book review

University of Georgia Press

Chapter Title: Women in Early Frontier Arkansas “They Did All the Work except Hunting” Chapter Author(s): SONIA TOUDJI

Book Title: Arkansas Women Book Subtitle: Their Lives and Times Book Editor(s): Cherisse Jones-Branch, Gary T. Edwards Published by: University of Georgia Press. (2018) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1vhtrh3.6

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Women in Early Frontier Arkansas

"They Did All the Work except Hunting'

SONIA TOUDJI

In May 1749, Marie Genevieve Baury, a French settler and resident at the Ar- kansas Post, was taken captive when Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Abekas joined forces, attacked the post, and killed several Frenchmen. Initially, she remained among the Chickasaws, who must have debated her fate. Rather than adopting her into the tribe, the Chickasaws, already involved in trading captives as slaves, sold her to their neighbors.1 In 1751, Marie Genevieve found herself among the English colonists and lived at Charleston for six months. By May 16,1754, now referred to as the widow Baury, Marie Genevieve was living in New Orleans. It is not clear, however, whether her husband was killed in the earlier raid or under other circumstances.2 The end of her story remains a mystery. Women's voices in the early American frontier are mostly lost to history, since they left almost no direct records of their thoughts. According to a prominent scholar, Daniel K. Richter, in order to overcome these hard realities, "we can only try to look over [women's] shoulders . . . to try to hear [their] voices when they emerge from the surviving documents" to reconstruct the conditions in which they lived.3

This has been the situation with colonial Arkansas women, particularly those of European origin or descent, "partly because women married early, and during the time of their coverture,' as their marital condition was called, they suffered from certain civil disabilities."4

Since the 19908, scholars have prodvuced a number of acclaimed studies of colonial Arkansas. These histories of the early frontier usually focus on the pro- cess of exploring, civilizing, and settling the "savage" scenery and its Native inhabitants.5 Dominated by male presence, the stories of women remain in the background. Rethinking early Arkansas history to incorporate women as equal players is necessary in order to have a fully painted picture of these frontiers and to offer a complete story of Arkansas women as a whole. This chapter is

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6 S O N I A T O U D J I

an attempt to uncover the past lives of some Arkansas women, recovering their contributions to frontier life from the early encounters of the late seventeenth century to the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Historical records have described women of early Arkansas as industrious and hard workers, especially due to their crucial roles as food producers and in reproduction, which were essential in establishing and strengthening the population in the colony Significantly, the women of the Caddo, Osage, and Quapaw nations that inhabited Arkansas were at the heart of the diplomatic process as mediators and peace builders during the encounters on the frontier. In this chapter I shed more light on the hidden stories of early Arkansas women within their socioeconomic and political set- tings and reexamine their contributions to the market economy in the Missis- sippi valley frontier.

The Caddos, who occupied the contemporary territory of eastern Texas, also stretched their settlements along the Red and Ouachita rivers in Arkansas. This Caddoan-speaking group is known as the Kadohadachos.6 Archaeological and anthropological studies of Natives in contemporary Arkansas help us under- stand the role and place of these indigenous women.7 Matrilineal, the Caddo society operated under a different socioeconomic and political organization. For instance, during house construction, a task performed by men among other Native nations, it was the women's task to gather bundles of long grass to thatch the roof and walls. Additionally, the first recorded Spaniards who visited them described the Caddos as sedentary farmers because each family chose a site to build a house and plant crops. Women planted fields of corn, beans, wa- termelons, sunflowers, and tobacco. A planting ritual honored the women as they began their work in the fields, while the harvest ceremony in the fall was the largest celebration of the year. In addition to their physical labor outside, Caddo women performed the household tasks. Most food was cooked in the form of a stew. Green corn was roasted and ground into flour, which was mixed with water, formed into loaves, and baked on hot stone slabs. Caddo women, however, were better known for their crafts, including baskets and mats woven from cane splints, which served both domestic and ritual needs. Their pottery, decorated with intricate designs, served as platters, bowls, and jars, which be- came commodities for trade.8

Subsequent to the Spanish expedition and prior to the French exploration in late seventeenth-century Arkansas, the Dhegihan-speaking indigenous na- tions migrated from the east as a result of wars with the Iroquois Confederacy, claimed the lower Mississippi valley, and made it their home. Passed down for generations, the Native story explains how, during the long journey from the lower Ohio River valley, a big storm separated some brothers during their cross-

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Women in Early Frontier Arkansas 7

ing of the river. The Wa-Sha-She (the Osage), meaning the "children of the middle water," went up the river and established themselves in the upper Ar- kansas River valley, around the Missouri River, and controlled vast territories of northern Arkansas to the White River. The O-Gah-Pah, meaning the "people who went downstream," set up their villages around the confluence of the Mis- sissippi and Arkansas rivers and came to be known as the Quapaw.9

Both the Osage and the Quapaw based their socioeconomic and political organization on kinship, placing women and their labor at the center of their societies. In their tradition, the labor was divided between the men and women. While child-rearing was the responsibility of the whole family, women culti- vated and cooked corn, beans, and squash, and from the forest, they gathered nuts, fruits, seeds, and roots, contributing to a productive agricultural economy. As in most indigenous societies, farming came to be women's work, and they controlled the food they produced. The ceremonial planting of corn was at the heart of the Osage traditional teachings for the women. When the Buffalo and Corn songs were sung, the elders invited the women to be present in order to receive instructions in the rites they had to follow when planting corn. During the ceremony, the instructor explained to the women that the planting of the field was their responsibility and that it had to do with "the feeding of your chil- dren." The planting ritual required the women to rise with the sun. For this task, the women were to paint the parting of their hair in red to "represent the path of the force of the day and [it] will make the paths of all the animals converge toward you, for upon them you and your children must depend for food."10 This responsibility also placed the Osage woman in the position of a provider.

