HISTORY69 - Native Americans in the Lower Mississippi River Valley

Pat and I were looking forward to a Spring 2023 cruise on the Lower Mississippi River from New Orleans to Memphis.  In preparation for that adventure, I previously wrote about the history of the Mississippi River (February 27, 2022) and the history of New Orleans (April 15, 2022).  I planned on this article covering the history of Native Americans in the Lower Mississippi River Valley, and then following that with an article on the history of Memphis.  Unfortunately, our trip was cancelled during the writing of this article.  I decided to complete the article anyway.  You never know …

 

After a short introduction to the Lower Mississippi River, I will cover the first peoples in the area, then over 5,000 years of impressive Mound Builder cultures, the first European contact, post contact Native American cultures, the ensuing Indian wars, and Indian removals, in which Native Americans lost their heritage lands.  I will conclude with a snapshot of Native Americans in the Lower Mississippi River Valley today.

My principal sources include Atlas of the North American Indian by Carl Waldman; “Native American Archaic Cultures,” and “Mississippian Culture,” britannica.com; “Mound Builders,” “Watson Brake,” “Hopewell Tradition,” “Mississippian Culture,” “Chucalissa,” “Winterville Site,” and “List of Indian Reservations in the United States,” wikipedia.com; “Hopewell Culture,” crt.state.la.us; “Mississippian Culture,” courses.lumenlearning.com; “Southeast Culture Area,” kids.britannica.com; “Profile: American Indian / Alaska Native,” minorityhealth.hhs.gov; and numerous other online sources.

Introduction

The Mississippi River is one of the world’s major river systems in size, habitat diversity, and biological productivity.  It is also one of the world's most important commercial waterways and one of North America's great migration routes for both birds and fishes.  The Mississippi River began flowing some 70 million years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the planet. 

The Mississippi River is the second longest river in North America, flowing 2,340 miles from its source at Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota, generally south through the center of the continental United States to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. 

Generally, the Lower Mississippi River is defined as the portion of the river downstream of Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio River joins the Mississippi, some 954 miles from the Gulf of Mexico.  For the purposes of this article, I will refer to the portion of the Mississippi River downstream of Memphis, Tennessee as the Lower Mississippi, a river distance of 737 miles.

 

The Lower Mississippi River - between Memphis and the Gulf of Mexico.

 

First Peoples

The Lower Mississippi River basin was first settled by ancient hunting - gathering people about 10,000 years ago.   During the Archaic period, from 8000 BC to 1000 BC, these first peoples transitioned from hunting large mammals and exploitation of nuts, seeds, and shellfish, to hunting smaller animals, and sedentary farming.  Evidence of early cultivation of sunflower, goosefoot, marsh elder plants for seeds, and indigenous squash, dates to the 4^th millennium BC. 

Mound Builders

A number of pre-Columbian cultures in today’s Eastern United States are collectively termed Mound Builders.  The term does not refer to a specific people or archaeological culture, but refers to the characteristic mound earthworks they erected.  Geographically, the cultures were present in the region of the Great Lakes, the Ohio River Valley, and the Mississippi River valley and its tributary waters. 

I’m going to focus on those Mound Builder cultures that were present or had significant influence in the Lower Mississippi River Valley.  These cultures span the period of roughly 3500 BC to the 16^th century AD - covering over 5000-years of Native American history prior to first contact with Europeans.  These cultures include the so-called Watson Brake, Poverty Point, Hopewell, and Mississippian Cultures.

Watson Brake.  The first mound building was an early marker of political and social complexity among the cultures in the Southeastern United States.  Watson Brake is the oldest, largest, and most complex of these early mound sites in North America. 

Watson Brake is located in the floodplain of the Ouachita River, near present-day Monroe in northern Louisiana, about 90 miles west of the Mississippi River and today’s town of Vicksburg, Mississippi.

Minor earthworks were begun there around 3500 BC, and continued in stages until sometime after 3000 BC.  The mound complex consists of an oval formation of 11 earthwork mounds from three to 25 feet in height, connected by ridges to form an oval nearly 900 feet across.  Watson Brake is older than the Ancient Egyptian pyramids or Britain’s Stonehenge.

Artist’s conception of Watson Brake mound complex.

