TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1. Native Empires in the Old Southwest . 20 2. Early Native Settlers in the Southwest . 48 3. Anglo-American Settlers in the Southwest . 76 4. Early Federal Removal Policies . 110 5. Removal Policies in Practice Before 1830 . 140 6. The Federal Indian Commission and the U.S. Dragoons in Indian Territory . .181 7. A Commission Incomplete: The Treaty of Camp Holmes . 236 8. Trading Information: The Chouteau Brothers and Native Diplomacy . 263 Introduction !2 “We presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible, that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them” - Thomas Jefferson to William Henry Harrison, February 27, 1803 Colonel Henry Dodge of the U.S. dragoons waited nervously at the bottom of a high bluff on the plains of what is now southwestern Oklahoma. A Comanche man on a white horse was barreling down the bluff toward Dodge and the remnants of the dragoon company that stood waiting with him. For weeks the dragoons had been wandering around the southern plains, hoping to meet the Comanches and impress them with the United States’ military might. However, almost immediately after the dragoon company of 500 men had departed from Fort Gibson in June 1834, they were plagued by a feverish illness and suffered from the lack of adequate provisions and potable water. When General Henry Leavenworth, the group’s leader, was taken ill near the Washita River, Dodge took command, pressing forward in the July heat with about one-fifth of the original force. The Comanche man riding swiftly toward Dodge was part of a larger group that the dragoons had spotted earlier on the hot July day. Since then the dragoons and the Comanches had been dancing across the bluffs, with the Comanches observing the troops from the tops of the bluffs before retreating when the troops approached. Eventually, however, the Comanches chose one man to approach the Americans. Dodge and the dragoons were probably nervous when they realized that one of the Comanches was actually riding toward them, even though they could see that he carried a steel lance with a white cloth tied to the top as a symbol of his peaceful intentions. The dragoons’ nervousness and tension must have quickly turned to surprise once the Comanche man arrived. Although he was dressed like the Indian that they expected, the man told !3 the group that his name was “Hey-soos-sanches,” and the Americans soon discovered that they could more easily communicate with him by speaking Spanish.1 The Americans were further astonished when, after the rest of the Comanche group approached, the Comanches insisted that each of their party should shake the hands of each of the Americans. The Comanches knew that the handshake was the greeting Americans most commonly used among themselves. Thus within the span of only a few moments, multiple preconceived ideas the Americans had about the Comanches were proven untrue. The Indians were not only welcoming, but were also able to communicate that welcome in a way that the troops recognized, an astonishing discovery for the Americans, who considered the Comanches to be just another “savage” plains group. Additionally, the dragoons had departed from Fort Gibson with the assumption that the Comanches had never been contacted by representatives of the United States government, and perhaps had never met any Americans at all. More important, the dragoons left for the West with the assumption that the Comanches were hostile, not only toward Americans, but toward the project of removal that in 1834 was bringing thousands of eastern Indians into the West, right on the borders of what was thought to be Comanche territory. The dragoons’ mission had been to make contact with the Comanches, intimidate them with the presence of a large number of U.S. troops, and thus obtain their assent to continued removals. The handshake greetings that the Comanches insisted on must have indicated to Dodge that the Comanches had a much different perspective on the situation than U.S. officials had realized, but whether Dodge fully grasped the 1 The man’s Spanish name was thus probably “Jesús Sanchez.” His Comanche name is unknown. See Fred S. Perrine, ed., “The Journal of Hugh Evans, Covering the First and Second Campaigns of the United States Dragoon Regiment in 1834 and 1835. Campaign of 1834,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 3 (September 1925), pp. 185-88. !4 Comanches’ perspective on removal and the increasing presence of U.S. officials in the region, either at that moment or in his subsequent meetings with their leaders, is unclear.2 I argue that historians have missed the significance of the story of Colonel Dodge’s encounter with the Comanches in July 1834, particularly how it is exemplary of the confusion and misperceptions with which the U.S. government operated as it attempted to implement its removal policies in the first four decades of the nineteenth century. Beginning almost immediately after the Louisiana Purchase, federal officials began planning for the ways that they might use the newly acquired western territory to remove Native