THE FIRST ARKANSANS
EUROPEAN CONTACT BRINGS DEVASTATION HISTORIC ARKANSAS INDIAN TRIBES WHOSE PATRIMONY HOLDS SWAY? THE NATIVE AMERICAN GRAVES PROTECTION & REPATRIATION ACT
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The native population had no resistance to European diseases, particularly smallpox.
University Museum Collections, University of Arkansas European Contact Brings Devastation
The arrival of European explorers in the 1500s signaled a change in life for Arkansas’s native population. Exposure to European diseases like smallpox and influenza; Spanish demands for interpreters, food, and a healthy labor force; and severe drought nearly wiped out the native peoples. By the mid 1800s, the number of Caddo, Cherokee, Osage, Quapaw and Tunica-Koroa living in Arkansas was small. The native peoples who built mounds and lived in bluff shelters were gone for hundreds of years by this time and were considered “vanished” by settlers who began to move into these areas.
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