 

Watson Brake’s discovery and dating in a paper published in 1997 changed the ideas of American archaeologists about ancient cultures in the Southeastern United States, and their ability to manage large, complex projects.  The mound complex was developed over centuries by a hunter-gatherer society, rather than by what was known to be more common of other, later mound sites: a more sedentary society dependent on maize cultivation and with a hierarchical, centralized government.  Most archeologists today agree that local natural resources were abundant enough to support mound builders and that permanent status hierarchies were not necessary to get the job done.

Watson Brake demonstrates that the pre-agricultural, pre-ceramic, indigenous cultures within the territory of the present-day United States were much more complex than previously thought.  While primarily hunter-gatherers, they planned and organized large work forces over centuries to accomplish the complex mound and ridge constructions.  Workers dug up tons of earth with the hand tools available, moved the soil long distances, and created the shape with layers of soil.

Waste dump remains show that the population relied on fish, shellfish, and riparian animals, supplemented by local annuals: goosefoot, knotweed, and possibly marsh elder.  Over time, the people consumed animals such as deer, turkey, raccoon, opossum, squirrel, and rabbits - likely related to changing habitat and waterway conditions.

Lacking pottery, the inhabitants heated gravel to cook with.  Hot rocks were either used in hearths to provide a long-lasting heat source, or they were used to “stone boil” liquids in containers like leather bags or gourds.

Watson Brake appears to have been abandoned around 2800 BC.  After that, no mounds were built in the Lower Mississippi River Valley for more than a thousand years, until the Poverty Point site arose and brought mound building to new heights.

Poverty Point.  The Poverty Point Culture, a hunter-gathering society, inhabited a portion of the Lower Mississippi River Valley and surrounding Gulf Coast from about 1730 - 500 BC.  Archeologists have identified more than 100 sites belonging to this mound-builder culture.  The people occupied villages that extended for nearly 100 miles on either side of the Mississippi River, mostly in today’s state of Louisiana, but some in southern Arkansas and southern Mississippi.

The Poverty Point site itself, located near today’s town of Epps in northeastern Louisiana, about 50 miles northeast of Watson Brake, was the “cultural capital” of the region.  Other people in the area shared the Poverty Point Culture, but they lived at smaller sites, built smaller mounds, and had fewer fancy artifacts than at Poverty Point.

Poverty Point Culture settlements extended over 100 miles on both sides of the Lower Mississippi River.

 

The earthworks at Poverty Point are the oldest earthworks of this size in the Western Hemisphere.  In the center of the site is a plaza covering about 37 acres.  Archeologists believe the plaza was the site of public ceremonies, rituals, dances, games, and other major community activities.

The huge site has six concentric earthworks, separated by ditches, or swales, where dirt was removed to build a ridge structure. The ends of the outermost ridge are three-quarters of a mile apart.  The ends of the interior embankment are over a third of mile apart.  Originally, the ridges stood four to six feet high and 140 to 200 feet apart.  Archeologists believe that the homes of 500 to 1,000 inhabitants were located on these ridges.  Poverty Point’s design, with multiple mounds and C-shaped ridges, is not found anywhere else.

Poverty Point was the largest settlement at that time in North America. The site also had a 50-foot high, 500-foot-long earthen pyramid, which was aligned east to west.  A large bird effigy mound, measuring 70 feet high and 640 feet across, is also located on the site.  Additionally, the site had five smaller conical mounds four to 21 feet high.  No other hunting and gathering society made mounds at this scale anywhere else in the world.  Unlike later mound builders, Poverty Point residents did not use any of their mounds for burials.

Artist’s conception of the huge Poverty Point site.

 

Many people lived, worked, and held special events at this huge site over hundreds of years. This has led some to call it North America’s first city.

Archeological excavation has revealed a wealth of artifacts, including animal effigy figures, hand-molded baked-clay cooking objects, simple thick-walled pottery, stone vessels, spear points, axes, hoes, drills, edge-retouched flakes, and blades.  Stone cooking balls were used to prepare meals. Scholars believe dozens of the cooking balls were heated in a bonfire and dropped in pits along with food.  Different-shaped balls regulated cooking temperatures and cooking time.  Artifacts of crude human figures are thought to have been used for religious purposes. 

Poverty Point was at the heart of a huge trade network, the largest in North America at that time.  This is unusual because the people did not grow crops or raise animals for food.  Weights were fashioned out of heavy iron ore imported from Hot Springs, Arkansas, to sink fish nets. Points made of imported gray Midwestern flint were also found.  Many of the raw materials used, such as slate, copper, galena, jasper, quartz, and soapstone, were from as far as 620 miles away, attesting to the distant reach of the trading culture.