At the political and spiritual levels, Quapaw and Osage women worked to maintain peace within their nations and to support them during war. Both na- tions were split into two divisions, the Sky and the Earth, each of which was subdivided into clans. To bind the members and create kinship bonds within the tribe, exogamy regulated marriage among both the Osage and Quapaw. The young men and women had to look outside their clan and moiety for mar- riage partners.11 Through these marriages, the Native women became diplo- matic tools within as well as outside the tribe. Spiritually, during wartime, as the Osage warrior raided, killed, and captured the enemy, the Osage woman sent him courage through prayers for his success. The woman's duty began with the pre-battle ceremony and carried to the battlefield through the song Rite of Vigil and the Sending of Courage. As the warrior began his journey, usually at night, the woman was required to remember him. The ceremony continued: "Before the sun rises on the fifth morning, [the Osage woman] must arise and go out of your house and take from the earth a bit of soil and put it on your

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8 S O N I A T O U D J I

head. You must give all your thoughts to the warrior who has gone against the enemy.... in this way you will aid him. When the shadow of evening comes . . . remove from your head the soil of earth repeating these words: CI remove from my head the soil of the earth and wipe my hands upon the body of the chief of our enemies that he may come to his death at the hands of our warriors.'"12

According to Athanase de Mezieres, lieutenant governor of the Natchitoches district of the Caddos, the Osages had made of the region a "pitiful theatre of outrageous robberies and bloody encounters."13 These rituals became part of the Osage woman's routine since the Osage people were engaged in constant war- fare against neighboring enemy nations with which they competed for political power and control over the region's resources.

Similarly the Osage emphasized women's reproductive abilities, which al- lowed the growth of the population within the nation and the increase of its political and economic power. Osage women performed the most basic re- quirement for the survival of a people by giving birth and raising children to adulthood. In the second part of the Rite of Vigil and the Sending of Courage, the Osage woman was instructed on her duties as a mother: "you have a child. There is in you the same desire that there is in all good mothers to bring your children successfully to maturity. In this, you need the aid of a power that is greater than that of the human being."14 It was also the instructor's task to teach the Osage woman about the rite by which an appeal could be made to the power that was to bless her child. As additional Europeans arrived in the valley, settlers and explorers recorded their observations on the early encounters with these Native groups, which allows us to sketch women's lifeways and understand and assess their role in their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century societies.

As part of Europeans' colonial aspirations and conquest of North America, Arkansas Natives witnessed "explorers" encroaching on their lands one after the other. The French were the first Europeans to establish a permanent settlement among Arkansas's Natives. Father Jacques Marquette, a priest, and Louis Joliet, a merchant, launched an expedition from New France into the interior of the North American continent. They reached Arkansas in June 1673 and were wel- comed by the Quapaws, who informed the French visitors that the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf of Mexico. The French explorers headed back to Quebec, the heart of New France, with the news of their discovery.15 As a result, the French Crown ordered Rene-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, to launch more expeditions to expand the colony southward. In 1682, Robert La Salle, who claimed the territory of La Louisiane in the name of the king of France at the Quapaw village of Kappa, reached the mouth of the Mississippi River. Soon, Frenchmen left France and New France to pursue fortune and adventure in the

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Women in Early Frontier Arkansas 9

new territories, including Arkansas. Henri de Tonti, who accompanied La Salle, in 1686 set up the Arkansas Post, the first permanent settlement in French colo- nial Louisiana, for trade among the Quapaws.16

Despite the first French exploration and the beginning of settlements, the number of European and African women present in the French colony of Loui- siana was almost insignificant. Similar to the stories of Native women, the sto- ries of Arkansas women of European and African descents, as well as their roles in the early frontier, are yet to be uncovered. The first Frenchwomen came to Louisiana as part of La Salle's expedition of twenty-one; by 1687, there were seven women. The initial French government in Louisiana began at Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and then transferred to the environs of Mobile, Alabama, in i/oi.17

In 1717, the French Crown gave Louisiana to John Law, a Scottish financier, for settlement through his Compagnie d'Occident. The company granted land to settlers and to entrepreneurs who wished to establish plantations in the colony.18 Between 1717 and 1721, a population of 5,303 men, 1,215 women, and 502 children, mostly natives of France and some from Germany, were transported to Louisiana.19 Most of the female immigrants were the wives and daughters of concessionaires, farmers, workers, and soldiers; however, at least 150 of them came from poorhouses and prisons in France. Records also reveal single women workers, such as Marie Delure, a dressmaker, and Francoise Chatrency, a la- borer.20 As part of the colonial project, the first two slave ships, Le Due du Maine and L'Aurore, brought rice seeds as well as enslaved Africans to French colonial Louisiana under the auspices of John Law's Company of the Indies, arriving in 1719. There were more than 600 Africans brought to Louisiana for agricultural labor by Law.21 In 1721, Law's ships disembarked 2,000 enslaved people from West Africa to produce crops for the colony's subsistence and exports.22 Among them was Le Fortune, which brought 303 enslaved people, including 64 women and 11 girls. Between 1726 and 1731, thirteen slave ships landed in Louisiana, and by 1746, the African population numbered 4,738 individuals, outnumbering the 3,400 Europeans.23

During the first decades of settlement, a civil government was set up to rule the French colony, and the Coutume de Paris (the French customary law) and the edicts of the king regulated the colony and dictated the legal status of women in Louisiana. According to article 25 of the Coutume, "le mari est seigneur," the husband is the lord. This legal system restricted women's rights severely, and they could not perform any legal act without their husband's con- sent. However, the law offered a certain level of economic protection, at least in theory. For instance, a married woman could act independently in business as a

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10 S O N I A T O U D J I

marchande publique (public merchant) and be active in her husband's mercan- tile affairs. The husband could not contract or obligate her separate property possibly acquired through inheritance or by marital gift, without her consent. In the case of a second marriage, the new husband had marital powers over the woman but not over her property. In becoming a widow, a woman gained both legal and financial independence.24 This law both restricted and protected the lives of colonial Arkansas women.

