Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Southern Borderlands, 1500-1850
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University of South Carolina Scholar Commons Theses and Dissertations Fall 2019 Learning the Land: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Southern Borderlands, 1500-1850 William Cane West Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd Part of the Environmental Sciences Commons, Indigenous Studies Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation West, W. C.(2019). Learning the Land: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Southern Borderlands, 1500-1850. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/5618 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you by Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. LEARNING THE LAND: INDIANS, SETTLERS, AND SLAVES IN THE SOUTHERN BORDERLANDS, 1500-1850 by W. Cane West Bachelor of Arts Sewanee: The University of the South, 2011 Master of Arts University of South Carolina, 2017 Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History College of Arts and Sciences University of South Carolina 2019 Accepted by: Woody Holton, Major Professor Thomas Lekan, Committee Member Mark Smith, Committee Member Kathleen DuVal, Committee Member Cheryl L. Addy, Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School © Copyright by W. Cane West, 2019 All Rights Reserved ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have found that dissertations are inherently exercises in frustration. I believe that resurrecting a portion of the past will always be incomplete and only partially representative. My dissertation is only a first draft in my scholarship and an additional draft in our understanding of the human experience. My frustrations are also personal. While sitting, writing, and revising, I asked my loved ones to accept an empty chair, a rain-checked date, or a distracted partner. I have dealth with the vicissitudes of my mental health and my relationships as much as I have dealt with documents and drafts. Despite the struggles, a wide community of historians have encouraged me on my journey. Bill Worthen and Swannee Bennett empowered me to research the lives of enslaved men and women in Little Rock. At Sewanee, John Willis, Houston Roberson, Gerald Smith, and others introduced me to the delights of academic curiosity. Allison Marsh, Woody Holton, Tom Lekan, and Mark Smith were supportive faculty at South Carolina. My cohort at South Carolina have added fellowship to the process. My motivations have always been to create “intellectual roots” for how I see the world and to honor the voices of the men and women often left out of History texts. I hope this dissertation is one small monument to that enduring purpose. As I have tried to remain true to my personal and professional lives, I have two final thanks: To my mom and dad, who have taught me to find history in every place and a map for every adventure. And to my partner, Sarah, for sharing love, patience, and a belief in my work as a scholar and as a human being. Your love has meant so much. iii ABSTRACT Between 1500 and 1850, Native Americans, Europeans, and enslaved African Americans competed for territory within the landscape of the lower Arkansas Valley. The complex transitional environment between delta bottomlands, interior highlands, and Great Plains fostered the co-existence of competing Native and Euro-American claims to regional sovereignty and settlement well into the nineteenth century. The geopolitical divides often hinged on debates over environmental resources and scientific practices. Indigenous polities from the Mississippians to the Quapaws and Osages adapted to environmental changes to establish and maintain their borders in the face of European colonial presence. In the nineteenth century, Cherokees and white planters alike used scientific expeditions, surveys, and maps to validate their respective farming territories and the Cherokees even reversed white settlers’ expansion into coveted farmland. White legislators later promoted the federal protection of the thermal waters at Hot Springs near the border of Indian territory as a beachhead for white settlement and a destination for Lower Mississippi Valley health seekers. Within the contested geography, enslaved African Americans carved out an informal area of relative autonomy by harnessing the environmental changes on the edges of cotton plantations. Indian nations and runaway slaves contributed to the contours of regional inhabitation throughout the early nineteenth century, despite the demographic dominance of the Cotton Kingdom, by adapting to environmental change and turning the practices of early American science into tools of anti-colonialism. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iii Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iv List of Figures .................................................................................................................... vi Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: A Landscape in Transition: Environmental Change and Native Power in the Arkansas River Valley ........................................................................21 Chapter 2: Contested Cartography: Arkansas Cherokees’ Appropriation of American Science .....................................................................................................58 Chapter 3: At the Borders of King Cotton: Surveyors, Travel Writers, and Levees in the Arkansas Bottomlands .......................................................................96 Chapter 4: State-building In the Mountains: Hot Springs and America’s First National Park ..........................................................................................................133 Chapter 5: Runaway Slave Geography: Environmental Change at the Edge Of the Plantation Frontier .......................................................................................172 Chapter 6: Police Geography: Surveilling the Social World of the Arkansas Valley .....202 Post Script ........................................................................................................................235 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................247 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 0.1 Physical Map of the Southeastern US ..............................................................14 Figure 1.1 Map of Ferdinand de Soto’s American Conquests, 1638 .................................33 Figure 2.1 The Arkansas Frontier ......................................................................................71 Figure 2.2 Map of Dardanelle and Vicinity, 1827 .............................................................81 Figure 2.3 Geographical, Statistical and Historical Map of Arkansas Territory, 1822 .....88 Figure 3.1 Red River Survey District, 1819 ....................................................................116 Figure 3.2 Annottated Map of Portions of Desha and Chicot Counties, Arkansas .........125 Figure 3.3 A Map of the Cotton Kingdom and Its Dependencies in America, 1861.......129 Figure 4.1 Map of the United States of America, 1816 ...................................................146 Figure 4.2 The Hot Springs of the Washita, 1844 ...........................................................166 Figure 5.1 Henry Bibb in the Red River Valley, 1849 ....................................................179 Figure 5.2 Map Showing the Distribution of the Slave Population of the Southern States of the United States, 1861 .....................................................................................186 Figure 6.1 Map of the Territory of the United States from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, 1858 ..............................................................................................211 Figure 6.2 Henry Bibb Chased by Bloodhounds, 1849 ...................................................232 vi INTRODUCTION The mountains of the Ozarks are my self-ascribed Arkansas roots. My maternal ancestors settled on the western edge of the Ozarks within a few miles of Indian territory. They journeyed from South Carolina in the 1830s, the white family and the human slaves that they owned—a wedding gift of grotesque power—to the extreme edge of the United States. These newly-arrived Anglo immigrants traded primarily with the Cherokees who were relocated into Indian Territory. In more recent years, my family hiked on trails past the abandoned chimneys and stone-walled fields of by-gone Ozark families. My own home lies farther east where the floodplain of the Mississippi Delta abuts the Interior Highlands of which the Ozarks are the northern uplift. In the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of Native, white, and black immigrants would create the Arkansas Valley borderlands amidst the alluvial plains, mountains, and prairies. In some sense, this dissertation begins at the western boundary where my ancestors built a farm and transposed African slavery to the edge of Indian Territory. It was not always the boundary. In 1819, Arkansas Territory expanded almost to the western edge of Oklahoma. Most histories of the state, however, typically