The Poverty Point Culture developed a tradition of making high-quality, stylized, carved, and polished miniature stone beads. The beads depicted animals common to the Poverty Point Culture's environment, such as owls, dogs, locusts, and turkey vultures.

The city flourished through 1100 BC, but the population seems to have declined after this time, and the city was abandoned sometime before 500 BC. 

Hopewell Culture.  About 200 BC, the Hopewell Culture began to flourish along rivers in what is now Illinois and Ohio.  Hopewell groups shared four traits.  First, they built groups of mounds and embankments, some of which covered hundreds of acres and reached 50 feet in height.  Second, they had elaborate graves inside some mounds.  Third, they made artifacts of materials that came from far away.  Fourth, they made special styles of decorated pots and pipes.

Hopewell society was hierarchical and village-based; surplus food was controlled by elites who used their wealth to support highly skilled artisans and the construction of elaborate earthworks.  An outstanding feature of Hopewell Culture was a tradition of placing elaborate burial goods in the tombs of individuals or groups.  The interment process involved the construction of a large box-like log tomb, the placement of the body or bodies and grave offerings inside, the immolation of the tomb and its contents, and the construction of an earthen mound over the burned materials. 

Artifacts found within these burial mounds indicate that the Hopewell obtained large quantities of goods from widespread localities in America - including obsidian and grizzly bear teeth from as far away as the Rocky Mountains; copper from the northern Great Lakes; and conch shells and other materials from the southeast and along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

Many Hopewell groups practiced agriculture, growing a variety of crops, including corn, beans, and squash.  Their extensive villages usually near water, consisted of circular oval dome-roofed wigwams, covered with animal skins.

Hopewell ideas swept across most of eastern America and down the Mississippi Valley to the Gulf of Mexico, including the Miller and Markville Cultures in the Lower Mississippi River Valley.  (See the map below.)  Each community decided which customs to follow and how to change them to fit their way of life. 

The Hopewell Tradition (200 BC - AD 500) spread from Ohio and Illinois to the Midwest and most of eastern America.

 

The Hopewell tradition was not a single society but a widely dispersed set of populations connected by a common network of trade routes, that lasted until about AD 500.

Miller Culture. The Miller Culture was located in the upper Tombigbee Rover drainage areas of southwestern Tennessee, northeastern Mississippi, and west-central Alabama.  Some sites associated with the Miller Culture had large platform mounds.  Archaeologist speculate the mounds were for feasting rituals.  In about AD 1000, the Miller Culture area was absorbed into the succeeding Mississippian Culture.

Marksville Culture. The Marksville Culture was located in the Lower Mississippi Valley, Yazoo valley, and Tensas valley areas of present-day Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Arkansas. It is named for the Marksville Site in Marksville, Louisiana.

The Hopewell customs followed at Marksville were 1) mounds and embankments, 2) burial traditions, and 3) pottery decorations.

The Marksville site in central Louisiana had six mounds and one ring enclosed by a C-shaped earthen ridge.  One of the mounds at Marksville was a burial mound.  Some of the tombs in this mound were built with logs and cane mats.

Other earthworks, including a circle and more rings, are outside the embankment.  Marksville covered at least 60 acres and was the largest site in use in Louisiana at that time.  It was a place where people gathered for ceremonies and to mourn the dead; no houses have been found at Marksville.  People used the site from AD 1 to AD 400.

Pottery is the major example of the long-lasting effect that Hopewell traditions had in Louisiana.  Other Hopewell traits were less widely adopted in this region.  For example, earthen embankments and elaborate tombs in mounds were very rare, and Marksville is unusual because it had these.

Marksville people gathered certain plants; harvested wild grapes, persimmons, and berries; and hunted deer and rabbits.  In the forests east of the site, nuts like acorns and pecans were available.   Although Hopewell people to the north at this time grew some crops in gardens, the people at Marksville did not. They ate only wild plants. They also hunted animals like turtle and birds.  Nearby rivers allowed for fishing and gathering fresh water clams.

Note:  From here on in this paper, I’m dropping the anno Domini (AD) notation for dates.