In 1724, a code of laws to govern the Africans, the Code Noir, was enacted in Louisiana. The code had already defined the system of slave labor and regulated race relations in the Caribbean colonies.25 The Code Noir severely governed some aspects of the lives of enslaved people, with an emphasis on cross-racial intimate intercourse. Enslaved people in French Louisiana were unable to pe- tition to be sold away from a cruel owner and could not claim the right of self-purchase. The law prohibited manumission without the permission of the government or the Superior Council and also prohibited freeing slaves in wills.26

The code also forbade the sale of young children separately from their mothers. It is, however, unclear how real this protection was in actual practice. The code restricted whites' behavior as well: they could not marry or live in concubinage with "mulattoes" or blacks, whether enslaved or free. In 1726, Father Raphael, the Capuchin vicar general of Louisiana, reported violations of the code by the colonists, who "maintained young Indian women or negresses to satisfy their intemperance.... [It was] enough to scandalize the church and to require an effective remedy."27

Colonial women's inferior legal status did not prevent their contribution to the early frontier; their labor and their reproductive ability were at the heart of the agricultural export economy in the French colony. Similarly, Louisiana grew as it depended on the deployment of enslaved Africans to boost its economy and secure its frontiers. African women performed many tasks in the settlers' households, including cleaning, cooking, and working in the agricultural fields. Others worked on plantations where they did all the exhausting work of grow- ing indigo, tobacco, and sugar.28 While women's physical labor was important, historiography has brought to light the essential role of reproduction in mak- ing the natural increase of population possible in the frontier life of the North American colonies. "Slaveowners contemplated women's reproductive potential with greed and opportunism," Jennifer Morgan writes.29 The reassessment of colonial women's contribution to the early frontier must keep in perspective their role as bearers of children, making life sustainable. European women's roles in the French colony included their reproductive potential, since populated settlements became key to maintaining sovereignty over the claimed territories.

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Women in Early Frontier Arkansas n

Early censuses reveal a small presence of both European and African women at the Arkansas Post. During the first decades of settlement in Louisiana, nearly 90 percent of the colonial population was concentrated in and around New Or- leans and on the Gulf Coast. Established by colonial officials, the interior posts, including Arkansas, worked to secure access and preserve trade networks with the Native people. In 1721, the Company of the Indies granted a large conces- sion in Arkansas to John Law himself. Soon after, a hundred French indentured servants, a few German farmers, a number of African slaves, and about twenty soldiers arrived at the Arkansas Post. A year later, the company moved most of the enslaved Africans nearer to New Orleans and freed a number of the in- dentured French servants. Unable to farm virgin land, which was difficult to cultivate, only twenty Frenchmen, six slaves, and an additional thirty settlers who lived among the Quapaws, remained. Quickly, more settlers abandoned the area, leaving a total of thirty men, women, and children. Those who stayed immediately gave up farming and became full-time hunters, depending on the Quapaws for agricultural produce. In 1726, records of the colonial population in Louisiana showed only fourteen settlers in Arkansas, including three women of European descent and one "Indian slave" (gender undisclosed).30

Throughout the eighteenth century, the Arkansas Post did not provide much stability and security for its settlers, especially women, thus discouraging new- comers. As a labor force at the post, especially during the hunting season when the men left the settlement—for roughly six months—the few European women and the enslaved African women engaged in a wide variety of activities. While conducting trade was restricted to the European men, Arkansas women, white and black, took care of the daily domestic tasks in the frontier households, such as child-rearing, cooking, serving, and cultivating small gardens of vegetables and tobacco. Throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, it appears that the villagers at the post were not equipped with an outdoor oven for baking bread, a common feature in other colonial towns of the era, an indication that there was no reliable production of grains. The successful cultivation of swampy and flooded lands was no easy task, if not impossible, but the biggest challenge for the women at the post was security. Even with the French military presence and Quapaw protection, the settlement was subject to raids from neighboring Native nations. In May 1749, a Chickasaw-British raid resulted in the killing of six Frenchmen and the taking captive of eight women and children, including Marie Genevieve Baury, whose story opened this chapter.31 While most of the captives were later ransomed, Marie Genevieve was sold to the British.

