The Cherokees
The Cherokees stood as one of the largest and probably the most “Americanized" tribe on the continent. A few of their approximately twenty thousand members settled along the Arkansas River in present-day Arkansas as early as 1795. A tough chief named Duwali (or “The Bowl”) led this group. Gradually, more migrated into the area. By the end of the first decade of the 1800s, the federal government was actively inducing all Cherokees to move west. It did not, however, specify particular coordinates for the Cherokees’ new lands.
At least one additional delegation of Cherokees reconnoitered lands the government offered them in northern and western Arkansas Territory, and more Cherokees agreed to move west. In 1807 American traders in Nachitoches, Louisiana met Cherokees who reported living up Red River to the north, probably in present-day southwest Arkansas. And in 1808 the Osages started complaining about Cherokees hunting on their lands in northern Arkansas and the eastern part of present-day Oklahoma without permission.
Sibley and others had attempted to calm the fierce Osages as they cleared a wide and bloody swath in the wake of their southern migration from Missouri. This tribe of around 4,250 people that included 1,250 warriors raided, plundered, enslaved, and slaughtered their way through one Native group after another in present-day Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma. They drove the Caddos, the Wichitas, and others before them (see Chapter 1). Tribes throughout the Southwest feared the Osages.
Soon the Osages did much more than complain about the Cherokees. This time, however, they had met their equal. The Cherokees who had come west were a smart and rugged lot, and they had no intention of being shoved out of lands for which they had departed their ancient homes and communities and traveled hundreds in some cases, over a thousand-miles to find. The Cherokees stood their ground and fought back against the Osages, with no less savagery than their opponents.
Plus, these Western Cherokee numbers continued to grow. By 1817 around two thousand lived in Arkansas, a few in present-day eastern Oklahoma. Spurred by federal government treaties that induced the struggling Osages to cede millions of acres of land they controlled in present-day Oklahoma (bounded roughly by the Verdigris River on the west, the present Kansas line on the north, Arkansas Territory on the east, and the Arkansas River on the south) to the U.S., as well as material compensation, the Cherokees’ western population swelled to six thousand by 1820.
John Jolly (?-1838) This shrewd, greathearted man led the Western Cherokees or Old Settlers wing of the tribe through some of their most momentous years. Known in Cherokee as Ahuludegi or Oolooteka, he entered the scroll of history as headman of Cayuga town on Hiwassee Island in present-day southeastern Tennessee upon his older brother Tahlonteeskee’s migration west to the Arkansas country in 1809 as a leader of the Old Settlers.
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. |