populations from the East, spending little time learning about the contexts of the western places where they planned to remove those people. Eager to capitulate to the demands of white settlers to remove Native Americans from valuable cotton-producing lands in the southeast and fertile grain-growing lands in the Ohio River valley, U.S. government officials hurtled headlong into the project of Indian removal with little certain information about the people they were removing, the places they were supposed to go, and the Native people that they would encounter in the Old Southwest. Historians have placed little emphasis on the actual space that Native peoples both purposefully migrated toward and were forcibly removed to in the nineteenth century, but this very fluid borderland space between the United States, the Comanche and Osage empires, and Spain made an important difference to how the process of Indian removals, migrations, and 2 George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and conditions of the North American Indians; written during eight years’ travel (1832-1839) amongst the wildest tribes of Indians in North America, Volume 2, Letter No. 37, pp. 1–37. (reprinted edition, New York: Dover Publications, 1973). !5 diasporas in the nineteenth century unfolded.3 Historians of Indian removal have already deeply explored the contexts in the east which led to removal, combing newspapers, letters of Native leaders and federal officials, court records, and countless other documents, but they have yet to investigate the contexts that existed in the West, which had an equally important effect on the process of removal and the development and outcome of federal policies. Those eastern contexts were vastly important, but the story of removal is about more than the lead-up to and the literal process of forced westward migration. For the federal government, removal was about the beginning of a long-term project to entirely remove Native people from American society. The location for the removals was an important part of that long-term plan, but U.S. officials assumed much more knowledge and control about those locations than they actually possessed. Thus one of the most significant contributions this dissertation makes to the historiography of Indian removal is to show how, in light of the lack of federal knowledge about the West, removal policies actually affected both the Native people that they were imposed on and the Native people who already lived in the Old Southwest. Additionally, most histories of removal are based on the assumption of increased federal power, knowledge, and control over time. This interpretation of events is not entirely untrue. Looking at the very large picture of United States-Native American relations over the course of several centuries, the decline of Native power and the rise of the United States seems inevitable and predictable. My contribution is to show that this process was much more uneven, 3 My focus on place helps situate my work within the borderlands school. As Brian DeLay has written, “Borderlands history. is most fundamentally the history of a spatial context: of places where people interacted across multiple, independent political and legal systems. Put more succinctly, borderlands are zones of plural sovereignty.” In North American Borderlands, p. 3. See also “Middle Grounds, Borderlands, and Frontiers” in Pekka Hamalainen and Benjamin H. Johnson, eds., Major Problems in the History of North American Borderlands (Boston: Wadsworth, 2012), pp. 83-131. !6 complicated, and contested, and can even be seen very clearly in the history of removal, which is often used as the primary example of the moment when the U.S. federal government achieved a new level of control over Native people. Spanning areas of the present-day states of Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri, the Old Southwest was technically bought by the United States as part of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, yet it remained an expansive borderlands space where no single polity exercised complete sovereignty. For decades after the purchase the federal government had very little knowledge about this southwestern region or the Native peoples who lived there. My dissertation shows that what knowledge federal officials in the West did gain about their surroundings was rarely applied to policy decisions or passed down to the federal agents who followed them, partly because of the high turnover rate for western Indian agents and also because, despite numerous attempts at reform, the administrative structure of Indian affairs remained a complicated system with an unclear chain of command.4 In 1789, the newly-established federal government took control of Indian affairs from the states, assuming that the United States had inherited Britain’s claims to ultimate sovereignty over most of North America, a right that was legally termed the “doctrine of discovery.” Thus federal officials began signing dozens of treaties with Native nations, most of which contained provisions for land cessions in addition to the usual platitudes about peace and eternal friendship.