Lovely's Purchase
Lovely's Purchase (also Lovely's Donation), was part of the early nineteenth century Missouri and Arkansaw territories. It was created in 1817, to give a haven to the Cherokee and other Native Americans who were being forced to leave the southeastern United States and moving west to Indian Territory (modern Oklahoma) through territory then inhabited by sometimes hostile White settlers and several other Indian tribes, especially members of the Osage Indian Nation. Following years of political maneuvering and sometimes conflicting treaties, the Purchase was finally split between the Cherokee and White settlers, with the larger section going solely to the Cherokee Nation. Background President James Monroe had promised an exclusive "gateway to the setting sun"—an area devoted to settlement for the members of the Cherokee Nation where they were not "...surrounded by the White man." Starting in 1809, members of the Cherokee Nation living west of the Appalachians in Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and the Carolinas, had started migrating west to the lands set aside by the United States government for those tribal members willing to exchange their eastern property for homesteads in the recently set-aside Indian Territory. A route was planned by the U.S. federal government with the purpose to insulate newly arriving Cherokee to the area from interference and harassment by hostile American settlers and warriors from other Indian Nations. These others lived, hunted, and had (in many instances) squatted on the promised tracts of land. They viewed the Cherokee as rivals. The Osage Nation had given-up exclusive hunting rights to the area that would become a large part of Lovely's Purchase in the 1808 Treaty of Fort Clark. They still owned the land outright, however, and maintained several settlements on it. The new Cherokee migrants came into almost immediate conflict with Native and White settlers who had preemptively occupied lands along the route. This included members of the Quapaw tribe and the Osage Indian Nation, as well as other Indian nations, who held a special animosity towards what they viewed as Cherokee usurpers of their lands and way of life. Violent incidents continued to plague both groups, however, and peaked in 1817 following Lovely's death. The next year saw the arrival from the east of a strong Cherokee leader, John Jolly, and these incidents grew less frequent, although they still occasionally occurred. Purchase history Major Lovely Major William Lovely, an assistant Indian agent to the Tennessee Cherokee, was promoted to Indian agent of the Missouri Territory (Arkansas Region), and sent to quell these frontier disturbances in the Missouri Territory. He held the position from 1813 to 1817. His wife, Persis, accompanied him to "...an abandoned Osage village far from what [is] considered civilization..." Lovely, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, made several failed diplomatic attempts to make peace between the warring Osage and Cherokee transplants to Indian Territory. His ultimate solution was to create a large strip of land to act as a buffer between the people of the two nations. Lovely's Purchase, set in the early Arkansaw District