Bill Earngey

De Soto's 1540s' records recount almost constant contact with villages in Arkansas. In 1673, French Explorers Marquette and Joliet encountered only a few scattered villages along the Mississippi. European diseases had taken out about 80 percent of them.

  After l700, new principal groups of historic Indian nations occupied Arkansas (pushed by white settlements, 1700-1835): the Quapaw along the Arkansas from Little Rock to the Mississippi; the Caddo, formerly of Louisiana, were concentrated at the big bend of the Red River in the southwest portion of the state; and the Osage claimed hunting rights in the highlands north of the Arkansas, while maintaining permanent villages in south and central Missouri.

  The Quapaw came downstream from the lower Ohio to the Arkansas. Their name for "downstream" was Oo-gaq-pa that was translated by Algonquian interpreters into French, which in frog language was so off the wall it took an 1881 act of the State to spell and phonetically standardize the State name.

  The Osage, Ponca and Kansa, also from the lower Ohio, went upstream on the Mississippi, opposite of the Quapaw route, and migrated into Missouri and Kansas. The Missouri Osage kept up a running fight with the Quapaw and Caddo until pushing both of them below the Arkansas River. The Caddo were eventually pushed back home, northern Louisiana, then further pushed west by the French and the Spanish to the southwest corner of Arkansas.

  The Cherokee, late comers, began arriving in Arkansas in the late l8th century, settling along the St. Francis River Valley.

  The Choctaw never inhabited the state per se, settling instead along the Oklahoma border.

  In an 1820 precursor of the 1830 Indian Removal Act, the Caddo, Cherokee and Choctaw were assigned and moved to reservations in western and central-northern Arkansas. The Quapaw were moved to the Pine Bluff area. By 1833 their population was 500.

  In 1831 the Osage and Cherokees signed a peace treaty.

  By 1839 all reservations were emptied into Oklahoma Territory. The Trail of Tears ended there.