The North Little Rock Site on the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail:
Historical Contexts Report

In early 1831, in anticipation of Choctaw removal, editor William E. Woodruff of the Arkansas Gazette published a lengthy editorial addressed “to the Farmers, Graziers, and Salt Manufacturers, of Arkansas.”  He wrote in response to the announcement by George Gibson, U. S. Commissary General of Subsistence, that the government would make contracts with local suppliers for subsistence and forage for removal parties during their journey and for subsistence for the people after they arrived in their new lands. Woodruff saw Indian removal as a major economic opportunity for Arkansas.  “The subsistence of such a vast number of Indians,” he wrote, “will give profitable employment to our farmers, by furnishing an excellent market for all the beef, pork, corn &c. that they can raise, and at prices that will afford them a better reward for their labor than the raising of cotton, at the present depressed price of that article.”  Woodruff outlined the likely routes the Choctaws would take through the territory, and urged farmers in those areas to shift their crop priorities in the approaching planting season.  He closed his editorial by saying that the Indians “must necessarily scatter large sums of money through our Territory in procuring the means of subsistence on their journey, and we hope our citizens will look well to their interest in providing themselves with a sufficient surplus of provisions to meet the demands of the emigrants.  The receipts from those sources will prove a very seasonable relief to those who complain of the hard times and scarcity of money.”¹

            The editor was remarkably farsighted in his assessment of the economic prospects.  Removal proved to be not only an economic boon to Arkansas in the short run but left its mark long run on the history of the state through social, political, and economic attitudes it left in its wake.

            In the short run, Indian removal pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into the cash-poor economy that the Gazette editor spoke about.  Most of the contracts for supplying rations for Indians and forage for livestock went to Arkansas farmers, livestock growers, and merchants.  Beef contracts, for instance, in 1832 went exclusively to Arkansans, who supplied 1,024,000 pounds of beef at an average price of $3.16 ¾ per hundred weight.  Arkansans received the contracts not only for removal parties moving through the state, but some successfully bid for contracts to supply rations to the Indians after they reached the West.  Only in times of short supply or suspected price gouging did the United States go outside the local markets for subsistence.  Disbursing agents who attended removal parties could exercise that option as Joseph A. Phillips urged during Choctaw removal in 1833 when corn was $2 a bushel in Arkansas but a dollar or less in Memphis.  Phillips concluded it was less expensive to buy it there and transport it than to have it supplied at ration depots in Arkansas at the higher price.²

            Supply of rations placed constant demand on Arkansas producers.  Daily rations remained standard throughout removal:  three-quarters pound of fresh beef, pork, or bacon; three-quarters quart of corn or corn meal.  Prices were slightly higher along the road from Little Rock to Fort Towson than the route from Rock Roe to Indian Territory, the difference relating, without doubt, to the productivity of the soil in each area.  The average price per ration in the territory in 1832 was 6 cents, 6 mills.  Corn averaged $1.70 a bushel and fodder $2 per hundred weight.  Prices remained steady throughout the period, in part, because from the beginning, farmers responded to the demands.  In anticipation of removal, in 1831, for example, farmers in the upper Arkansas River valley shifted to corn production.  G. J. Rains reported from Fort Smith, “Every farmer in the vicinity of this place has raised corn, under the expectation of finding a market for it when the Indians come on.  The past season was very propitious to cultivation in this region, so that you may rely upon the fact that one hundred thousand bushels can be obtained and delivered at this place at seventy-five cents per bushel, or any lesser quantity can be gotten in the neighborhood at fifty cents.”³ For the better part of a decade, farmers in the best agricultural region of Arkansas refrained from cotton production, unlike those in other Southern states, and built their agricultural economy around Indian removal.

            It was not just farmers who profited from removal.  When removal of a tribe was anticipated, contractors went to work.  “The whole population on the route were rallied; and put into employ,” according to Capt. Jacob Brown, “—some building cribs, others hauling corn, collecting and herding beeves, &c.”  Teamsters hired out themselves and their teams and wagons to haul subsistence and forage to ration depots or the Indians’ baggage from place to place. Those with their own teams could earn $5 a day. The extent of operation depended on the number of emigrants, teams, pack horses, and oxen expected to move past the supply depots or “stands” as they were called.  If removal failed to take place, as with the Creeks in 1834 and the Seminoles in 1835, contractors stood to lose money rather than make it.⁴

