Arkansas River - Watershed Trails

Watershed Trails

Many nations of Native Americans lived near, or along, the 1,450-mile (2334-km) stretch of the Arkansas River for thousands of years. The first Europeans to see the river were members of the Spanish Coronado expedition on June 29, 1541. Also in the 1540s, Hernando de Soto discovered the junction of the Arkansas with the Mississippi. The name "Arkansas" was first applied by Father Jacques Marquette, who called the river Akansa in his journal of 1673.

In 1819, the Adams-Onís Treaty set the Arkansas as part of the frontier between the United States and Spanish Mexico. This continued until the United States annexed Texas after the Mexican-American War, in 1846.

Later, the Santa Fe Trail followed the Arkansas through much of Kansas, except for the Cimarron Cutoff from Cimarron, Kansas, to Cimarron, New Mexico, via Cimarron County, Oklahoma along the Cimarron River.

In the 1880s, Charles "Buffalo" Jones, one of the cofounders of Garden City, Kansas, organized four irrigation companies to take water one hundred miles from the Arkansas River to cultivate 75,000 acres (300 km2) of land.