Mississippian Culture.  About 700, a new advanced agricultural culture arose in the Mississippi River valley between the present-day cities of St. Louis and Vicksburg.  Known as the Mississippian Culture, it rapidly spanned much of the present Midwestern, Eastern, and Southeastern United States, including the Lower Mississippi River valley.

The Mississippian Culture (700-1500) expanded from the middle Mississippi River Valley to the Midwest, the East, and Southeast, including the Lower Mississippi River Valley.

 

A network of trade routes was active along the waterways, spreading common cultural practices over the entire area between the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes.  Agriculture introduced from Mesoamerica, based on maize, beans, and squash, gradually came to dominate. 

Small native villages grew into large towns with highly stratified complex chiefdoms and large populations, with subsidiary villages and farming communities nearby. 

Regional styles of pottery, projectile points, house types, and other utilitarian products reflected diverse ethnic identities.  Notably, however, Mississippian peoples were also united by two factors that cross-cut ethnicity: a common economy that emphasized corn production and a common religion focusing on the veneration of the sun and a variety of ancestral figures.

One of the most outstanding features of Mississippian Culture was the earthen temple mound.  These mounds often rose to a height of several stories and were capped by a flat area, or platform, on which were placed the most important community buildings - council houses and temples.  Platform mounds were generally arrayed around a plaza that served as the community’s ceremonial and social center; the plazas were quite large, ranging from 10 to 100 acres.

Typical Mississippian mound complex.

  

The most striking array of mounds occurred at the Mississippian capital city, Cahokia, located near present-day St. Louis; some 120 mounds were built during the city’s occupation.  Monk’s Mound, the largest platform mound at Cahokia, rises to approximately 100 feet above the surrounding plain and covers some 14 acres.   Cahokia, was occupied from about 600 to 1400 (Cahokia was settled around 600; mound building began with the emergent Mississippian cultural period, around the 9^th century.)  At its peak, the population of Cahokia numbered between 8,000 and 40,000 inhabitants, larger than London, England at that time. 

Artist’s conception of Cahokia, largest and most important of the Mississippian cities.

 

In some areas, large, circular buildings received the remains of the dead, but burial was normally made in large cemeteries or in the floors of dwellings.  Important household industries included the production of mats, baskets, clothing, and a variety of vessels for specialized uses, as well as the creation of regalia, ornaments, and surplus food for use in religious ceremonies.   In some cases, particular communities seem to have specialized in a certain kind of craft activity, such as the creation of a specific kind of pottery or grave offering.  Ritual and religious events were conducted by an organized priesthood that probably also controlled the distribution of surplus food and other goods.  Core religious symbols such as the weeping eye, feathered serpent, owl, and spider were found throughout the Mississippian world.

As the Mississippian Culture developed, people increased the number and complexity of village fortifications, and often surrounded their settlements with timber palisades.  This was presumably a response to increasing intergroup aggression, the impetus for which seems to have included control of land, labor, food, and prestige goods.

The Mississippian peoples had come to dominate the Southeast by about 1200.

By the early 16^th century, Cahokia and many other Mississippian cities had declined.  But, when Europeans first explored the Southeast during that period, the predominant native groups met and described by Spanish and French explorers were remnants of the Mississippian Culture.

Middle Mississippian.  The term Middle Mississippian is also used to describe the core of the classic Mississippian Culture area. This area covers the central Mississippi River Valley, the lower Ohio River Valley, and most of the Mid-South area, including western and central Kentucky, western Tennessee, and northern Alabama and Mississippi.  Sites in this area often contain large ceremonial platform mounds, and residential complexes, and are often encircled by earthen ditches and ramparts or palisades.

Important sites located in, or near, the Lower Mississippi River Valley include:  1) Moundsville, an influential regional political and ceremonial center between the 11^th and 16^th centuries, and 2) Parkin, 30 miles west of present-day Memphis, believed by many archaeologists to have been visited by Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto in 1542 (See below.)

Plaquemine. The Plaquemine culture was located in the Lower Mississippi River Valley in western Mississippi and eastern Louisiana.  A good example of this culture is Winterville, on the Mississippi River, north of Greenville, Mississippi.  It consisted of major earthwork monuments, including more than twelve large platform mounds, and cleared and filled plazas.

Artist’s conception of Winterville in the Lower Mississippi River Valley.

