Before the Cherokee came to what is now Pope County, much of the region had long been the traditional home of the Osage. The Osage signed their first treaty with the United States on November 10, 1810, ceding all of the land east of present-day Fayetteville all the way to the Mississippi River and between the Arkansas and Missouri Rivers.

With pressure on them in their home territory in the east by the expansion of Euro-American settlement,  Cherokees had long been exploring west of the Mississippi. Before the Revolutionary war, as many as a thousand had moved into Spanish Louisiana, which later became part of the United States as the Louisiana Purchase.  Their first Arkansas focus was the St. Francis River drainage and Crowley’s Ridge in northeast Arkansas. After the 1811-1812 New Madrid earthquakes that disrupted their settlements and a foretelling by Cherokee prophet Skauwuaw of worse to come, many moved into the Arkansas River valley.

The recorded history of Pope County began with the June 1813 establishment of an Indian agency on Illinois Bayou about three miles upstream from the Arkansas River by Major William L. Lovely who had been appointed as an agent to the Cherokee living in what is now Arkansas. Dwight Mission, the first non-Indian settlement in the area, was established near the agency in 1820, with the first school in Arkansas opening there on January 1, 1822.^{1, 2, 3}

Arkansas Territory had been established about three years earlier, on March 2, 1819, stretching from the bottom of Missouri to the top of Louisiana, and from the Mississippi River almost all the way to the Rocky Mountains.  Prior to that, the region had been established on December 13, 1813, as the County of Arkansas, part of a newly minted territory created the year before when the District of Louisiana was changed to Missouri Territory.

Officially established November 2, 1829, Pope County was formed from part of Crawford County, with portions of Van Buren, Johnson, and Yell counties added to it later.

In 1828, Kirkbride Potts, one of the early white settlers in the region, bought 160 acres near Galla Creek and the foot of Crow Mountain, about 5 miles northwest of the Arkansas River port of Galla Creek.

Pope County’s 2020 population, according to the U.S. Census, was 63,381 before nonresponse follow-up adjustments.

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1. “Pope: Association of Arkansas Counties.” Pope | Association of Arkansas Counties. Accessed December 21, 2021. https://www.arcounties.org/counties/pope/.
2. Morse, Jedidah. A Report to the Secretary of War on Indian Affairs, Ect. various, 1822. Google Books, accessed December 6, 2021
3. Annual Report of the Missionaries to the Secretary of War, Sept. 1821.