Gathering Together by Sami Lakomäki

Author:Sami Lakomäki
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300182316
Publisher: Yale University Press

Figure 2. Pah-te-cóo-saw, Straight Man, Semicivilized, by George Catlin, ca. 1830. A noted war leader among the dispossessed White River Shawnees, Petecaussa played an important role in the negotiations with federal authorities in Washington in 1825 that led to the creation of the Shawnee reservation in Kansas. © Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison Jr.

The rapidly growing American population of the Arkansas Territory resented the presence of these Shawnees and other eastern refugee Indians within the limits of the territory. Between 1820 and 1830 the non-Indian population of Arkansas jumped from fourteen thousand to thirty thousand. Most newcomers were engaged in commercial plantation agriculture that required large areas of land for cotton cultivation. They were not pleased to discover that the Shawnees lived on “good farms on the best lands” in northern Arkansas. In the late 1820s “bickerings and jealousies” arose between the Indians and Americans. Governor John Pope and other territorial officials bombarded federal authorities with inflammatory reports of an Indian war waiting just around the corner. Shawnee leaders sent their own appeals to Little Rock and Washington, explaining that they wished only to become U.S. citizens and buy the lands they occupied on the White River. In the increasingly racialized climate of the day the policymakers in Washington found it much easier to believe that Indians were savages preparing for a war than farmers and ranchers willing to live peacefully among Americans. In 1828 the federal government pressured the Cherokees to cede their country in Arkansas and move to the conquered Osage lands west of the territory. Bereft of their allies, the White River Shawnees held out for a few years. In 1832 they too were forced to sign a new removal treaty that ordered them to move to the Kansas reservation.36

But it was one thing to order the Shawnees to remove and quite another to make them do so. While some families reluctantly migrated to Kansas, more than three hundred people moved instead to the Cowskin River in the northeastern corner of modern Oklahoma, just south of the reservation that had been recently created there for the Shawnees and Senecas from Lewistown, Ohio. Long-standing contacts and kinship relations linked the White River and Lewistown Shawnees and made them willing to join forces. In contrast, the White River refugees were suspicious of the Ohio Shawnees from Wapakoneta who were now settling on the reservation in Kansas. This was not only because time and distance had gradually weakened the contacts between the western and eastern Shawnees and alienated them from one another. More was involved. The refugees from the White River were Kishpokos, Pekowis, and Thawikilas who had always questioned the efforts of the Mekoches to lead the entire Shawnee nation. They knew very well that national consolidation remained the goal of the Wapakonetan Mekoche leaders in Kansas. In 1834 the Mekoches sent messengers to the Cowskin to invite the local Shawnees to the reservation. The westerners refused, pointing out that “all the Choice spots of

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