Arkansas Online

An excursion to Arkansas Post

BROOKE GREENBERG Brooke Greenberg lives in Little Rock. Please send email to brooke@restorationmapping.com.

In late 1820 and early 1821, John James Audubon traveled by flatboat from Cincinnati to New Orleans. He was already 15 years into his effort to study and draw the birds of America, and he let James Miller, the governor of Arkansas Territory, know of his intention to enter Arkansas for his purpose.

On Sunday, Dec. 10, 1820, Audubon and three members of his crew decided to walk overland from a place near the mouth of the White River to Arkansas Post.

Audubon records that “We walked through a Narrow Path often so thickly beset with green briars that We Would be forced to give back and go round—this followed through Cypress Swamps and around Pounds [ponds] and Cane Breaks,” until he and his party reached “the first Settlement owned by a Frenchman called Monsr Duval.”

Though he was getting ready for bed, Monsieur Duval (“this friendly man”) dressed and accompanied Audubon’s party the last seven miles to Arkansas Post, where the crew, “Wearied, Muddied, Wet & hungry,” fell upon supper at “the Only Tavern in the Country” like “4 wolfs taring at an old Carcass.”

A Mrs. Montgomery offered overnight accommodation in “a Large Building that formerly perhaps saw the Great Councils of Spanish Dons,” where three beds already held five men. Nevertheless, the Audubon party slipped in and rested well after some light conversation to get acquainted with the strangers who were their bedfellows.

Audubon does not indicate whether or not Monsieur Duval headed home. Ready for sound sleep, Audubon notes that “32 Miles in such a Country May be Calculated as a full dose for any Pedestrian per day.” I’ll say. Half of that distance along a briarencumbered path through cypress swamps and cane breaks would seem to be a full dose for a day.

“The Morning broke and with it, Mirth all about us, the Cardinals, the Iowa Buntings, the Meadow Larks and Many Species of Sparrows, chearing the approach of a Benevolent sun Shining day,” writes Audubon, who rose and dressed to “take a View of all things in this place.”

Audubon was disappointed to learn that Governor Miller was not at the Post, but pleased to encounter Capt. Henry Barbour, whom he had known 13 years earlier in Pittsburgh. Barbour informed Audubon that on his most recent voyage up the Arkansas River to the Osage Nation, “he fell in with Nuttall the Botanist and had him on board for 4 months.”

I have not discovered whether Audubon ever met Thomas Nuttall, but boat captain Barbour’s acquaintance with two of the greatest naturalists of early America is pleasing in itself, and supports Wallace Stegner’s assertion that the American frontier was a place of continuity and connections, not a world made by those who had “thrown everything away but an ax and a gun.”

Arkansas Post had been, from 1686 to 1699 and then from 1721 to the time of Audubon’s arrival in 1820, a place of complex connections and interdependence. Audubon’s remark that the large building where he slept “formerly perhaps saw the Great Councils of Spanish Dons” indicates his awareness of the rich colonial past of Arkansas Post, when Quapaw Indians, French settlers and then Spanish settlers negotiated for power and struggled for survival and prosperity.

“Now a poor, Nearly deserted Village, [the Post] flourished in the time that the Spaniards and French kept it,” and a century earlier it could have been called an “agreeable Small Town,” Audubon wrote.

The Post now drew life only from “Worn out Indian Traders and a few American families.” Audubon admitted that “the Natural situation is a handsome One, on a high Bank formerly the Edge of a Prairie, but rendered extremely sickly by the Back Neighborhood of Many Overflowing Lakes & Swamps.”

The “Natural situation” where Audubon found the “Nearly deserted village,” is the Écores Rouges (Red Bluffs) site, the second and fourth/final site of Arkansas Post, and is the site that the National Park Service has maintained and (sparingly) interpreted since 1960.

The original site, somewhat downriver and, like this one, on the north side of the Arkansas River, was founded in 1686, 35 years before the founding of New Orleans. It was occupied until 1699, and again from 1721 to 1749. It was the first European settlement in the Louisiana Territory west of the Mississippi River, and located near the Quapaw village of Osotouy.

An attack on Arkansas Post on May 10, 1749, during a French-Chickasaw war led its residents to resettle at the second and fourth/final site upriver. In 1756, the French government ordered that the Post be moved to a site downriver and on the south side.

While perhaps more convenient to boat traffic during the French and Indian War (1756-1763), the site was literally inferior to the earlier ones, lower in altitude (in the Delta, rather than on the Grand Prairie) and extremely prone to flooding. The years of the Post’s third location saw the transition from French to Spanish colonial government, and might have been a time of population growth and economic growth had it not been for the poor location. The Post moved back to its second site in 1779.

French imperial ambition in the Louisiana Territory was mercantile and martial, perhaps in that order. In his 1995 essay “The Significance of Arkansas’s Colonial Experience,” (collected in “Cultural Encounters in the Early South: Indians and Europeans in Arkansas”), Morris S. Arnold notes that the colonial administrations of France, and later, Spain, were able to draw some people “of gentle birth” to remote outposts by permitting them to engage in trade.

“In many respects,” Arnold writes, “they were merchant-capitalists first and military officers second.” Trade with the Quapaws and others who hunted and trapped upriver from the Post could prove lucrative, and I will examine the attractions of that trade and the efforts of colonial governments to regulate it in columns to come.

On a perfect January day (blue sky and temperatures in the 40s), I drove from Little Rock to Arkansas Post in less time than it would have taken Audubon, his crew, and Monsieur Duval to walk the last seven miles from Duval’s settlement. It was my first visit since the January 2013 commemoration of the Union capture of Fort Hindman.

It is a beautiful site for walking and bird watching, but the exhibits are housed in an uninspiring modern building, and the interpretive panels on the “town site” path date from no later than 1991. (At the spot marking William Woodruff’s log cabin, the panel notes that the Arkansas Gazette is still published in Little Rock.)

The best I can say about the National Park Service’s efforts to interpret the colonial history of Arkansas Post is that the store offers four books by Morris S. Arnold, including “The Arkansas Post of Louisiana.” There is a real opportunity to apply Arnold’s work and that of other Arkansas historians and of archeologists to improved site interpretation. Here’s hoping.

One of the pleasures of writing about recent history in our small and wonderful state is receiving corrections from people who were part of it. I am grateful to a reader in Fayetteville for writing to let me know about an error in my column of Jan. 22, in the paragraph about the founding of the creative writing program at the University of Arkansas: I stated that Jim Whitehead and Bill Harrison founded the program in 1965 with Miller Williams; in fact, Whitehead and Harrison founded it in 1965-1966 and Williams joined in 1970.

Perspective

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