 

First Contact with Europeans

Scholars have studied the records of Spanish conquistador and explorer Hernando de Soto's expedition of 1539 - 1543 to learn of his contacts with Mississippians, as he traveled through their villages of the Southeast.  On a winding route, the de Soto expedition explored the present-day states (in the order listed) of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas.  De Soto arrived at the Mississippi River at a point below Natchez, Mississippi on May 8, 1541.  De Soto was the first European documented to have seen the Mississippi.

Note:  Hernando de Soto (c. 1500 - 21 May, 1542) was involved in early Spanish expeditions in Nicaragua and the Yucatan Peninsula.  He also played an important role in Francisco Pizarro's conquest of the Inca Empire in Peru, but de Soto is best known for leading the first European expedition deep into the Southeastern territory of the modern-day United States.  De Soto died of a fever on 21 May, 1542, about a year after reaching the Mississippi River.  Before his death, de Soto chose Luis de Moscoso Alvarado, his former field commander, to assume command of the expedition, that continued into Arkansas and Texas, then down the Mississippi River, and by sea to Mexico.

Painting of de Soto reaching the Mississippi River on May 8, 1541.

 

The de Soto expedition met many varied Native American groups, most of them bands and chiefdoms related to the widespread Mississippian Culture.  De Soto visited many villages, in some cases staying for a month or longer. Some encounters were violent, while others were relatively peaceful. 

De Soto's encounters left about half of the Spaniards and perhaps many hundreds of Native Americans dead. The chronicles of de Soto are among the first documents written about Mississippian peoples and are an invaluable source of information on their cultural practices.

Following the de Soto expedition, the Mississippian peoples tried to continue their way of life. However, this first contact by Europeans dramatically changed these native societies.  Because the natives lacked immunity to infectious diseases unknowingly carried by the Europeans, such as measles and smallpox, epidemics caused so many fatalities that they undermined the social order of many chiefdoms.  Political structures collapsed in many places.

During the 1500s, the native peoples of the Southeast suffered greatly as the Spanish continued their explorations and sporadic colonization.  Thousands of native people were killed during warfare with explorers.  Thousands more died in epidemics of European diseases.  Many other individuals were captured and traded as slaves. 

Post Contact Native American Cultures (1543 - 1830)

The remnants of the Mississippian groups dispersed from their heritage cities, and over the next years of dramatic cultural change, were reborn in the so-called Southeast Culture area as Native American tribes.  Mississippian peoples were almost certainly ancestral to many of these Native American nations.  Among these Southeast peoples were the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole, which Europeans later called the Five Civilized Tribes.  The map below shows the territory of these tribes circa 1650.

The so-called five civilized Native American tribes in the Southeastern United States, circa 1650.

 

Other prominent tribes in the Lower Mississippi Valley included the Natchez (Louisiana), Caddo (Arkansas), Tunica (Louisiana/Arkansas/Mississippi), Coushatta (southwest Louisiana), Chitimacha (southern Louisiana), and Quapaw (Arkansas).  The Natchez were direct descendants of the Mississippians.  Many other Southeast peoples also inherited cultural traits from the Mississippians, such as the use of ceremonial mounds and a heavy reliance on corn.

The economy of the Southeast tribes was mostly agricultural.  The leading crop was corn, followed by beans and squash.  Southeast peoples also raised sunflowers, which were processed for their oil, and tobacco.  Wild plant foods, including greens, berries, nuts, acorns, and sap, were readily available.  Native peoples also hunted deer, elk, black bears, beavers, squirrels, rabbits, otters, raccoons, and turkeys.

Most of the people lived in small villages, scattered along streams or in river valleys.  At the center of each town was typically a council house or temple.  Often these structures were set atop large earthen mounds, as were the homes of the ruling classes or families.  The heart of a town also included a central plaza or square, and sometimes granaries or other structures for storing communal produce.

Some Southeast communities housed more than 1,000 people, but they more often had fewer than 500 residents.  A village might be linked to neighboring settlements by ties of kinship, language, and shared cultural traditions.  Generally, however, each village was independent and governed its own affairs. In times of need, villages could unite into confederacies, such as those of Choctaw in the Lower Mississippi River Valley.

Painting of a Choctaw village in the Lower Mississippi River Valley.

 

The natives made many items of wood, including bows, arrow shafts, dishes, and spoons.  The inner bark of the mulberry tree was used as thread and rope and in making textiles.  Other important raw materials in the Southeast included bone and stone, which were used to make arrowheads, clubs, axes, scrapers, and other tools.

