7
To Civilize the Osages

Soon after Long returned from the upper Mississippi, news of a war between the Osages and the Cherokees reached General Smith’s headquarters at Fort Belle Fontaine. The conflict between the Osages and the Cherokees lay far to the south of Rainy Lake House and Long’s eventual contact with John Tanner and John McLoughlin, but it is relevant to the story in the effect it had on Long’s developing ideas about the Indian frontier. General Smith ordered Long to accompany a force of riflemen under the command of Major William Bradford so as to locate a site for a fort in Osage country (the location of today’s Fort Smith, Arkansas). Bradford’s force would proceed to the upper Arkansas River, build the fort according to Long’s plan, and restore peace between the Osages and the Cherokees. Although Long’s immediate task was to situate and design the fort, as usual he had broader objectives to explore the country and report on the Indians and the white settlements—the latter composed largely of squatters who were trespassing on Indian lands. Long’s report on the Osages would stand as one of his most detailed commentaries on Indian peoples.

The expedition departed St. Louis in September and descended the Mississippi River to the mouth of the Arkansas. Long went with his own crew in his six-oared skiff, while Bradford took his men and supplies downriver in keelboats. From the mouth of the Arkansas, Long went ahead of the slower keelboats and located a site for the post, the future Fort Smith, which he called Belle Point. He also made observations of the river valley and continued on upstream to its head of navigation in present-day northeast Oklahoma.¹

While exploring the upper Arkansas he encountered an Osage war party. He informed this party of the approach of US troops and invited them to a council one month hence for the purpose of making peace between themselves and the Cherokees. Long then returned to Belle Point and made a plan of construction for the fort. In early December he left with an escort of two soldiers and a guide and traveled over the Ouachita Mountains to the Red River of the South, where the guide left the party by prior agreement and Long and the two soldiers turned homeward.²

The first leg of their return trip was hellish. Reentering the Ouachita Mountains, Long soon found himself in a “wilderness country” of broken hills and numerous streams swollen by heavy winter rains. Each stream crossing presented the men with a perilous choice between wading and swimming or expending the time and energy to build a raft. Every forest opening presented another tough slog through head-high canebrakes. They spent over half a month covering a straight-line distance of about 100 miles, and finally fetched up at a large cluster of hot springs on the Ouachita River at dusk on New Year’s Eve. It was one day past Long’s thirty-third birthday, and he was grateful to have gotten himself and his escort through the mountains alive. On New Year’s Day they rested and examined the springs, taking the temperature of the waters, which ranged from 64 to 151 degrees Fahrenheit.³

The remainder of their overland journey through present-day Arkansas was relatively easy. There were many farmsteads. A census the previous summer had counted nearly 2,000 white inhabitants, but Long met with so many new immigrants that he reckoned the population closer to 3,000. He thought the “rich & luxuriant soil” would be good for growing cotton, and the many small creeks well suited for watermills. Long’s line of march took him past the White and St. Francis rivers to the Mississippi. Striking the Mississippi at the hamlet known as Herculaneum, he ascended the great river back to St. Louis.⁴

In his report of this, his third expedition, Long gave most of his attention to US Indian policy and the Osages. Long was already familiar with the Osages by reputation, for they were the most powerful Indian nation in the region and they held a dominant position in the fur trade south of the Missouri River. At the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the Osages numbered perhaps 5,000 and their territory covered a large part of the present states of Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. They had long been allied with the French and Spanish in the fur trade, and they had plentiful hunting grounds on the edge of the Great Plains. But in the years after the Louisiana Purchase the tribe had become beleaguered by enemies on all sides. The Americans pressed on the Osage territory from the east, while the Pawnees and other enemy tribes, armed with guns by the Spanish, encroached on their hunting grounds from the west. Most troublesome of all, waves of Cherokee emigrants, having acquiesced to American demands to leave their homes in the East and resettle on the Arkansas River, pushed into Osage territory in the Ozark Hills north of the Arkansas River. Warring between the Osages and the western Cherokees became incessant. In 1816, US Indian agent William Lovely brought the chiefs of the Osages and Cherokees together in council and offered to settle all US claims for Osage depredations in return for a cession of their territory that would serve as a buffer between the two tribes. But in spite of the so-called Lovely Purchase, the Osages continued to raid Cherokee farms. The western Cherokee chiefs decided to take matters into their own hands and mount a war of extermination against their Osage enemies. Raising an army of about 600 men, composed mainly of Cherokees, Shawnees, Delawares, and Quapaws, and including eleven white settlers, the Cherokee-led force advanced up the Arkansas and Grand rivers to attack the largest of the Osage villages. Accounts varied as to what happened next. Some accounts stated that the Osage men of warrior age were away hunting while the women, children, and old men were left in the village; others stated that the warriors fled to the hills and the women, children, and old men hid in a cave. The accounts agreed that the Cherokees and their allies slaughtered the defenseless Osages whom they found there and then burned the village. Reports of the conflict reached General Smith at Fort Belle Fontaine about the time that Long returned from his expedition to the upper Mississippi.⁵