            Some individuals enriched themselves by engaging in a number of such services.  A good example was William E. Woodruff, owner of the Arkansas Gazette and, after 1834, owner of the lower ferry at the North Little Rock site.  As editor he received contracts to publish public notices related to removal, and his print shop generated many of the forms used by government officials.  As well, in 1834, he had a teamster trade, hauling such items as a smith’s forge and annuity iron for the Choctaws to the steamboat landing at Little Rock.  He also was a contractor for rations.  In 1835 he supplied Muscogee rations issued at William Strong’s near the St. Francis.⁵

            The ferry business, of course, was a lucrative trade.  Some samples of his business during the Chickasaw removal will illustrate.  He charged a dollar a wagon and twelve and a half cents for a foot passenger, a horse, or an ox.  When the Chickasaws were indecisive in the summer of 1837 about whether to go to the Red River country or to the northwest, J. M. Millard convinced some of them to return across the river and go with him upstream.  Woodruff and his partner literally made money “coming and going.” He did the same on November 28 when he ferried 166 Chickasaws, 8 horses, and 5 wagons loaded with provisions across to the Little Rock side.  The Chickasaws changed their minds and crossed back to the north side, and he charged them again.  In December he supplied 153 bushes of corn and 2500 pounds of fodder to the Chickasaws.  In August 1838 he ferried 127 Chickasaws, 238 horses, and 10 wagons as well as a wagon crossing and returning, carrying provisions, and one doing the same, carrying sick Chickasaws.⁶ For years, removal provided Woodruff a steady flow of ready cash, which could go far in a fledgling economy like Arkansas’s.

            One reason local suppliers such as woodruff profited so well is that the office for the disbursing agents for Indian removal west of the Mississippi was in Little Rock.  Men such as Capt. John B. Clark, Capt. Jacob Brown, Lt. S. V. R. Ryan, and Capt. R. D. C. Collins controlled the flow of cash.  In them was vested the power to make contracts and to oversee the provision of goods and services.⁷ Their practice was to keep the cash at home.

            Once Indian removal ended and the cash flow stopped, it left in its wake certain social and political attitudes that had significant implications for the tribes in decades to come.  First was an anti-Indian, specifically an anti-Indian Territory, feeling that developed among the population of Arkansas, particularly in the western half of the state.  Rumors floated in 1832 that the U. S. government intended to give Crawford and Washington counties to the Cherokees as incentive for them to remove.  The rumors were soon laid to rest, but they were unsettling in a state whose citizens had been forced in recent times to retreat east from Lovely’s Purchase and old Miller County that now lay in Indian Territory.  That retreat was a warm issue.  Bills to compensate the Miller County residents had been introduced in 1834.⁸ 

            By 1836, in the midst of the Muscogee removal, the anti-Indian sentiment surfaced.  Rumors of citizen complaints that the Muscogees were stealing their crops and burning their fence rails arose from a lengthy encampment of a large party of Muscogees at the North Little Rock site.  Governor James Conway ordered the Indians on their way and directed officers in charge of any group to move them through the state as expeditiously as possible.  He gave authority to local militias to enforce his edict.  Lt. Edward Deas, in charge of the group in question, countered that economics was at the base of the complaints.  Demand for commodities to provide subsistence for removal had caused prices to rise in local markets; hence the complains, Deas said.⁹

            Deas’ assessment was no doubt accurate, but there were other causes for the rising anti-Indian sentiment.  The establishment of Indian Territory on their western border created a growing sense of vulnerability in Arkansans.  At the time of the Conway-Deas exchange, they were concerned about the effectiveness of only one fort—Fort Gibson—on their western border to oversee all of the Indians concentrated there.  There was a rising specter of Indian war. The Creek “war” of 1836 and the on-going conflict between the United States and the Florida Indians fueled the feeling as did the Texas Revolution.¹⁰

During the next few years, the clamor for defense grew, along with the demand for more forts and a greater military force on the western frontier.¹¹

            In 1838, during Chickasaw removal, the editor of the Gazette expressed a common sentiment among the citizenry.  He asked, “Can there be any thing more unjust and inhuman than the course which our Government is pursuing toward the citizens of Arkansas?  It is sending thousands on thousands of Indians to be our immediate neighbors, and the greater portion of them have been driven from their homes east of the Mississippi, at the point of a bayonet, and come here with the most embittered feelings toward the white people generally.”¹² Such inflamed rhetoric had clearly a political purpose, but it was common in the period.  In commenting on a party of Florida Indians that passed up the river in 1841, the editor wrote, “It does not afford us any pleasure to record the arrival of treacherous enemies on our border; neither is it a pleasing task to be continually but justly, calling on the Government to send us a force adequate to the protection of the frontier; upon which she is concentrating an immense number of the sworn enemies of the white man. . . . One thing they may be certain, should they attempt any warlike movement in their new home, that they have not the swamps and hammocks of Florida to hide in; and that the frontiersmen of Arkansas know every nook and hiding place so well, that the utter extermination of the Indian would follow any depredations committed by them on our citizens.”¹³