Southeast tribes obtained copper through trade with western Great Lakes peoples. They worked the metal to create beads, rings, and bracelets.  Shells were used for beads and pendants, and to decorate ritual objects.

A lack of geographic barriers to the north and west allowed significant trade with Northeast and Plains peoples. 

The main division of labor in the Southeast was by gender.  Women were responsible for most farming, gathering wild plant foods, cooking, and preserving food.  They made baskets, pottery, clothing, and other goods.  Women also took care of young children and elders.  Men were responsible for war, trade, and hunting; they were often away from the community for long periods of time. Men also assisted in the harvest, cleared the fields, and built houses and public buildings.  Both women and men made ceremonial objects and took part in building earthen mounds.

Indian Wars

During this period of post contact Native American tribe development, colonization of America by European powers accelerated.

In 1682, French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, canoed down the Mississippi River from the mouth of the Illinois River to the Gulf of Mexico, where he claimed the entire Mississippi River basin for France.  With its first settlements, France lay claim to a vast region of North America and set out to establish a commercial empire and French nation stretching from the Gulf of Mexico through Canada, including the Lower Mississippi River Valley.  Meanwhile the English were expanding their territory on the east coast of America, starting to move westward, while the Spanish claimed Florida.

By the early 1700s, Southeastern Native American tribes found themselves increasingly drawn into wars between European powers over control of North America.  Large tribes, including the Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Cherokee, formed alliances with the Europeans, and they often found themselves pitted against one another.

In 1729, in the Lower Mississippi River Valley, the Natchez revolted against the French living in their midst but were defeated by a combination of French and Choctaw, decimating the Natchez.  From 1720 - 1752, the Chickasaw successfully resisted repeated incursions of the French with their Choctaw allies.

Note:  From 1754 - 1763, the French and English fought the so-called French and Indian War for control of American territory.  The English won the war, and the French lost all of their American territory.

During the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), the long-time pro-British Chickasaw were active against American settlers as far north as Kentucky, and the Chickasaw and Creek helped the British in several engagements along the Lower Mississippi River.

On January 8, 1815, the Battle of New Orleans was fought between the British Army and the United States Army under Brevet Major General Andrew Jackson.  This battle, which the United State won, was the final battle of War of 1812.  Native Americans were important to the American war effort.  Choctaw Indians assisted General Jackson in New Orleans, and Caddo Indians, from North Louisiana, defended the Louisiana-Texas border from invasions originating in Spanish controlled Texas.

Meanwhile, the number of Euro-American colonists in the Southeast grew from perhaps 50,000 in 1690 to 1 million by 1790.  The enslaved African population in the region grew from about 3,000 to 500,000 during the same period.  With these enormous population increases, the Euro-American settlers demanded more land.  They were particularly interested in the large, prosperous farmland owned by the Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw.

The Creek War (1813-1814) began as a conflict among Creek factions, but soon involved Spain, Britain, and the United States.  British traders in Florida, as well as the Spanish government, provided one Creek faction with arms and supplies because of their shared interest in preventing the expansion of the United States into their areas.  Expansionist Americans, fearful that southeastern Indians would ally with the British, quickly joined the war, turning the civil war into a military campaign designed to destroy Creek power.  The U.S. formed an alliance with the Choctaw and Cherokee (both traditional enemies of the Creeks).  The war effectively ended when General Andrew Jackson forced the Creek confederacy to surrender more than 21 million acres in what is now southern Georgia and central Alabama.

In 1817, tensions grew between the Seminoles and settlers in Spanish colonial Florida and the newly independent United States, mainly because enslaved people regularly fled from Georgia into Spanish Florida, prompting slaveowners to conduct slave raids across the border.  A series of cross-border skirmishes escalated into a war with the Seminoles, when General Andrew Jackson led an incursion into the territory over Spanish objections.  Jackson's forces destroyed several Seminole towns and briefly occupied Pensacola before withdrawing in 1818.  The U.S. and Spain soon negotiated the transfer of the Florida territory to the U.S. with the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819.  The U.S. than coerced the Seminoles into leaving their lands in the Florida panhandle for a large Indian reservation in the center of the peninsula.

Indian Removal

American settlers began to call on the federal government for oppressive policies to deal with the Native peoples.  They expanded their efforts after gold was found on Cherokee land in Georgia in 1829.  In 1830 the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which authorized President Andrew Jackson to grant Native tribes unsettled western prairie land in exchange for their desirable land in the East.  The land west of the Mississippi River that was designated for the Indians was called Indian Territory (now Oklahoma).

