Speaker revisits city’s role on Trail of Tears

LITTLE ROCK — Little Rock served as the major economic and administrative center for Indian removal west of the Mississippi River, Daniel Littlefield, the director of the Sequoyah National Research Center at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, said during a lecture Thursday.

The talk was arranged as part of the “La Petite Roche Tricentennial,” a slate of events marking 300 years since Jean-Baptiste Benard de La Harpe of France traveled on the Arkansas River near present- day Little Rock in 1722 while on an expedition.

Eight people, not including a UALR official, were in attendance at the UALR downtown campus in the River Market for Littlefield’s lecture, entitled, “Little Rock: A Pivotal Point on the Trail of Tears.”

The forced removal of tribes from the southeastern U.S. to land west of the Mississippi took shape as a result of treaties under the 1830 Indian Removal Act, signed by President Andrew Jackson.

All of the tribal groups that were removed from the southeast passed through Arkansas, according to the Sequoyah National Research Center.

In his lecture, Littlefield put the number of Indians who moved through Arkansas beginning in 1831 at 60,000 — “Choctaws first, Muscogee Creeks second, Seminoles third, Chickasaws fourth and the Cherokees fifth.”

The main travel routes at the time came through Little Rock. However, as important as Little Rock’s geographic location was, its role as an economic and administrative hub related to removal, according to Littlefield.

The disbursing agent for Indian removal west of the Mississippi was located here, while the agent east of the Mississippi was headquartered in Memphis, Littlefield said.

As time went on, millions of dollars came into Little Rock as a result of the “lucrative” contracts associated with Indian removal and the ration stations that were set up to facilitate it, Littlefield said.

There came to be a need for banks, but Arkansas’ status as a territory meant it could not charter banks, he said. Arkansas ultimately gained statehood in June 1836 as a slave state, entering the U.S. shortly before Michigan, which was designated a free state.

Arkansas, and Little Rock in particular, was “the place to be — that’s where millions of dollars were funneling through over this decade,” Littlefield said.

Entrepreneurs and people interested in “fast money” proliferated in the state, which developed into “a real economic hub,” he said.

Indian removal supplied the money to set up a number of people in positions of influence in Arkansas, he said.

Other long-range effects included the development of roads: when Arkansas became a state, road-making and upkeep were turned over to the counties, which had no money, so roads stayed where they were, Littlefield said.

Many of the roads residents drive on today are situated where they were in the 1830s, he said.

“We have more roads that we actually drive over on the Trail of Tears in Arkansas than any other state in the union,” he said.

Indian removal also delayed Arkansas’ entry into the cotton economy for a decade as individuals grew corn, small grains and fodder as cash crops instead of cotton, Littlefield said.

Additionally, Indian removal contributed to the development of the slave trade in Arkansas, Littlefield said, as thousands of Black people — either free, enslaved by tribal members or runaways from white plantations in the South — came west with the tribes.

Contemporary ads in the Arkansas Gazette reflect plantation owners east of the Mississippi seeking escaped slaves who were last seen with a group of tribal members along the route, Littlefield said.