The Quapaw, Downstream People of the Arkansas

Before Little Rock was a city, before it was a name on a surveyor's map, the land along the Arkansas River belonged to the Quapaw. They called themselves Ugakhpah, the downstream people, and their villages clustered where the rivers ran widest and most generous. The Quapaw had a complex history with European contact that stretched back to Hernando de Soto's entrada in fifteen forty-one.

They survived those first, catastrophic encounters when epidemic disease swept through the interior. By the time French explorer Henri de Tonti traveled down the Mississippi in sixteen eighty-six, the Quapaw were still here, still farming the rich bottomlands, still maintaining towns that could accommodate hundreds of people. The French built Fort Arkansas near a Quapaw village and formalized a relationship that would shape the next century.

What the Quapaw received from these alliances was protection of a limited and unreliable kind. What they gradually lost was land. In eighteen eighteen and again in eighteen twenty-four, the United States pressed the Quapaw into treaties that took nearly all of their land.

After the second treaty they tried to settle along the Red River, where repeated floods left them starving, and a treaty in eighteen thirty-four moved them to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. A portion of the community, unwilling to leave, stayed on in Arkansas outside the boundaries of any treaty for years. Today the Quapaw Nation is headquartered in Quapaw, Oklahoma, where the tribe has built a substantial economic base including the Downstream Casino.

They maintain their language, their ceremonies, and their connection to the Arkansas River valley. In two thousand and seven, the state of Arkansas formally apologized for the removal. The little rock they named by absence is still here; so are they.