure these originally eastern Indians for close neighbors is to be found in the increased strength they would be able to muster in sustaining their quarrel with their native western neighbors.”

Treaty of 1819

The Treaty of 1819 called for the Cherokee to get 3 million acres of land between the Arkansas River and the White River in exchange for 5 million acres of their homeland in the East. The eastern Cherokee Boundary Line established in the 1817 Treaty had been established beginning at Point Remove on the Arkansas River to Batesville on the White River, as seen immediately below on the 1826 Anthony Finley map of “Missouri and the Territory of Arkansas.”

Source: https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~2365~250012:Map-of-the-State-of-Missouri-And-Te

To fulfill the acreage requirement of 3 million acres, the western line was drawn from Fort Smith on the Arkansas River to near today’s Harrison. That second boundary line, the western line, is also drawn on the Finley map. White settlers were forcibly removed from the area between those rivers and the 2 boundary lines. Find “CHEROKEES” printed across the northern portion of the Finley Map in that space. By 1820 the estimate of the number of Cherokee removed to Arkansas was 4,000 to 6,000.

Enter the Presbyterians

By 1820 Dwight Mission, a Presbyterian outreach to the Western Cherokees requested by their chief, Tahlonteskee, after he visited Brainerd mission school on Chickamauga Creek in the East, served the Cherokees in Arkansas until their removal in 1829. Dwight Mission is seen on the Finley map on the Illinois River, located there so that Chief John Jolly, who had reservations about potential untoward effects Christian education could have on Cherokee heritage, where the chief could keep an eye on the mission’s programs.

The 1817 Treaty had called for the Federal Government to build a fort to protect the Cherokee immigrants from the Osage and a trade factory to supply the Cherokee with food and farming supplies in their new Arkansas home. Both were built at Belle Point, seen on the Finley map.

Other location sites for early Cherokee settlements in Arkansas seen on the Finley map include Spadra Creek, Illinois Bayou, Mulberry River, and Piney (Pine) River. The Bowl had settled on Petite Jean River south of the Arkansas River after the New Madrid earthquake, as shown as Little Jean River on the Finley map.

“[T]hose measures necessary to the civilization and preservation of their nation”

The Cherokees, as quoted from Royce, “consented to the cession of those tracts of country naively described in the treaty of February 27, 1819, as “at least as extensive” as that to which the United States was entitled under the principles and provisions of the treaty of 1817. These cessions were made, as recited in the preamble to the treaty, as the commencement of those measures necessary to the civilization and preservation of their nation, and in order that the treaty of July 8, 1817, might, without further delay or the trouble or expense of taking the census therein provided for, be finally adjusted.”

Nine More Land Cessions

Nine separate land cessions were transferred from the Cherokees to the United States in the 1819 Treaty listed here by their Number on the Royce map. (Areas 27,28, and 29 are covered in Chapter 9.)

27. Tract in Alabama and Southern Tennessee
28. Tract in Southern Tennessee, on the Tennessee River
29. Tract in Tennessee, N. Carolina, and Georgia
30. Jolly’s Island in the Tennessee River
31. Small tract in Tennessee at and below the mouth of Clinch River
32. Tract of 12 miles square on Tennessee River in Alabama
33. Tract of 1 square mile in Tennessee, at foot of Cumberland Mountain
34. Tract of 1 square mile in Tennessee, at Cherokee Talootiskee’s
35. Tract of 3 square miles in Tennessee opposite the mouth of Hiwassee River