II. ARKANSAS POST AND THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR

C. Captain Colbert Intervenes

3. Captain Colbert Strikes

g) Labadie Describes Captain Colbert

Colbert, Labadie observed, was about 60 years old, possessed of good health, and a strong constitution. An active man, despite his years, he had a “violent temper,” and was capable of “enduring the greatest hardships.” He had lived among the Chickasaws for 40 years and boasted that he was owner of a “fine house” and “some hundred and fifty” blacks. He said he had several sons by Chickasaw women, who were “very important chiefs in that nation.”[58]

Labadie found Colbert a violent Hispanophobe. “This man,” he declared,

is one of the greatest enemies of our nation, against which he is so angered that, notwithstanding the constant supplications of myself and Madame Cruzat, he would never consent to set at liberty the soldier of this detachment, Joseph Crespo. He said in an insolent, ironic, and contemptuous tone, that the latter was a native Spaniard, and that as such he wished to keep him, for he esteemed the people of this nation highly, and that he wished all the prisoners were the same.[59]

h) Labadie Keeps His Eyes Open

In the days following their capture, “many rebels came and went,” and Labadie estimated their total strength at 150. Several of them bragged that they could field a force of 300 “whites, of different nations, English, American, and French, besides . . . Francisco de Grange, who speaks many languages, and who deserted from the fort of Mobile, where he was a Spanish soldier.”

There were also, Labadie learned, “some hundred Negro slaves” who belonged to the rebels. These, he believed, included “the indentured servants of Monsieur Lafon, Lebran, Petiton, and Basco.” The blacks were observed to “take up goods, divide them, and dispose of them.”

Most of Colbert’s command consisted “of people from Natchez, Arkansas, Ylinueses,” many of whom were known to Labadie.

All that he saw led him to conclude that “the Chickasaw nation and part of the Choctaws are not much inclined . . . toward the rebels, except towards the chiefs, Tranble, Colbert, Cilly, and McGillivray.”[60]

The rebels, it was leaned, also had a camp of 18 skin-and- bark huts on the west side of the Mississippi, near the site of Labadie’s capture. Outposts had been established on the left bank of the Mississippi at Dunulieu Bluff, 15 leagues above Chickasaw Bluffs, and at a site an equal distance below the mouth of Wolf River to keep than apprised of traffic on the river.