The Native peoples of the Southeast responded to the Indian Removal Act in a variety of ways.  The Choctaw arranged their departure with federal authorities fairly quickly.  The Chickasaw sold their property and planned their own transportation to their new home.  By 1836, most Creeks had relocated voluntarily or been forced to remove to Indian Territory.  The Cherokee chose to use legal action to resist removal, but the effort went nowhere.

Ultimately, all the southeastern tribes found that resistance to removal was met with military force.  In the decade after 1830, nearly every Native nation from the Southeast moved westward, whether voluntarily or by force.  Along the way they encountered great difficulties and lost many people to exposure, starvation, and illness.  Those who survived the migration named it the Trail of Tears.

From the western side of the Mississippi River Valley, in 1834, the Quapaw were removed to Indian Territory.  In 1835, the Caddo were removed to Texas (then Mexico), and in 1859 were relocated to Indian Territory.

Indian removals from the Southeastern United States.

 

The Seminole fought to defend their Florida peninsular homeland.  A few bands reluctantly complied with the Indian Removal Act, but most resisted violently, leading to a second Seminole War (1835 - 1842).  Most of the Seminole population had been relocated to Indian Country or killed by the mid-1840s, though several hundred settled in southwest Florida, where they were allowed to remain in an uneasy truce. Tensions over the growth of nearby Fort Myers led to renewed hostilities, and the Third Seminole War (1855 - 1858).  By the cessation of active fighting, the few remaining bands of Seminoles in Florida had fled deep into the Everglades to land unwanted by white settlers. Taken together, the Seminole Wars were the longest, most expensive, and most deadly of all American Indian Wars.

Native Peoples Today

Almost 200 years after Native American tribes were removed from the Southeastern United States, they are still located in Indian Territory, now the state of Oklahoma.   This includes the tribes from the Lower Mississippi Valley: the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Quapaw, and Caddo.  The current Native American reservations in Oklahoma are shown in the figure below.  Note the additional tribes, from outside the Southeast, that were relocated.

Native American nations relocated to reservations in Oklahoma.

 

There are currently 38 federally recognized Indian nations located in the State of Oklahoma.

When the U.S. Government started to remove Native Americans from the Southeast in the 1830s, it focused its efforts on Native peoples who lived on land that was good for farming or rich in mineral resources. 

The government paid less attention to other groups, so some were able to avoid removal and stay in the Southeast.  For example, in the Lower Mississippi River Valley today, the Choctaw have one small reservation in central Louisiana, and a larger one in central Mississippi, comprising eight communities; the Tunica have a small reservation in central Louisiana; the Coushatta have a small reservation in southwest Louisiana; and the Chitimacha have a small reservation near the south-central coast of Louisiana.

 

Final Notes

When Europeans first arrived in North America, approximately five hundred sovereign Indian nations were prospering in what is now the United States.  Each nation possessed its own government, culture, and language.  

The oppressive and often brutal actions against Native Americans in the Southeast occurred all across America, including Alaska, as the land-hungry United States expanded across the continent.  New diseases, wars, ethnic cleansing, and enslavement reduced the Indian population from more than one million people at the time of Columbus to about three hundred thousand in 1900. 

Since then, the number of Native Americans has grown.  In the 2020 U.S. Census, an estimated 3.7 million people identified as Native American alone, accounting for 1.1% of all people living in the United States.  An additional 5.9 million people identified as Native American and one other race group.  Together, these groups comprise 2.9% of the total U.S. population in 2020.  About 13 % of this group (1.3 million people) live on one of the current 324 federally-recognized Indian reservations or other trust lands.  The majority of Native Americans live outside the reservations, mainly in the larger western cities such as Phoenix and Los Angeles.  

Here are a few sobering statistics from the 2020 U.S. Census:

The median household income for Native Americans was $49,906, as compared to $71,664 for non-Hispanic white households.  20.3 % of this population lived at the poverty level, as compared to 9.0 % of non-Hispanic whites.  The overall unemployment rate for Native Americas was 7.9 %, as compared to 3.7 % for non-Hispanic whites.

It is significant to note that Native Americans frequently contend with issues that prevent them from receiving quality medical care.  These issues include cultural barriers, geographic isolation, inadequate sewage disposal, and low income.