            Concerns for defense were no doubt genuine, but there was also an economic motive behind the demand for active forts.  In the flurry of militia mobilization that had occurred during the revolution in Texas had come a demand for goods.  Money could be made as well from supplying an army as supplying Indians marching through the state.  But instead of the need for a larger military presence, the opposite soon became obvious.  Though Fort Smith was reactivated in 1839, Fort Wayne, built in 1838, was abandoned.¹⁴ Thus at the time Indian removal was slowing down and the economic boon it represented nearing an end, the economic prospect of supplying a line of forts along the western border faded.

            Indian Territory represented not only a failed economic opportunity but was looked at ultimately as a barrier to the economic progress of Arkansas.  A good example was the inability of Arkansas to enter the Santa Fe trade.  In September 1837, the Arkansas Gazette ran a story about a company of Missouri traders who had returned with $100,000 in gold and silver.  This caused John Drennen of Crawford County to write:  “How is it that the good people of Arkansas permit Missouri to monopolize this trade?  It has kept specie plenty in that State, given wealth to many individuals, and made her capital a port of entry.  Why do we close our eyes against these advantages?”  Santa Fe lay directly west from Fort Gibson, he observed, yet the Santa Fe trade route went around Arkansas in a circuitous route.¹⁵

Indian Territory was an unyielding barrier to a direct Santa Fe route.  In a like manner, during the great migration of Americans to the far west in the 1850s, much of the stream of wagon trains that brought people and money into unsettled areas bypassed Arkansas, mostly going to the north because of Indian Territory.  Later, the territory became a barrier to east-west railroad construction.  For some months in 1858, for example, there was national interest in building a transcontinental railroad along the thirty-fifth parallel, and a route was surveyed as far as Albuquerque.  For a time, the prospect generated a good deal of local excitement around Fort Smith, a likely starting point for the road.¹⁶ However, acquisition of railroad right-of-way through Indian Territory was problematic.  Indian resistance was so strong that no railroad passed through Indian Territory until the early 1870s and that from north to south.  An east-to-west railroad was much later in coming. 

By the last two decades of the century, the resentment against Indian Territory informed the political agenda of Arkansans in Congress who were intent on liquidating the tribal title to the land, closing down the tribal governments, and allotting the land in severalty.  To the Indians, it was reminiscent of events leading up to removal.  Congressman Jordan Cravens of Clarksville, whose family had made money supplying subsistence to Indians during removal, first initiated legislation to liquidate the Cherokee title to their last parcel of trust land in the state—the old Cherokee Agency reserve.  The task was completed by Senator James K. Jones of Washington and Congressman Clifton R. Breckenridge of Pine Bluff.¹⁷

The role of the latter two and other Arkansas politicians in dissolving the tribal nations is undisputable.  Key figures were Senator James H. berry of Bentonville, Congressman Hugh A. Densmore of Bentonville, Governor William Fishback of Fort Smith, Congressman John S. Little of Sebastian County, and Congressman Thomas S. McRae of Prescott.  When the Dawes Commission was established in 1893 with a mission to dissolve the tribal nations, Jones was chair of the Senate committee on Indian Affairs, Berry was chair of the Senate committee on territories, and McRae was the chair of the House committee on public lands.  Archibald McKennon of Clarksville, brother-in-law to Berry, was a member of the Dawes Commission and an author of the Curtis Act of 1898.  Breckenridge also served on the Dawes Commission.  Of these figures, McRae, Fishback, and McKennon were the most virulent in their verbal attacks on the tribal leadership and government.¹⁸ There is, without question, a direct relationship between the growing anti-Indian sentiment that surfaced during removal and the breakup of Indian Territory, followed by what former Cherokee Chief Wilma Mankiller has called the “Dark Ages” of tribal history.

Indian removal through Arkansas also established the financial foundation for the social and political base of certain Arkansas families.  The Cravens family mentioned above got its start by supplying rations and forage for removal parties moving up the Arkansas River valley.  In the late nineteenth century some of them practiced law in Fort Smith before moving to Muskogee, Creek Nation, where they did legal work in Indian allotments and other resources.

