ARKANSAS POST - 1686 AND LATER
Continued

At this time, the French and the British were get ting involved in another of the series of wars they had been having for over 50 years. The French were anchored at New Orleans, founded in 1718, just above the Mississippi Delta to the south, and by Fort St. Louis in Illinois to the north. Do not confuse this Fort Saint Louis, near the present site of Peoria, IL with modern day St. Louis on the Mississippi. Fort Saint Louis had been founded by De Tonti in 1680. The city of St. Louis did not come into existence until 1763. The only connection is that they were both named for St. Louis, who happened to have been King Louis X of France a few hundred years earlier. Supply boats went upriver from New Orleans and downriver from the Illinois country. A base, a halfway house, so to speak, should be set up somewhere along the way. The logical site would be in the lands of their old friends, the Quapaws, where De Tonti and De Boulaye had their posts.

Lt. Coulange and 12 men arrived in 1732 and built a small fort at the Menard Mounds. A missionary set up shop. A few French traders, called habitants, settled nearby, mostly at the Ecores Rouges, five miles upriver near the old Law Concession. They stayed there for 19 years, until Captain N. de la Houssaye assumed command in 1751.

Two years earlier, the habitant village at Ecores Rouges had been burned in a Chickasaw raid. The habitants wanted protection. Also, sometime between 1732 and 1751, the Arkansas River seems to have changed course. It no longer flowed at the base of the Menard Mounds but was one and a half to two miles out in the flood plain. The Menard Mounds were isolated by swamps and a large, deep bayou. De la Noussaye deemed it necessary to move the post, and did so in October, 1751, to Ecores Rouges, some thirty miles from the mouth of the Arkansas River, the site of the habitant village. This site is now within the boundaries of Arkansas Post National Memorial.

A large fort was built. An eleven foot high wall of double stakes 720 feet long enclosed at least ten buildings. Platforms for cannon were set in angles formed by three bastions. A prison was built under one of the cannon platforms. A station complement of between 50 to 60 men was assigned, with spiritual aid supplied by a Jesuit missionary, not always in residence, who also ministered to the Quapaw. The fort was not finished until 1755. By then it was evident the location was too inaccessible to boat travel on the Mississippi. This fort was abandoned in 1756 and moved to a site six miles from the mouth of the Arkansas, on the south side of the river, opposite Big Island, at a place in later days called either Fort Desha or the Turner Place. A polygonal fort, each side 180 feet long, with a 3-pounder cannon in each bastion was built enclosing four buildings. The garrison of 60 men was in residence.

Now comes the big wrench. The French dominion in North America came to an end. After losing Montreal and Quebec in the early 1760’s, France in the Treaty of Paris of 1763 ceded Canada and the lands east of the Mississippi to England. In order to forestall the hated English west of the Mississippi, they ceded the Louisiana Territory to Spain in return for St. Pierre, Miquelon, and some sugar islands in the Caribbean. These islands were deemed more important economically than a vast wilderness in North America. Thus, the third objective of De Tonti’s settlement in 1686, the validity of French claims to Louisiana, ended 77 years after it started.