April 1783: It had been almost 110 years since Quapaws from the village of Kappa paddled upstream on the Mississippi River to greet the expedition led by Jesuit Father Jacques Marquette and fur trader Louis Joliet. Smoking of the calumet marked that peaceful first meeting of the Quapaws and the French.
The French returned in 1682. This time, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, claimed the country of Louisiana (the entire Mississippi River drainage basin) for France while visiting a Quapaw village.
The Quapaws' acceptance of La Salle's claim was not a passive acceptance by the weaker party. To the contrary, the Quapaws had greater numbers, knew the land, and incorporated the French into their rituals in order to establish a friendship with desirable trading partners who might also prove allies against rival Indian groups to the east and west.
As Kathleen DuVal writes in "The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent," "To the Quapaws, the French were not a dominant intruder, but simply another of the region's diverse peoples, one connected to sources of powerful goods."
Italian-born Henri de Tonti accompanied La Salle on his expedition down the Mississippi, and after receiving a land grant from La Salle, returned in 1686 with half a dozen Frenchmen. They established the first Arkansas Post near the Quapaw village of Osotouy. The post lasted until 1699.
The French re-established Arkansas Post in 1721 in the original location; they moved it upriver to Écores Rouges, or Red Bluffs, in 1749, and moved again to an unfavorable spot downriver and on the south side at the beginning of the French and Indian War in 1756. The French secretly ceded all of the Louisiana colony to Spain in 1762, and Spain officially received all of Louisiana west of the Mississippi River under the Treaty of Paris of 1763.
Frenchmen continued to administer Arkansas Post well after the Treaty of Paris. Captain Joseph Orieta, the first Spanish-born commandant of the post, did not arrive until 1771. Spain declared war on Great Britain on June 21, 1779. During the same summer, Commandant Balthazár de Villiers moved Arkansas Post from its flood-prone site south of the Arkansas River back to Écores Rouges.
Great Britain did not formally recognize the independence of the United States until the ratification of the second Treaty of Paris on Sept. 1, 1783, but the old nation and the nascent one had signed preliminary articles on Nov. 30, 1782. Likewise, France and Spain had signed preliminary articles with Great Britain on Jan. 20, 1783.
The fighting back east had been over for a while by the early morning of April 17, 1783, when James Colbert and his war party attacked Fort Carlos III, the garrison that the Spanish had erected in 1781 to protect Arkansas Post. The six-hour battle that followed was the only battle of the Revolutionary War fought in what is now Arkansas.
Jacobo Dubreuil, commandant of the post, waited 18 days (until May 5, 1783) to write Esteban Miro, the Spanish governor of Louisiana. A member of the raiding party named Malcolm Clark was captured and sent to New Orleans, where he gave a statement ("declaracion") of the events of the battle.
Dubreuil's letter and Clark's statement are the best contemporary accounts of the battle, according to Morris S. Arnold, who has mined both documents for his article "The Quapaws and the American Revolution" in the Spring 2020 Arkansas Historical Quarterly.
According to DuVal, who also draws from Dubreuil's letter to Miro, Colbert's party consisted of his sons as well as at least "60 whites, a dozen Chickasaws, and a few Blacks."
To defend Fort Carlos III, Dubreuil had 70 Spanish soldiers, four Quapaws, and a few habitants (local farmers of French descent).
The fact that four Quapaws just happened to be spending the night inside the Spanish fort might tell us something about the degree of trust and cooperation that had emerged between the Quapaws and the Spanish during the latter group's formal presence in the land.
Colbert's party killed two soldiers and took soldiers and civilians (habitant families) as prisoners. The Spaniards, in Arnold's words, "rained down more than 300 cannon rounds on Colbert's little band" and 10 soldiers and four Quapaws drove them to retreat, with their prisoners, back down the Arkansas River.
Last week I noted that Colbert's party managed to reach Arkansas Post and the fort there without interference from anyone at the Quapaw village where they stopped on the way. I used Henry IV's lament (from Shakespeare's play, not real life) "uneasy lies the head that wears a crown" to describe the unenviable predicament of Angaska, the Quapaws' leader at the time of the Colbert raid. I regret using it because the Quapaw governed themselves, as far as we know, in such a way that even a great chief would not have enjoyed (or endured) the same consolidation of power in his own person as a medieval English king.
If Colbert's party arrived at Arkansas Post around 2:30 a.m. April 17, the battle would have been over no later than 9 a.m. Angaska arrived at the fort at noon. He claimed not to have known Colbert's party was a war party, and that when he learned of the attack, most of his warriors were off hunting. Arnold finds Angaska's story "not implausible," and finds "no particular reason to doubt" his claim.
If Angaska could have warned the Spanish of the coming attack on Arkansas Post, or gathered enough warriors to help repel it, why didn't he? Or if he was not able to gather enough men to help, why not? Perhaps because he didn't wear a crown.
The Quapaws, in Arnold's words, "lacked formalized coercive institutions: codes, armed constabularies, courts, and jails."
Angaska "simply may not have been authorized to decide unilaterally, and in the moment, whether the tribe should meddle in formal military engagements between European powers."
Angaska did lead a clean-up mission. He gathered up to 100 Quapaw warriors to pursue the Colbert party downriver, which led to the release of most of the prisoners. And so concluded Arkansas' part in the Revolutionary War, though the curious relationship between the Quapaw tribe and the Spanish had decades to go.