Caddo Nation and Osage: The Less-Told Removals

The Cherokee Trail of Tears has a name and a date and a sustained place in American historical memory. The removals of the Caddo and the Osage from Arkansas territory do not, which is itself a historical fact worth naming.

The Caddo Confederacy, a network of related nations, occupied the Red River valley of southwestern Arkansas and adjacent portions of Louisiana and Texas before European contact. The Osage held territory across northwestern Arkansas and into Missouri and Kansas. Both were significant presences in the region for centuries before the American republic existed. Both were progressively displaced through a series of treaties and military pressures in the early decades of the nineteenth century, removed westward as American settlement expanded under the Indian Removal Act and its predecessors.

Their removals proceeded without the catastrophic single event that marks the Cherokee dispossession in popular history. There was no single winter crossing, no named trail. There were treaties, pressure, incremental land cessions, broken agreements, and the gradual impossibility of remaining in a place that had been legally transferred to people who wanted you gone. The process took longer and generated fewer martyrs for subsequent remembrance. The result was the same.

Both nations survive. The Caddo Nation is federally recognized and maintains tribal government operations in Binger, Oklahoma. The Osage Nation is federally recognized in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, and has, more recently, become known through the documented murders of Osage citizens for oil money that David Grann has written about. Their histories in Arkansas are the beginning of stories that continue elsewhere.