While the records are scarce, it is clear that the colonial government and the French Crown understood the importance of women's ability to procreate in

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12 S O N I A T O U D J I

order to sustain settlements in the colony. Although they claimed the large terri- tories of New France and Louisiana, the French remained relatively weak by contrast to the Spaniards and the British. Thus, populated settlements became key for French survival during the race for land. As early as 1714, Louisiana governor Antoine Laumet de Lamothe Cadillac characterized the French colo- nists of Louisiana as "a mass of rapscallions from Canada, without subordina- tion, with no respect for religion, and abandoned in vice with Indian women, whom they prefer to French girls."32 The same year, Father Henri Roulleaux de La Vente argued that "in order to populate the colony [we need] to permit mar- riages between Frenchmen and Catholic Indian women."33 However, as long as the Frenchmen remained among the Natives and their wives and children re- mained "uncivilized," these unions neither populated nor benefited the colony. In 1715, writing from Dauphin Island in what was then lower Louisiana, French administrator Jean-Baptiste du Bois Duclos expressed his opposition to inter- marriage between Native women and Frenchmen. He reported that French- men legally married to Native women in the Illinois Country were "Indianized," while "their wives had changed nothing or at least very little in their manner of living." As a result, the governor-general of New France, Pierre Rigaud de Vaudreuil, reversed the policy and banned intermarriages in 1715.34 In fact, post commandants and governors in French Louisiana frequently asked for French- women from the homeland to strengthen the settlement.

In response to these requests, French authorities sent women from France in an attempt to solidify the settlements in Louisiana. The king agreed to send one hundred women annually to increase the colonial population; twelve women taken from a house of correction in Paris arrived at the colony by 1713. After their arrival, the king's "daughters," as they came to be known, were supposed to live with Sister Gertrude, a Catholic nun, until they might marry. As the Frenchwomen remained unmarried, Duclos, Louisiana's commissary-general, suggested that the "girls were too ugly and badly formed to secure the affec- tions of the men," and added that in the future, "if they were only to be offered girls as ugly as these they would rather attach themselves to Indian females."35

More young women were sent from France in response to the officials' com- plaints concerning the need for wives. In 1720, twenty-five women arrived from a house of correction, the Saltpetriere, in Paris. In 1727, a vessel arrived with a few women who, unlike many others who had been sent to Louisiana, had not been taken from a house of correction.36 By 1749, Governor Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville could describe Louisiana as a "healthy place [where] women are very fertile."37 Regardless, the arrival of a larger number of Frenchwomen in Louisiana did not mark an end to the sexual relations between Frenchmen

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Women in Early Frontier Arkansas 13

and Native women; however, marrying Native women often was a matter of practicality rather than preference.

During this early period, Native American women's labor in the household and in the field remained crucial to life and the market economy on the frontier. Native American women were a labor force for their communities that sustained economic exchange with the Europeans. The contribution of Osage women, for example, was evident in the articles they produced, mainly for cooking, and ex- changed in long-distance trade networks. Osage women used the peelings stripped from canes to make fine strainers, while other strainers with larger openings were used to sift grains. They made baskets to carry corn and other produce they grew in their yards. With feathers from the tails of turkeys, "which they [knew] how to arrange," the women made fans for themselves and for European women.38 They sold or exchanged these small articles to the French for European goods, such as cooking pots and knives. Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, the cofounder and governor of Louisiana, complained in an undated memoir that the Quapaws were "very lackadaisical and lazy and depended entirely on the work of their women for the necessities of life."39 Quapaw men hunted turkey, deer, and buffalo, as re- ported by Father Paul Du Ru, who traveled up the river from New Orleans. Du Ru described the Quapaw women as harder working than the men.40 In addition to household chores, cooking, and rearing children, the women tilled the soil, sowed, and reaped. Frenchman Henri Joutel admired a field of four or five square miles from which the Quapaw harvested "corn, pumpkins, melons, sunflowers, beans, as well as lots of peaches and plums." Joutel explained the different sorts of corn bread prepared by the Arkansas women, which they served with smoked meat. They cooked all kinds of dishes and "did all the work except hunting."41

For the fur trappers, to whom European women were useless, the Native women's work was essential to maintaining the frontier economy. Cleaning furs and dressing skins were deemed women's work, and without a good skin dresser, a trapper, hunter, or skin buyer was severely handicapped. According to Dumont de Montigny, the indigenous women were "very hardworking.... When her husband kills a deer or a buffalo, he never brings it h o m e . . . . he tells her where to find the animal and she walks in her husband's track[s] to find it and carries it to the hut." The woman cooked what she needed and traded the rest of it to the French, or she smoked the meat and dried it in order to preserve it.42 In Arkansas, both the Quapaw and the Osage supplied fur to the colony of Louisiana. The French took advantage of their expertise in working skins and pelts, as the Arkansas Post produced deerskins.43

Osage women's work on hides was central to tribal life and, now, to their economic and diplomatic relations with the Europeans. The Osage used both

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14 S O N I A T O U D J I

raw and tanned hides in their daily lives. Some of the hides were used with the hair still on them, but often the hair was removed. Women removed the hair from buffalo hides using the ash-lye method. They boiled the hide in a water and wood ash solution, which loosened the hair, making it easier to scrape off. However, for hides to be used in making bags, the Osage women hammered off the hair with a rounded stream stone. Then the hide was covered with buffalo dung on both sides and kept moist for three to five days before tanning. The hide was cleaned with buffalo brain. Once the oil of the brain loosened the fibers, they laid the hide over a log and beat it with a stick until it was pliable. The hide was then smoked and stored.44 The Osage woman's skills with hides and in the fields were critical for the Osage man, whose status depended on his wife's reproductive and productive abilities as well as his ability to provide for and protect his family. These same skills also proved to be critical for the French trappers and traders on the early frontier.

