"Faulkner and all the rest of them were always going on about this tragic sense of history, and we're supposed to sit on our porches talking about it all the time. I never did that. My South was always the New South. My first memories are of the country club, of people playing golf." --Walker Percy
Tuesday was the Fourth of July, and I courted nostalgia by returning to the edge of the Ouachita orogeny, to a New South institution where I can remember, in the 1980s, celebrating the Fourth of July this way: Someone would coat a watermelon in Vaseline, then toss it into an Olympic-sized swimming pool, where children were expected to fight to retrieve it.
What was the prize? The watermelon? Is it safe to cut a greasy watermelon?
I don't know the origin or the fate of the watermelon game. I doubt that it has endured the celebration's growth into a carnival. It was good to return to the place, though, and see some familiar faces, watch fireworks, and look down the Arkansas River Valley with a sense of geography that has just been picked up and shaken out like an old Persian rug, thanks to Kathleen DuVal's book "The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent."
Cartesian coordinates offer precision. Imposed upon our round, tilted, wobbly Earth, they are good for finding a location. They don't have much to do, however, with felt experience, whether we are walking along suburban streets, driving along an interstate highway (cut cruelly through a town), or paddling a canoe up a river.
DuVal lifts the burden of Cartesian coordinates off our understanding of history. She returns us to rivers as the first way of understanding space, time, movement.
She does what everyone who cares about the sense of place tries to do: She finds the center, not of a town or a state, but of a continent. She finds its heart. Lucky for us, she finds the Arkansas Valley: the Arkansas River from its source in Colorado to its mouth on the Mississippi, and all of the lands where water flows into the Arkansas, or into its tributaries.
For those of us who live along the Arkansas River or one of the smaller waters that feed it, DuVal's is a wonderful way to settle ourselves in space to think about the past, simply because it's right here. We can see it and, if brave, dip a hand in or a paddle. Let go of the north-south of the Mississippi River for a minute and just think of the Arkansas River. Where is it from where you are, and when you think of it, are you going upriver or down?
One Quapaw village chief, Angaska, had just come back upriver when we left him last week, in the spring of 1776. Challenged by Captain Joseph Orieta, commandant of Arkansas Post, Angaska had just thrown his English medal to the ground.
Angaska was the chief of only one of three Quapaw villages near the confluence of the Arkansas River and the Mississippi, but he appears so often and with such weight in Spanish colonial documents that we may treat him as the significant Quapaw leader around the time of the American Revolution.
And uneasy lies the head that wears a crown; Angaska's position was not one to envy. It seems that he alienated the Spanish and their French agent at Arkansas Post, as well as his own people, by courting favor among the English across the Mississippi River.
Captain Balthazar de Villiers had been the commandant of Arkansas Post since September 1776, having received an order to leave Natchitoches on July 4, 1776. Spain declared war against Great Britain on June 21, 1779, and Villiers, having denounced Angaska in the past, declared that he would count on him for support. During the same year, Villiers moved Arkansas Post from its flood-prone location south of the river back to Écores Rouges, upriver on higher ground.
Villiers died in 1782, and command of the Post passed briefly to Lt. Luis de Villars and then to Capt. Jacobo DuBreuil. In early 1783, Angaska delivered the support that Villiers had hoped for by leading scouting expeditions and bringing reports back to the Spanish.
On April 17, 1783, James Colbert and other British loyalists from Mississippi raided Arkansas Post. The Colbert party stopped at the Quapaw village downriver from the Post, where it appears that they were given a pass.
Legend has it that Angaska and other Quapaws were drunk when the Colbert party came by, but the scholar closest to the matter says there is no evidence that intoxication was the reason that Angaska failed to stop the Colbert party or even let the Spanish know that they were coming.
So why not? We'll look at that next week. Meanwhile, please pay attention to the river.
Brooke Greenberg lives in Little Rock. Email brooke@restorationmapping.com.
Print Headline: A concrete version of native ground