The Osages were divided into three bands known as the Big Osages, the Little Osages, and an offshoot known as Clermont’s band. The latter group had formed around the leader Clermont and had come to outnumber the other two divisions, and it was this group that bore the brunt of the conflict with the Cherokees. Long was aware of the internal divisions within the tribe, but in his view the United States had to treat with all the Osages as one people and he regarded Clermont as the tribe’s principal chief.⁶

Long found that the Osages’ grievances against the United States revolved around the Lovely Purchase. The agreement purportedly included more land than the tribe had intended to sell. Although Clermont had signed the agreement, he felt he had been deceived by the interpreter. Moreover, Lovely had acted on his own initiative without instructions from the US government. The tribe, so far as Long could discern, was unaware that the Lovely Purchase had no legal standing unless it was ratified by Congress.⁷

William Lovely had died the previous February, so it was necessary for Long to piece together information about the purchase from his parley with the Osages and interviews with white settlers. He definitely relied more on the latter, for his account of the Osage tribe’s attitude toward local whites reflected the settlers’ bias. He stated that the Osages had invited the Americans to settle on their lands, become their neighbors, and teach the tribesmen how to cultivate the ground and the women how to spin and weave. The Osages frequently expressed a desire “to change their mode of life,” Long reported, and showed a “high regard for the attainments of Americans.” They had observed how the Cherokees kept farms in imitation of the whites, and wanted to obtain those same advantages for themselves. Supposedly they saw the necessity of adopting the white people’s ways so that they could survive when their hunting grounds were depleted. No other Indian nation in the Mississippi valley, Long reported, showed such a strong inclination to advance from savagery to civilization. No other Indians with whom he was acquainted were more deserving of the US government’s “humane exertions” to help them assimilate. Unfortunately, it seemed that William Lovely had led the Osages to believe that the purchase would be opened exclusively to white settlers, not Cherokees. The Osages were upset to find that the Americans were allowing Cherokees to move in and hunt in the purchase area.⁸

Long’s analysis of the triangular relationship between the Osages, the Cherokees, and the Americans was fairly accurate, but he revealed his bias in favor of the white settlers. The white population squatting on Indian lands on the upper Arkansas and upper White rivers at this time were hardly the culture bearers and teachers that Long imagined them to be. Although the white homesteaders might run a few head of livestock and raise a small amount of corn, their main object was to hunt and trap animals for their hides and furs. Some had tanneries in which they prepared buffalo hides for market, transporting the hides and tallow to New Orleans. One contemporary traveler said that these inhabitants were living off the country much like Indians; another claimed that a significant portion of them were renegades from justice. William Lovely, the former Indian agent, described the white population in 1813 in the most disparaging terms: “All the white folks, a few excepted, have made their escape to this country guilty of the most horrid crimes and are now depredating on the Osages and other tribes, taking off 30 horses at a time.”⁹ Long took a more charitable view of them, saying that they had not yet had time to put in crops. These people’s reliance on hunting and trading was only temporary, as they wanted to “raise an honest livelihood from the cultivation of the soil.”¹⁰

Long stated that the United States had three military objectives in the area. First, it must prevent further strife between the Osages and the Cherokees. Second, it needed to prevent whites from trespassing on the hunting grounds of the Indians. Third, it had to protect the white settlements from depredations by the Indians. He thought that the future Fort Smith would be adequate to keep peace on the upper Arkansas, but the remote hill country north of the Arkansas would require a chain of forts linked by a military road. Further, the United States should make another land cession treaty with the Osages in order to legitimize the Lovely Purchase. With these actions, white settlers would come into the area and develop an agriculture-based economy. By moving the frontier of settlement westward in this region, the United States would secure its control of the Mississippi River valley all the way from New Orleans to St. Louis.¹¹

In Long’s view, what was good for the United States was good for the Osages. As white farmers moved into their neighborhood, the Osages would adopt the whites’ way of life and become civilized. As the new agricultural economy replaced the tribe’s dependence on the hunt, the fur trade would quickly fade into insignificance.

When Long looked northward to the tribes on the upper Mississippi and upper Missouri, his outlook was less sanguine. The agricultural frontier would advance more slowly in the colder climate found at that higher latitude, denying tribes like the Sioux the opportunity to learn farming the way the Cherokees and Osages were doing. For those Northwest tribes, the fur trade would have to form some kind of a bridge as Indians negotiated the difficult road from savagery to civilization.