Content area
Full Text
The Rumble ofa Distant Drum: The Quapaws and Old World Newcomers, 1673-1804. By Morris S. Arnold. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000. Pp. xxi, 230. Preface, introduction, maps and illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00.)
Where would our understanding of early Arkansas be without Morris Arnold? His two books, Unequal Laws Unto a Savage Race: European Legal Traditions in Arkansas, 1686-1836 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1985) and Colonial Arkansas, 1686-1804: A Social and Cultural History (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991) have done more than virtually all other scholarly works combined to fill in the historical gap from the earliest continuing European presence in the late seventeenth century to the territorial era. While necessarily dealing extensively with Indian peoples, both books had as their framework the establishment of European society, law, and customs. In The Rumble of a Distant Drum Arnold now shifts his perspective toward the Quapaws, the dominant native group of the lower Arkansas River-and, Arnold shows, arguably the primary actors in the diplomatic and economic maneuverings during this time of accelerating change.
His account can also be read as tracing a progressive deterioration of Quapaw relations with the...