Arkansas Post: Sentinel of the Lower Mississippi River

A frontier melting pot of colonial ownership from the Fur trade to the Civil War  

One of the joys of visiting every unit managed by the National Park Service is driving rural roads to historic sites located off the beaten path.  Not only is the final park destination guaranteed to be worth the drive, but the opportunity to experience rural America on state highways and county roads can be equally edifying and enjoyable.  We experienced both on a recent visit to Arkansas Post National Memorial located on the Arkansas River just upstream from its confluence with the Mississippi.  I was traveling with my mom and girlfriend and we started our adventure in Memphis where I rented a car to spend a week mostly cruising civil war battlefields along the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi and Tennessee.   

 National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis

Our first stop, however, was Arkansas because it is right next door and was the last state I needed to have visited all 50…and there were nearby parks!  We started with Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site before heading to Arkansas Post.  We had just visited the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis (where Martin Luther King was shot) which gave us a solid contextual understanding of where Little Rock fit in the civil rights story.  Both civil rights sites are well worth the visit and really helped me understand a time in our country’s history that I had no first-hand knowledge of, having only read about it growing up in Oregon.  I would really recommend the museum in Memphis.  It is fabulous.  Go and plan to spend most of the day.  It is that engaging.

 Little Rock High School National Historic Site

Our drive from Little Rock to Arkansas Post took us past cotton fields, bayous, and homes and farms along highways 165 and 169 in southeast Arkansas.  I had no idea how flat this part of the world is.  A 25 foot bank along a river is considered high ground.  This flatness historically allowed rivers to change course with seasonal flooding, as rivers really like to do.  As this story unfolds, we’ll see how seasonal flooding caused the location of Arkansas Post to move four times, occupying three different locations.  Several times we found ourselves driving on levees built to try and control the Arkansas River and keep it in its channel.  The views from this little bit of elevation into the bayous, swamps, old oxbows and abandoned river channels gave us an appreciation of the area’s rich fish and wildlife habitat.  We had pretty good birding through the car window!

Arkansas Post was first set aside in 1929 as a state park.  In 1960, 770 acres were established as a unit of the national park system to commemorate the long history of human habitation along the Arkansas River.  We learned this park gets about 40,000 visits a year, averaging about 110/day.  That’s really not very many people and arriving on a chilly fall day guaranteed that we would see virtually no one else as we walked the site and learned about the shifting ownership of these lands and waters.   

 Dugout Canoe in Arkansas Post Visitor Center

We started at the visitor center and watched the movie about European exploitation of the Lower Mississippi Valley.  There is recognition that the Quapaw occupied the area when the first Europeans arrived, but this site focuses on European settlement and the shifting ownership between Britain, Spain and France before the U.S. ultimately acquired the land in the Louisiana Purchase.  The movie is an award winner and after viewing it we concurred it was award worthy.  We’ve seen a lot of park films and this one depicts a very sweet conversation between a grandfather and grandson.  We got the historical story as the two of them fished and camped at Arkansas Post.

Here’s a snapshot of the European history.  Hernando de Soto cruised through the area in 1540, but it wasn’t until 1686 that the French established the first trading post in the Lower Mississippi region just a few miles downstream from today’s park site on the Arkansas River.  The French and Quapaw became allies and trading partners (think beaver pelts for knifes, pots, cloth and beads) and the Quapaw helped the French repel attacks from other tribes in the area that were allied with the British.  Trading activity defined the success of this first post and given the ups and downs of the beaver trade, French interest also ebbed and flowed.

 Typical lowland hardwood forest at Arkansas post

By 1749, flooding and raids from the British-backed Chickasaw nation caused the Post to move upstream to an area called Red Bluff, where the park is currently located.  The Post was active at Red Bluff until 1756 when action in the Seven Years’ War (which played out in North America as the French and Indian War) caused the French to move it downstream closer to the Mississippi River to better battle the British and their allies, the Chickasaw Nation.  When that war was over in 1763, Spain got control of all lands west of the Mississippi River which included this site by trading land in Florida to the victorious British who had taken over French holdings in the Lower Mississippi River valley.  The Spanish kept the Post operating and, because of flooding on the lower river, moved the Post back to the Red Bluff site in 1779.  In 1783, the British attacked the Spanish-held Post in the only Revolutionary War battle fought in Arkansas.

 Commemorating the Spanish Post

In a secret deal with the French, Spain gave the lands west of the Mississippi back to France in 1800 so that Napoleon could then sell them to President Jefferson in 1803’s Louisiana Purchase.  I tried to imagine how all this horse-trading took place.  Men in powdered wigs and haughty attitudes thousands of miles away trading pieces of the American landscape back and forth like they were board pieces in a Monopoly game.  But that was the European colonial mindset 250 years ago. 

So now Arkansas Post is part of America.  As trapping begins to decline, farmers moved in.  In 1819, Arkansas Post was named the capital of the new Arkansas Territory, an honor that lasted only two years until 1821 when the capitol was moved to Little Rock.  The farming economy soon turned the Post into a major river port for exporting cotton.  But by 1855, Arkansas Post saw the cotton boom declining and it was no longer even the county seat.  The town continued to decline until the civil war.

 Author with one of several cannons on-site from the Civil War era

The Confederacy built Fort Hindman on the site in 1862 as part of a series of forts along the Arkansas River to protect Little Rock from Union attack.  It had a garrison of 5,000 men and supported a town site that included a cotton gin, warehouses, stores, taverns and a branch of the Arkansas Bank.  During a battle with nine Union ironclad warships in January 1863, the town was leveled and Fort Hindman surrendered.  This shelling and continual river erosion, along with a decline in water-based shipping as transportation shifted to railroads, was the death knell for Arkansas Post.  The final straw was the Arkansas River shifting more than a half mile from the town site in 1912.  Soon thereafter, in 1929, it became a state park, telling the story of all the different nations that jockeyed to claim the Mississippi River Valley and commemorating the region’s first European settlement.  

You can’t actually visit the sites of the early French and Spanish Post buildings or Fort Hindman.  Flood control measures have raised the river level and these sites are all underwater.  But there are over two miles of nicely laid out trails through the forest and along the shoreline that take you by some of the remaining civil war embattlements, the civil war era town site and a section of reconstructed Spanish era fort.  The trail also gives you a flavor of bayou wildlife.  We saw no alligators, but from the signage you know they are around.  We saw red-bellied woodpecker, tufted titmouse and purple Gallinule on the lily pads.  We walked the old town site on accessible concrete trails with signage telling us the stories of the buildings that used to be there.  The most interesting thing was saw on our hike was a local fisherman who showed us his bucket of catfish and bass he’d caught in Park Lake, just behind the visitor center. 

 Alligator trails through the lowlands

All in all we spent about three hours experiencing the landscape and trying to follow the bouncing ball of history as this place see-sawed between European overlords and various physical locations along the ever-shifting river.  I’m sure there is some kind of metaphor for our country in all that political and geographic fluctuation, but I’ll leave that to your contemplation.  After all, our National Park System was created to help you contemplate what it means to be an American.  And Arkansas Post is an excellent snapshot of that complicated and diverse discussion.