The Cherokees dwelt, like the Choctaws, over against Arkansas but north of the Canadian River and in close proximity to Fort Smith, the headquarters of the Southern Superintendency.[101] Their territory was not so compactly placed as was the territory of the other tribes; and, in its various parts, it passes, necessarily, under various designations. There was the "Cherokee Outlet," a narrow tract south of Kansas that had no definite western limit. It was supposed to be a passage way to the hunting grounds of the great plains beyond. Then there was the "Cherokee Strip," the Kansas extension of the outlet, and for most of its extent originally and legally a part of it. The territorial organization of Kansas had made the two distinct. Finally, as respects the more insignificant portions of the Cherokee domain, there were the "Cherokee Neutral Lands," already sufficiently well commented upon. They were insignificant, not in point of acreage but of tribal authority operating within them. They lay in the southeastern corner of Kansas and constituted, against their will and against the law, her southeastern counties. They were separated, to their own discomfiture and disadvantage, from the Cherokee Nation proper by the reservation of the Quapaws, of the Senecas, and of the confederated Senecas and Shawnees. This Cherokee Nation lay, as has already been indicated, over against Arkansas and north of the northeastern section of the Choctaw country. The Arkansas River formed part of the boundary between the two tribal domains. So much then for the location of the really great tribes, but where were the lesser? [Illustration: COLONEL DOWNING, CHEROKEE [_From Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology_]] The Quapaws, the Senecas, and the confederated Senecas and Shawnees, the most insignificant of the lesser, occupied the extreme northeastern corner of Indian Territory and, therefore, bordered upon the southwestern corner of Missouri. The Creeks lived between the Arkansas River, inclusive of its Red Fork, and the Canadian River, having the Cherokees to the east and north of them, the Choctaws and Chickasaws to the south, and the Seminoles to the southwest, between the Canadian and its North Fork. The Indians of the Leased District have already been located.