II. ARKANSAS POST AND THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR

A. War Comes to the Lower Mississippi Valley

1. The Post in the Mid-1760s

The shots fired on Lexington Green on April 19, 1775, were heard around the world. They were destined to effect the lives and fortunes of people living in and around Arkansas Post, who had never heard of the little Massachusetts village nor knew of the long standing difficulties between King George III and his ministers and many of their American colonists.

In that month the Spanish military post on the Arkansas River, designated Fort Carlos II, was sited on the south bank of the river 3 leagues above its mouth. Captain Philip Pittman of the British army, who had visited the area in the mid-1760s, had reported that the fort consisted of a stockade

in a quadrangular form; the sides of the exterior polygon are about one hundred and eight feet, and one three pounder is mounted in the flanks and faces of each bastion. The buildings within the fort are, a barrack with three rooms for the soldiers, commanding officer’s house, a powder magazine, and a magazine for provision, and an apartment for the commissary, all of which are in a ruinous condition. The fort stands about two hundred yards from the water-side, and is garrisoned by a captain, a lieutenant, and thirty French soldiers, including serjeants and corporals. [1]

Near the fort were eight houses

occupied by as many families, who have cleared the land about nine hundred yards in depth; but on account of the sandiness of the soil, and the lowness of the situation, which makes it subject to be overflowed, they do not raise their necessary provisions. These people subsist mostly by hunting, and every season send to New Orleans great quantities of bear’s oil, tallow, salted buffaloe meat and a few skins.[2]

According to Captain Pittman, the Quapaw Indians in the mid 1760s lived on the riverbank “three leagues above the fort.” The Quapaws were divided

into three villages, over each of which presides a chief, and a great chief over all; they amount in all to about six hundred warriors; they are reckoned amongst the bravest of the Southern Indians; they hunt little more than for their common subsistence, and are generally at war with the nations to the westward of them, as far as the river Bravo.[3]

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