....excerpts from The First Incarnations of Arkansas Post by Morris S. Arnold. A special report written for the Arkansas Archeological Society 1997 Training Program.

Arkansas Post was the first European settlement in what, in 1803, would become Jefferson's Louisiana. It was established in the summer of 1686 by six men sent there by Henri de Tonti, an associate of La Salle's, in an effort to effect a trade and military alliance with the Quapaw Indians. The Post therefore predated St. Louis by 80 years and was settled 35 years earlier than New Orleans. After the Pueblo revolt of 1680 in New Mexico, it may well have been the only European post west of the Mississippi River.

At or very near the general location of your dig, one of Tonti's original settlers, a ship's carpenter named Jean Couture from Rouen, built a trading house to serve the Quapaw Indians, one of whose four villages was close by. This house (we know it from the accounts of visitors in 1687) was built of horizontal logs, a building technique that the Canadians called pièce sur pièce. Most of the buildings that were to be built by Europeans during Arkansas's Colonial Period, however, were of poteaux en terre (posts in the ground) construction, the distinctive technique associated with vernacular eighteenth-century Louisiana architecture. House sites of this sort are a lot easier to locate than those built in the pièce sur pièce style, because they leave behind distinctive post molds that form patterns. One colonial record reveals that the stockade of an eighteenth-century Arkansas fort was placed 3 feet in the ground, and a previous dig at your location unearthed post molds of that depth. Though the investigators did not draw the inference, it is quite possible that what they had discovered were traces of a European house, fence, or stockade, rather than an Indian one.

The French occupied the site at which you are located until about 1699, when Tonti's Post was abandoned. They took up residence again in 1721 when John Law, a banker and financier in France, obtained a huge land grant and established a number of workers (perhaps as many as 80) at Tonti's old site to make ready the way for German colonists. None of these Germans, however, ever arrived in Arkansas. In 1732, a fort was built here. It was attacked on May 10, 1749, by a force of Chickasaw Indians, who burnedthe houses of the Post and captured a number of men, women, and children: The men were killed and the women and children were enslaved. The Post was soon thereafter moved upriver to the present site of the Arkansas Post National Memorial, where the Quapaws had moved the year before the attack because of floods.

The first Arkansas Post was placed where it was because the Quapaw Indians were nearby and because it was the first relatively high ground that one encountered in ascending the Arkansas River from the Mississippi. It was situated on the edge of a little detached part of the Grand Prairie near a clear stream (Menard Bayou), with wood for fires and building purposes close by. The great cypress breaks in the neighborhood were frequently exploited for houses and stockades. Even though the Post was moved in 1749, by the late eighteenth century at the latest your site was reoccupied as a farmstead. It was no longer directly on the river, because Lake Dumond had been formed before 1779 (I think probably in 1748), but it was still the first on the Arkansas River more or less reliably free from flood waters.

During the time that the Post was located at your site, it was always tiny. A census of 1749, the year that the Post was moved, recorded only 31 whites and 14 black slaves in residence. Living with them were 3 horses, 29 bulls and steers, 60 cows, and 29 pigs. Ten years earlier, the governor of Louisiana had written that the "fort of the Arkansas is falling into ruins; there are only a missionary and three habitans [farmers] there who do nothing." An inventory of 1743 reveals that there was a little tobacco being grown there at the time, and no doubt a great deal of corn. But the main economic activity at and around the Post was hunting, and the main exports were bears' oil, tallow, buffalo meat, skins, and furs. Arkansas delicacies that were enjoyed abroad included pecans and salted buffalo tongues.

The social structure at the Post, as one would expect, resembled that of a Colonial banana republic. The only gentry were the commandant and his immediate family. There were a few merchant-farmers and even fewer artisans (smiths, carpenters, craftsmen, bakers, etc.). The bulk of the population were hunters, almost all of whom were destitute, and who were constantly in debt because they had to buy their outfits on credit. There was an extremely small number of free blacks and mulattos at the Post in the late Colonial Period. Below all these on the social scale were a few slaves, mostly black but some Indians, about whose lives we unfortunatelyknow next to nothing.

The area around you is filled with French names: The Bayou La Grue ("Crane") and Menard Bayou are two examples. Not far from Menard Mound is a cemetery in which a number of Menards are buried. The little town of Nady in named for a French family whocame to Arkansas in the nineteenth century. Notrebe's Bend, upriver from you, was named for Frederic Notrebe, anothernineteenth-century immigrant who became a prosperous planter at Arkansas Post and was memorialized in one of Washington Irving'sstories. The name of Lake Dumond may have a French origin, but in the early nineteenth-century records it was called the Bayou of the Old Fort -- recording the local memory that Arkansas Post had at one time been located here.

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