Another good example is Samuel M. Rutherford, an early settler of Clarke County, who served as sheriff there. In 1831 he was in partnership with Samson Gray of Bayou Meto to supply rations for the Choctaws.  In January 1832 he was named assistant agent for removal and conductor of Netachache’s party of Choctaws from Little Rock to Fort Towson.  In 1833 in partnership with Gray and David Rorer, he helped construct part of the new road from the Little Rock ferry to Bayou Meto. In 1835 he became U. S. marshal for the Indian Territory, working out of the federal court at Little Rock.  And by the 1850s he had become the U. S. agent for the Seminoles.¹⁹ His steady climb in the “Indian business” laid the groundwork for his son, Samuel M. Rutherford, Jr., who first practiced law in Fort Smith and then moved to Muskogee, Creek Nation, where he became mayor and a prime mover for allotment of Indian land and dissolution of the tribal nations.

Others like Samson Gray, James Irwin, William Strong, and William E. Woodruff, as well as government officials overseeing removal used the money they made from removal to create banking and real estate enterprises.  Captain Jacob Brown, for years the disbursing agent for removal at Little Rock, was elected president of the Bank of Arkansas in November of 1836 while still holding his army position.  A year later, under fire, he resigned from the bank.  In the interim, the U. S. War Department had invested Choctaw funds in the bank, and Brown had arranged a $300,000 bond sale to the War Department. By then, Brown had extensive real estate holdings.  Despite the panic of 1837, some of these men were instrumental in establishing the Real Estate Bank of Arkansas in the fall of that year.  Woodruff, James Irwin, William Strong, and Capt. R. D. C. Collins, who replaced Brown as disbursing agent, held positions as board members, directors, or other officers.  Collins became president of the institution in 1839.²⁰ A casual search of the Bureau of Land Management records will reveal extensive land holdings by all of these men.

The town of D’Cantillon that was platted at the North Little Rock site was named for R. D’Cantillon Collins, the disbursing agent.  He was one of the promoters as was Simeon Buckner, the Louisville steamboat owner whose fleet had been used in Chickasaw removal a few months earlier.²¹

The connection between wealth generated by removal and the banking and real estate interests of the new state is strong, and, like the political and social attitudes about Indian resources that grew in the wake of Indian removal, the economic base established by removal guaranteed the political and social status of a number of Arkansas families.  Thus the burden of history passed from one generation to the next.

Notes

1. Arkansas Gazette, February 23, 1831.

2. Arkansas Gazette, May 23 and August 8, 1832; Arkansas Advocate, March 20 and July 3, 1833; 23^rd Congress, 1^st Session, Senate Executive Document 512, I:18, 531, hereafter cited as Document 512.

3. Ibid., I: 825.

4. 26^th Congress, 1^st Session, House Report 503, 7; Arkansas Advocate, December 14, 1835.

5. See, e.g., Monthly Abstracts of Disbursements, August 1834, Choctaw Emigration 268; Report of Agents, 4^th Quarter 1834, Creek Emigration; and Statement of Expenditures, September 30, 1834, Choctaw Emigration 280, all in National Archives Record Group 75, Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Letters Received, Choctaw-1834 and Creek 1834.

6. See, e. g., Receipts No. 9, 26, 50, and 49, Chickasaw Emigration C816-38, National Archives Microfilm Publications M234, Roll 144, National Archives Record Group 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Letters Received.

7. Document 512, I: 47, 57, 111, 113.

8. Arkansas Gazette, May 23, 1832; Arkansas Advocate, April 11, 1834.

9. Arkansas Gazette, December 13, 1830.

10. Ibid.

11. For a detailed history of these demands, see Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr., and Lonnie E. Underhill, “Fort Coffee and Frontier Affairs, 1834-1838,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 52 (Fall 1976):  314-336; Littlefield and Underhill, “Fort Wayne and the Arkansas Frontier, 1838-1840,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 35 (Winter 1976):  335-359.

12. Arkansas Gazette, May 30, 1838.

13. Arkansas Gazette, April 11, 1841.

14. Robert G. Ferris, ed., Soldiers and Braves:  Historic Places Assciated with Indian Affairs and Indian Wars in the Trans-Mississippi West (Washington, DC:  U. S Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1971), 85, 150, 264.

15. Arkansas Gazette, October 10, 1837.

16. See, e. g., Arkansas Intelligencer, July 2 and August 12, 1858.

17. See Littlefield and Underhill, “The Cherokee Agency Reserve, 1828-1886,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 31 (Summer 1972), 166-180.

18. This survey is based on the unpublished research on the Dawes Commission by Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr.

19. Grant Foreman, Indian Removal:  The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians (Norman:  University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), 58, 385; Arkansas Gazette, May 22, 1835; Document 512, I: 73; Arkansas Advocate, May 29, 1845.

20. Arkansas Gazette, October 4 and November 8, 1836, March 28; April 2, June 27, July 11, August 8, September 12, October 17, and  November 14 and 21, 1837, and November 8, 1839.

21. Arkansas Gazette, July  1838.