Historian Juliana Barr has suggested that women represented peace and played a crucial role in early frontier diplomacy. In fact, the presence of women or their absence was an indication of peace or threat. For instance, during the encounter between Spanish explorers and Caddos in the late seventeenth cen- tury, although Spanish women were absent, the portrait of the Virgin Mary carried by the Spaniards prevented the Caddos from identifying them as po- tential enemies. Additionally, the Spaniards explained how the Virgin was their mother and the mother of all the Caddos as well. As a result, the Caddos drew parallels between the Virgin Mary and the Mother from their creation story, which made the Caddos identify with the Spaniards, who now became brothers and allies.45

Similarly, women lay at the heart of Native nations' diplomacy, and they were at the center of the tribes' hospitality. Because women grew, gathered, prepared, and served the food, they came into intimate contact with the guests and po- tential allies. As they arrived among the Natives, the Europeans were delighted by the hospitality of the "savages" and the treatment offered by their women. In fact, when Hernando de Soto ventured into contemporary Arkansas in 1542, the Spanish conquistador reported an attempt by the Natives to establish a kinship with him. The chief of the Casqui nation welcomed the Spaniards and then expressed his desire to offer "de Soto one of his daughters to unite his blood with that of so great a lord."46 Instead, de Soto, who failed to understand Native diplomacy, attempted to pass for a god. Unsuccessful, he died with no glory and no legacy. Similarly, Spaniard Jacinto de Barrios was scandalized by the Frenchmen among the Caddo who regarded "the Indians so highly that civi- lized persons marry the Indian women without incurring blame."47 Along with

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Women in Early Frontier Arkansas 15

Native women being "Europeanized" among the Spaniards, Frenchmen might be "Indianized" and serve, along with their metis offspring, as a bridge between the two peoples.48

Native women and Frenchmen engaged in intimate and socioeconomic interactions that sustained diplomatic and economic relations that benefited the two peoples throughout the eighteenth century. Among the Quapaw, hospitality was at the center of kinship while women were at the heart of hospitality. On March 12,1682, when the Quapaw welcomed Robert La Salle, Father Membre recalled "the courtesy and fine treatment we received from these barbarians. They let us lodge where we wanted, swept the place clean for us, and gave us firewood for the three days we spent with them." Membre was pleased by the treatment that the Quapaw women, with "pretty white complexions," gave the Frenchmen. They were "so well formed that we were in admiration of their beauty and their modesty," wrote Membre. According to him, the Frenchmen were convinced that the Quapaws' hospitality and friendship "gives idea of the good-hearted qualities of these savages."49 The French seemed to understand the importance of the kinship established by La Salle to preserving the Qua- paws' friendship and loyalty.

Intermarriage enabled the Quapaws to create stronger bonds with French Creoles.50 During La Salle's expedition among the Caddos in 1684, Henri Joutel, commander of a company, asserted that when Barbier, a Frenchman whose full name is unknown, went out hunting, Joutel usually "sent with him some women and maids, to help the hunters to dress and dry the flesh. Barbier used to slip aside from the company, with a young maid he had kindness for." After Bar- bier expressed his desire to leave to marry that young woman, Joutel asked the priest to marry them. Joutel added that following this example, other French- men asked for the same privilege, and he indicated that he had blessed many of these unions himself.51

During the first decades of the eighteenth century, the French royalty relied on a coureur de bois (woodsman), Etienne de Veniard, sieur de Bourgmont, who lived among the Osage and Missouri nations, to establish Fort d'Orleans in 1723.52 He influenced five tribal chiefs to travel across the Atlantic to seal dip- lomatic ties with the king of France two years later.53 As part of the delegation that traveled to Paris, a Missouri woman, identified as a chief's daughter, took an active diplomatic role. In Paris, the Duchess of Orleans arranged for the bap- tism of the "sauvagesse" in Notre Dame de Paris, and stood as her godmother. She also arranged the Native woman's marriage to a French officer, a sergeant identified only as DuBois, who had served Bourgmont during his explorations on the American Plains and then on the trip to France.54 The couple and the rest

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16 S O N I A T O U D J I

of the delegation came back to the Mississippi valley with gifts that symbolized the kinship between the king and his "children" and the reciprocal obligations between their nations. These unions, friendships, and alliances illustrate the ties between the French settlers and the Arkansas Natives that persisted even after the diplomatic treaties ended with the transfer of Louisiana to Spain in 1763. As the balance of power changed at the end of the French and Indian War, the French attempted in vain to convince the Arkansas Natives that they were maintaining their previous diplomatic relations through the Spaniards, but Ar- kansans, Natives, and French settlers all resisted Spanish authority

Because the French and the Natives lost the French and Indian War, the British and the Spaniards advanced into the French territory of Louisiana in accordance with the 1763 Treaty of Paris. On paper, the great war for empire was ended, and the Louisiana territory west of the Mississippi River became Spanish. In reality, the territory, in many aspects, remained French and Indian. Since the Spanish Crown was slow to send officials to begin their rule in Loui- siana, the residents continued life as if they were still in a French colony. The laws and the Coutume de Paris, which had governed the colony during the French regime, remained essentially unchanged under the initial Spanish colo- nial governance. As the Spaniards enacted laws to govern the newly acquired colony, settlers and Natives resisted the change. In March 1766, the first Spanish governor of Louisiana, Antonio de Ulloa, in an attempt to control the econom- ics of the colony, issued new commercial decrees that changed trade practices. Merchants who had been accustomed to trading with French ports in the Carib- bean, in addition to conducting illegal commerce with the nearby British colo- nies, resisted the governor's new trade decrees. The leaders of New Orleans's business community led an insurrection in 1769 that forced Ulloa to leave.55 In theory, Spanish was the official language, and French authorities were replaced by Spanish ones; in actuality, many Frenchmen still held offices, and French remained the most important language in the colony. Because few Spaniards lived in the region, St. Louis, Louisiana, maintained its French character and French language.56

