Crossroads, p. 41
Scholars think that 50 to 90% of the Indians of the Southeast died in the plagues of those first terrible years of Spanish colonization and exploration in the 16th century, perhaps upwards of a million people. The hardest hit areas were those traversed by Hernando De Soto's army between 1539 and 1543, for his conquistadores carried the plagues inland to the heartland of Mississippian culture. Moreover, the Spaniard's practice of enslaving the Indians as bearers and concubines, then letting them go when they were too sick or exhausted to be useful, insured that diseases took hold wherever the army went.
(This is a map of two possible routes of
DeSoto's army through Arkansas between 1541 and 1542. most archeologists
currently favor the "Hudson Route.")
In Arkansas the Nodena people and the Parkin people vanished shortly after De Soto passed through their territories in the summer of 1541. The next European observers to reach Arkansas, the expedition of Marquette and Joliet in 1673, saw almost no one along the Mississippi River in northeast Arkansas where many thousands had once lived. The first large villages they found were those of the "Akansea," thought to be the ancestors of the modern Quapaw, who were living near the mouth of the Arkansas River.
The Tunican people of southeast Arkansas may have escaped the epidemics because of their scant population and because the Spaniards did not go far into their territory. The Caddo came through quite well too, even though De Soto's army spent many months among them. What saved them, apparently, was that they did not live in large towns where epidemics could spread quickly and easily.
- The Historic era, the years from 1541 to 1850, is still poorly known,
partly because very little archeology has been done on sites occupied during
those years and partly because in Arkansas the first European
contacts
with the Indians were unusually sporadic and poorly documented. A full
130 years elapsed between the De Soto invasion and the expedition of Marquette
and Joliet.
- (This is a map of the distribution of Indian tribes in Arkansas and adjacent states around A.D. 1700: the Osage in northwest Arkansas, the Quapaw in east central Arkansas, the Caddo in southwest Arkansas, and the Tunica in southeast Arkansas.)
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