Ugakhpa

The Ugakhpa, known as the Quapaw, are a Dhegiha Siouan people whose name means the Downstream people. Their oral history tells how they parted from the Omaha, Ponca, Osage and Kanza and settled at the Arkansas mouth by the mid-seventeenth century. Algonquian neighbours called them the Akansa, from which the French derived Arkansas, naming the river and Arkansas Post after them.

At their request Henri de Tonti built the post in 1686, the first European settlement on the Mississippi. The Quapaw became a French ally, fighting the Natchez in 1729 and in the Chickasaw Wars.

In 1818 the United States acknowledged some thirty-two million acres as theirs only to make them cede nearly all of it; a second treaty in 1824 took the rest. Floods and hunger scattered the survivors until 1834, when they were removed to Indian Territory beyond the Mississippi.