However, when the Crown appointed Alejandro O'Reilly as governor in 1769, the laws that regulated the lives of enslaved Africans, including enslaved women in Arkansas, changed under the Spanish colonial government. O'Reilly insti- tuted reforms to encourage economic exchange between Louisiana and other Spanish colonies. Economic prosperity during the Spanish era brought more African slaves into the colony; the enslaved population reached 5,000 individu- als and grew even larger with the expansion of plantation agriculture in the 17708. The rapid growth of the slave population prompted tighter restrictions

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Women in Early Frontier Arkansas 17

on their social and economic actions. Unlike the Code Noir, Spanish law did not protect the African slave family: children could be sold separately from their parents. Slaves were, however, able to purchase their freedom, buy their family members, and go to court to seek a remedy if they were badly treated by their owners. A large number of enslaved Africans petitioned and sued for their freedom while many slaveowners voluntarily emancipated their slaves. As a result, communities of free people of color developed throughout the colony, including the Arkansas Post. The Spanish Census of 1769 had counted 9 male slaves, 7 female slaves, and no free blacks or mulattoes at the Arkansas Post. In 1785, more than a decade after the Spanish law was in place, the Arkansas Post's total population of 196 individuals included 31 free people of color and 17 slaves.57 Although the record does not disclose gender, it is possible that the freed slaves included women, since the Spanish law was not gender specific and allowed African women in Arkansas to buy their freedom.

Like the French, the Spanish colonial government understood that families, implying the presence of women, were important for the stability and there- fore prosperity of the Arkansas Post. In 1769, the Arkansas Post housed thirty white women in addition to the seven enslaved women. In 1768, Captain Al- exandre Chevalier DeClouet, commandant of the post during the Spanish era, succeeded in getting four outdoor ovens built for baking bread; however, the inhabitants were still unable to produce grains and were reduced to trading liquor to the Quapaw for corn. As the French and African women continued their work in the fields, flooding undermined their labor. The 1779 flood, for instance, submerged the post as the inhabitants saw their crops destroyed, their livestock drowned, and their houses collapse. Soon, Captain Balthazar de Villiers relocated the post permanently to higher ground. De Villiers hoped, like other officials before him, to attract farmers and create "a respectable settle- ment." A year later, nine American families, refugees of the American Revo- lution, arrived, followed by a petition from other families from South Carolina asking for permission to settle.58 Although most of the residents continued to hunt as their main source of income, about a dozen families eventually began to produce a significant wheat crop after the post relocated. In the spring of 1780, de Villiers reported, "an American family composed of nine persons has arrived to stay. They came from Illinois and ought to be followed by several others, all farmers. This is going to give this post a stability, which it has never had. I am doing my best to encourage them."59 By the 1791 Census, there were twenty-seven households, and sixteen of them were headed by farmers (culti- vateurs). The largest slaveowner (thirty-seven slaves) living at the post was the widow Menard, a merchant and farmer, who became one of the most productive

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18 S O N I A T O U D J I

farmers growing wheat, corn, and tobacco. The Census of 1798 counted ap- proximately four hundred habitants, the highest number throughout colonial times, including thirty families that produced a crop, mostly corn, some wheat, and tobacco. The number of mulatto and black slaves reached fifty-six.60 While migration partially explains the population growth at the post, women's repro- ductive capabilities continued to serve the frontier.

Women of European descent contributed to the natural increase of the popu- lation. On December 5,1743, Catherine Landrony, daughter of Joseph and Marie Landrony, was the first white child recorded as born at the post. A year later, Catherine's sister, Marie Antoine, was born. Between 1780 and 1793, baptismal records, which are incomplete, reveal that a total of thirty-three children of European descent were born at the post.61 Perhaps the case of the widow of Joseph Francoeur, Marie Jeanne, an Indian or metis, opens a window into these women's role in populating and also connecting the early frontiers. In the 1768 Census of Inhabitants of Arkansas Post by Alexandre DeClouet, Marie Jeanne Francoeur is reported to have had three sons and six daughters—Agnes, An- gelique, Susanne, Catherine, Marie Jeanne (known as Maria Juana in the Span- ish records), and Marianne. Agnes married Jean Jollin, a native of La Rochelle, France, and they lived in St. Genevieve, Illinois. Their daughter Agnes Jaulin was baptized on December 10, 1770. Angelique, who married Joseph Turgeon in 1770, lived in Kaskaskia, Illinois. On June 5,1770, at Pointe Coupee, Susanne married Pierre Julien Chevalier de Montcherveaux. Catherine married Jean Baptiste Chenier, a native of Illinois and resident of St. Charles Parish, in 1771. She gave birth to two sons: Jean Baptiste Chenier Jr. and Joseph Chenier. The records from St. Louis Cathedral, New Orleans, show the marriage on July 5, 1783, of Maria Juana (Marie Jeanne) and Antonio Pino, who later had two sons.62

One colonial Arkansas woman, Marie Jeanne Francoeur, by giving birth to six daughters, thus managed to create a web of connections between the post and different frontier settlements throughout the colony of Louisiana.

