Yell County, Arkansas: History
Native Americans first inhabited present-day Yell County and the Arkansas River Valley for thousands of years prior to European colonization. They used the open, fertile floodplain of the Arkansas River for hunting grounds and later farming settlements. During the Thomas Jefferson and Indian Removal era, many Cherokee were voluntarily relocating from Georgia along the Arkansas River, including in Yell County, between 1775 and 1786. A large Cherokee reservation across the Arkansas River from Yell County was established in 1815 to encourage further voluntary relocation from Georgia.
The area presently encompassed as Yell County was first settled by European settlers when James Carden built a house in 1819 among Cherokee farms in the Dardanelle Bottoms, at the confluence of the Arkansas and Petit Jeans. Lands south of the Arkansas River had been deeded to the Choctaw in the 1820s when they removed from their homelands east of the Mississippi River, but White settlement and Cherokee relocation continued apace into the 1820s. The peoples competed over the prime riverbottom lands.
In June 1823, a meeting between numerous Cherokee chiefs and acting Territorial Governor Robert Crittenden was held under two large oak trees. Long believed by many to result in a "Council Oaks Treaty" re-establishing Cherokee title of 3.2 million acres (1.3 million hectares) north of the Arkansas River, Crittenden had no treaty-making authority, and the meeting ended with no agreement other than each party sending separate letters to Secretary of War John C. Calhoun.
Some Cherokee remained on their farms south of the river, the group identifying itself as Black Dutch, intermarrying and assimilating with the area's White settlers.
In 1830, the United States Congress enacted the Indian Removal Act, leading to further, forcible Cherokee settlement from the Southeast into the Arkansas River Valley. Cherokee, Muskogee (Creek), and Seminole were forcibly removed along the Trail of Tears through Yell County to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma).
Yell County was taken by Union forces in the Civil War in October 1862. A Confederate force of about 1,500 men tried to retake Dardanelle in January 1865, failing after a four-hour battle. First Sergeant William Ellis of the 3rd Wisconsin Cavalry received a Medal of Honor for holding his position despite multiple wounds.