OPINION

REX NELSON: At the post

The rain was coming down hard as we exited U.S. 165 and made our way to the Arkansas Post National Memorial. Tom DeBlack, the well-known Arkansas historian from Arkansas Tech University, was driving. Paul Austin of the Arkansas Humanities Council and I were trying to help him watch the road in the blinding storm.

The morning had been spent farther south in the old Mississippi River port town of Arkansas City. After lunch there, we made our way north along the levee on Arkansas 4. We connected with Arkansas 1 and passed the World War II-era Japanese-American relocation camp at Rohwer before driving through Kelso and Watson. We turned onto U.S. 165 at Back Gate and headed north. After the rainiest February in Arkansas history, ditches were full and fields were flooded.

By the time we crossed the Arkansas River at Pendleton, it was raining so hard that we couldn't see the river. The bridge was built in 1971. That was 81 years after Congress had approved its construction. Authorization isn't to be confused with appropriations in Washington, and the cost was deemed too high for decades. A ferry operated instead.

The National Park Service interpreter seemed happy to see us when we entered the visitors' center. We were the fourth, fifth and sixth visitors on this wet Wednesday. That included the UPS man. Much of the Delta has been cleared for row-crop agriculture, but this remote part of southeast Arkansas is still filled with swamps and almost impenetrable forests, thanks mostly to the federal government and the nearby White River National Wildlife Refuge.

One can sense what a forbidding place this must have seemed for early European settlers. If you have an interest in Arkansas history, a visit to Arkansas Post is a must. It was the first European settlement in what's now Arkansas. When Arkansas became a territory in 1819, Arkansas Post was selected as its capital, and the Arkansas Gazette was founded there. The capital--and the Gazette--moved to Little Rock in 1821.

The visitors' center had just received a shipment of Judge Morris "Buzz" Arnold's book The Arkansas Post of Louisiana, published last year by the University of Arkansas Press. I purchased a copy during the 2017 conference of the Arkansas Historical Association when Arnold, one of the few experts on the colonial period in this state, served as the AHA's closing speaker at Pocahontas.

The book begins: "The Arkansas Post of Louisiana was born of Rene-Robert Cavelier de La Salle's grandiose commercial scheme to establish a French crescent of influence in the heart of North America, running from Quebec and Montreal, through the Illinois country, down the Mississippi, and around the Gulf Coast--confining the English colonies to the Eastern seaboard and preventing Spanish intrusions from the south and west. Because La Salle knew that the success of his venture depended on a strong connection with the Quapaw Indians--the French called them the Arkansas--who lived in the very heart of his project near the mouth of the Arkansas River, the first order of business on his imperialist agenda for that region was a trade and military alliance with the tribe.

"He moved to accomplish this in 1682 when, accoutered with such Gallic pomp and circumstance as he and his small company could muster at the time, he rather fancifully took possession of the whole of Louisiana at one of the Quapaw villages. A more serious effort to effect the alliance occurred in 1686, when Henri de Tonty, La Salle's associate, left six of his men to settle near the Quapaws. This was the first Poste aux Arkansas and the first white settlement in what would become Jefferson's Louisiana."

The distinguished history of the Arnold family of Texarkana has long intrigued me. Buzz Arnold's father, Richard Lewis Arnold, and his grandfather, William Hendrick Arnold, were prominent attorneys. Buzz Arnold graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire in 1959, attended Yale University from 1959-61, then graduated with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Arkansas in 1965. He received a law degree from the UA in 1968, finishing first in his class, and went on to earn a master of laws degree and a doctor of juridical science degree from Harvard Law School.

He taught law and history at schools ranging from Harvard to Penn before being nominated by President Ronald Reagan in October 1985 as a U.S. district judge. President George W. Bush nominated Arnold to serve on the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. From 1992-2004, Buzz Arnold and his older brother, the late Richard Sheppard Arnold, were the only brothers in U.S. history to serve simultaneously on the same federal court of appeals. Buzz is a Republican; Richard was a Democrat.

Before and during his time on the bench, Buzz Arnold continued researching colonial Arkansas. The UA Press published his Unequal Laws Unto a Savage Race in 1985, Colonial Arkansas, 1686-1804: A Social and Cultural History in 1991 and The Rumble of a Distant Drum: Quapaws and Old World Newcomers, 1673-1804 in 2000.

In a postscript to his current book, Arnold writes: "The Post's population could not have much exceeded 400 souls, and there were not many more than 500 Quapaws in the neighborhood, when an American army lieutenant with a sergeant, two corporals and 11 soldiers took over the fort there on March 23, 1804. Such was the indifference of the Spanish king to the whole enterprise that only three Spanish soldiers and their captain had stayed behind to see that the exchange went properly. But the coming of the Americans brought a great deal more to the French inhabitants of Arkansas than a formal substitution of sovereigns. . . .

"Segregated on account of their language, customs and manners, the French were virtually excluded from participation in government. They only very rarely served on juries and almost never sought political office. The Quapaws suffered a worse kind of discrimination, a kind known to all manner of Indian people. Their new government banished them entirely to Indian territory, and not a few of them found death awaiting them along the way."

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Rex Nelson is a senior editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Editorial on 03/18/2018

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