The Catholic Church records for the Arkansas Post show that Frenchmen continued to rely on Native women (either wives or captives) for their necessi- ties. During his visit among the Quapaw in 1772, Jean Bernard Bossu declared that it was "a pleasure seeing these women who were showing a great affection toward the French, they prefer them to the Spanish."63 In 1784, Jacob (Jacobo) Dubreuil, commandant of the post, reported in his Census of the three vil- lages of the Arkansas Quapaws a total of 308 females of all ages out of a total population of 708. Few officials or travelers clearly documented French-Native liaisons, and of the European-Native marriages actually recorded in official and sacramental records in eighteenth-century Arkansas, only one clearly involved

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Women in Early Frontier Arkansas 19

a Quapaw woman—that between Michael Bone and Marie Louise. However, recent scholarship has pointed at the hidden unions between Frenchmen and Arkansas Native women throughout the eighteenth century. Further, Native women were often victims of a highly organized slave trade in the region. The Catholic Church records of the 17908 reveal several instances of Frenchmen who fathered children with women of indigenous origin (including Osage, Cances—now known as Kansas—and Paducah), presumably captives. A larger list of Native women who gave birth to children of unknown fathers can be drawn from these records. By 1791, two women identified as metis served the post's residents as seamstresses.64

As wives, concubines, or captives, Native women were so necessary that Frenchmen disregarded the Spanish law about Indian slavery to maintain their lifestyle in frontier Arkansas. The Spanish law was beneficial to the enslaved Na- tives, who won their freedom under the new regime. In 1763, there were about one hundred Indian slaves in lower Louisiana. In 1769, as the Spanish govern- ment officially took over the administration of Louisiana, the law prohibited the further enslavement of Natives and the selling of Natives already in slavery, proclaiming future descendants of Indian women to be free by law. The Spanish Crown published a decree on December 7,1769: "the wise and just laws of His Majesty very expressly forbid subjects of any quality or condition whatsoever to make any Indian a slave or to possess any such, under any pretext whatever, even though there be an open war against that Indian s nation. In Consequence whereof, all subjects of His Majesty, and even all transients, are expressly for- bidden to acquire, purchase, or take over any Indian slaves."65 In 1770, a year after the Spanish law took effect, Lieutenant Governor Athanase de Mezieres complained about French hunters in Arkansas's St. Francis River area and de- scribed them as "the most wicked persons, [who] live so forgetful of the laws"; many "have not returned to Christian lands" for several years and lived "their scandalous lives in public concubinage with the captive Indian women whom for this purpose they purchase among the heathen, loaning those of whom they tire to others of less power, that they may labor in their service, giving them no other wage than the promise of quieting their lascivious passions."66 The same year, however, in a letter addressed to Francois Demazellieres, commandant of the Arkansas Post, the Francoeur brothers declared that the hunters along the Arkansas River who "requested permission to marry the savage women with whom they are living and by whom they have had children, in the Roman Ap- ostolic church, did not have the money or the food to go to New Orleans."67 Be- cause Native women were so necessary to the Europeans' survival, Frenchmen who kept captive Indian women found ways around the Spanish law: they used

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20 S O N I A T O U D J I

terms such as "captive," "slave," "domestic," "concubine," and "wife" interchange- ably, making the women's status difficult to define, in case of law enforcement.

The Osages, via their women, expanded control over the Arkansas River valley and provided New Orleans with the largest quantity and the best quality of fur. They occupied a very strategic site that connected to the Great Plains. The revenues from the fur and skin trade at the Arkansas Post with the Osages alone averaged $18,750 annually by the end of the colonial era. Osage women continued to carry out their regular tasks of child-rearing, tending the gardens, and preparing the meals, and they built their houses and most of the interior furniture and utensils as well. Most critical to the Frenchmen were the Osage women's role in preparing buffalo and deer hides for the European market. It was the tradition among the Osage on the hunts that the men cooked the ribs while the women were busy preparing the meat and the hides. Osage women cleaned and dressed thousands of furs and shaved and tanned most of them to make leather. Their skills were so necessary for the hunt that during the winter, the Frenchmen took some women with them to prepare the hides with flesh- ers and metal scrapers. Historian John Mathews concluded that the interest the coureurs de bois, the French woodsmen, had in the Osage had to do with their women because "they all took the widows or married the girls."68 Hundreds of individual voyageurs worked along the rivers and streams of Louisiana, exchang- ing guns, ammunition, and other goods for furs and skins. As a result, the French coureurs de bois and voyageurs fraternized with the Natives, learned their lan- guages, ate their food, and married the women.69 In fact, during the second half of the eighteenth century, the Chouteau family built St. Louis using indigenous labor and collecting the most "precious fur from throughout the region."70 The Chouteau brothers, Auguste and Pierre, had been students of the Osages since their adolescent years and married into the tribe. Through the Osage wives, the Chouteaus and the Osages gradually became intimate and business partners, forging a kinship that maintained their monopoly on the fur business during the second half of the eighteenth century. Because of his connections with the Osage and his economic power in the region, Pierre Chouteau was appointed to become the U.S. Indian agent for the district of Louisiana, and was selected to escort the Osage delegation to visit the president in Washington, D.C., in i8o4.71

The aristocratic women of Arkansas throughout the eighteenth century con- tributed to frontier life similarly, although they experienced it differently. Perhaps what is most unusual about this group of women is their presence in the historical records. Although these women are still identified as the wives or daughters of colonial officials, they are more than numbers in a census about female popu- lation or being part of a household. Uniquely, the upper-class colonial Arkansas

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Women in Early Frontier Arkansas 21

women became part of the recorded stories about the Arkansas Post, and their names and even their portraits have survived. For instance, when Ensign Pierre Louis Petit de Coulange was assigned to the Arkansas Post, his wife accompanied him to the frontier. Shortly after, on September 23, 1732, their daughter, Marie Francoise, was born in Arkansas, as her tombstone in a New Orleans cemetery reveals. By the time she was seven years old, Marie Francoise lost her father to a Chickasaw warrior, and she moved to New Orleans with her mother. She grew up to give birth to a son, Charles Melchior de Vilemont, who served as one of the last colonial commandants of the Arkansas Post between 1794 and i8o2.72

