American Explorers of Early Oklahoma
Trouble for Natives French trappers and traders had traveled the rivers and established commerce with the tribes in present-day Oklahoma from the early 1700s. As the Americans began to compass the area in the early 1800s and root-planting white settlers crosshatched present-day eastern Oklahoma, a separate but converging drama mounted. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, the area appeared destined for statehood, either on its own or as part of the growing Arkansas Territory.
Events back east dictated otherwise. Hundreds of thousands of North American Indians had lived in scattered bands and tribes across the continent as white European Christian civilization began to take root and spread westward from the Atlantic Ocean in the 1600s. In many cases and many places, the Natives existed in peace with white and (usually enslaved) black settlers, often bearing children together and intermarrying. Such was especially the case early in the process of European settlement, when the Puritans, Pilgrims, and others as a whole possessed a keen devotion to the principles and Savior of their Christian faith. This spawned generally superior relations between the settlers and Indians than what occurred as European, then American civilization flooded westward toward the distant Pacific Ocean.
For a jumble of reasons, however, white society—the stronger in force due to greater numbers, superior technology including weapons, and a religion that produced more, better organized, and longer-lasting human life—as a whole gradually determined it would not assimilate the Natives as equal partners.
Read the entire Oklahoma story in John J. Dwyer's The Oklahomans: The Story of Oklahoma and Its People volume 1 of a 2-part series on the 46th state and the people who make this state very special. |