Farmers, warriors, and grandfathers : the Shawnee and Delaware Indians and their neighbors in the trans-Mississippi West, 1787-1832
Abstract
[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] The Shawnee and Delaware Indians settled in Spanish Louisiana in the 1780s and left Missouri and Arkansas for Indian Kansas by 1832. This study probes their changing relationships with their Indian and Euro-American neighbors in the region and why those relationships came to an end within fifty years. The Shawnee and Delaware fled American expansion in the Ohio Country during the late eighteenth century. They built multiethnic communities with their French, Spanish, American, and Indian neighbors, fought with the Osage over access to the western prairie-plains hunting grounds, and worked with Euro-American officials and fellow eastern emigrant Indians to create a buffer population in defense of Spain's colony. In doing so, they utilized their cultural traditions and past experiences as mediators, alliance-builders, and warriors to create bonds of friendship, family, and commonality with their neighbors. These multiethnic communities persisted into the early American period following the Louisiana Purchase. However, as more Americans arrived with their African slaves and eastern tribes were defeated during the War of 1812, the trans-Mississippi West's multiethnic relationships changed. Missourians came to desire a new western agricultural slave state that had no place for the mixed fur-trading Indian communities in their midst. Several removal treaties, combined with the movement of thousands of eastern emigrant Indians through and beyond Missouri's borders, pressured the Shawnee and Delaware to leave behind their once peaceful communities and seek out new homes further west.
Degree
Ph. D.
Thesis Department
Rights
Access is limited to the campuses of the University of Missouri.