Another colonial Arkansas elite woman, Marie Madeleine Broutin Delino de Chalmette, also accompanied her husband, who was appointed comman- dant at the Arkansas Post, and she witnessed the infamous Chickasaw raid of May 1749. Like the rest of the women at the post, Marie Madeleine experienced the insecurity and the violence of frontier Arkansas. And like Marie Francoise, Marie Madeleine's contribution to Arkansas was giving birth to Jean Ignace Delino de Chalmette, who served as commandant of the post from 1790 to 1794. Marie Madeleine's daughter, Victoire Delino de Chalmette (1777-1868), and Marie Felicite Valliere de Vaugine (1770-1806), the daughter of Commandant Don Joseph Valliere, spent a few years at the post during their childhood, but eventually enjoyed a privileged life in the city of New Orleans and received a proper education that included music and dancing lessons. Marie Felicite at- tended the school at the Ursuline convent—built in 1753 and still standing in the French Quarter in today's New Orleans—since there were no educational opportunities at the post at all. Last, Captain Alexandre Chevalier DeClouet, commandant of the post, saw his wife, Louise Favrot, serving the frontier as she attended the sick brought to the post during an epidemic. Before 1769, when the DeClouet family left Arkansas, Louise offered the post's chapel some luxury items as gifts.73 These examples show the lives of Arkansas's ruling class in the colonial era: they faced the isolation, violence, and diseases of the typical fron- tier experience regardless of age, class, and gender.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, the lifestyle in the colony looked similar to what it had been at the beginning of settlement. Reporting on his 1802 travels, Perrin du Lac revealed: "The inhabitants, almost all originally French emigrants from Canada, are hunters by profession.... More than half the year one finds in this village only women, children, and old people. . . . On their return home [the men] pass their time in playing games, dancing, drinking, or doing nothing, similar in this as in other things to the savage peoples . . . whose habits and customs they acquire."74 On August 17,1803, George Gillespie from St. Louis exclaimed at "the news of the day" that "the French have ceded Louisiana

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22 S O N I A T O U D J I

to the Americans for six million piastres'.'75 The purchase of the French colony by President Thomas Jefferson signaled the end of a colonial frontier and the beginning of a new era, as Arkansas became part of the American unorganized territory During the colonial era, through their presence, and their sexuality, Arkansas women contributed to survival on the frontier, while their wombs provided the population necessary to settle the land and their labor carved out wealth. What the purchase meant for Americans, and its consequences for colo- nial Arkansas women, is covered in the following chapters.

NOTES

I am grateful to Judge Morris Arnold, an expert in colonial Arkansas history, who has read my work and provided important feedback.

1. Because of the demand for female slaves/captives, the Chickasaw-English raids against the Arkansas Post continued until the end of the American Revolution. On August 3, 1783, Captain of Infantry Jacob Dubreuil, commander of the Arkansas Post, requested the return of the captives and some property, taken in April of the same year, from James Colbert, a British trader, who allied with the Chickasaws and resided in the Chickasaw Nation (see 545 in the following source). Fort Charles III, "Arkansas Reports for the Year 1783, by Anna Lewis," Mississippi Valley Historical Review

20, no. 4 (1934): 537-49- 2. Petition of Marie Genevieve [Baury], Colonial Records of South Carolina, Documents Relat-

ing to Indian Affairs, 1754-1765, 37-38, Core Family Papers, box 22, file 15, MCi38o, Special Collec- tions, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.

3. Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 9.

4. Jeannie Whayne, Thomas A. DeBlack, George Sabo III, and Morris S. Arnold, Arkansas: A Narrative History (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2013), 81.

5. A leading scholar in the field, Morris Arnold, looked at the early Arkansas societies and the laws that governed Natives, Europeans, and Africans. Arnold's work includes Unequal Laws unto a Savage Race: European Legal Traditions in Arkansas, 1686-1836 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1985); Colonial Arkansas, 1686-1804: A Social and Cultural History (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991); and The Rumble of a Distant Drum: The Quapaws and the Old World New- comers, 1673-1804 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000). Kathleen DuVal developed the concept of "Native ground" and applied this encounter pattern to the lower Mississippi valley, home to a few large and relatively cohesive tribes, in her The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). George Sabo III traced the history of Arkansas Natives from precontact to their removal to the Indian Territory in the early nineteenth century in his Paths of Our Children: Historic Indians of Arkansas (Fayetteville: Arkansas Archeological Survey, 2001). See also Joseph Key's "The Calumet and the Cross: Religious Encounters in the Lower Mississippi Valley," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 61 (Summer 2002): 165.

6. Todd Smith, Louisiana and the Gulf South Frontier, 1500-1821 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), 38.

7. George Sabo's work offers an overview of the cultural beliefs and practices as well as the socio- political structures of three different tribes of French Louisiana, including what is today Arkansas.

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Women in Early Frontier Arkansas 23

He explores the lives of the Quapaws, Osages, and Caddos and developments from the ancient

prehistoric era to the twentieth century. The period before the encounter with the French explorers

and settlers is pertinent to my work. Sabo, Paths of Our Children.

8. Following Hernando de Soto's death in 1542, the remaining members of his expedition, about

three hundred individuals, headed westward hoping to join the Spanish settlements in Mexico.

Traveling along the Ouachita River, the journey took them to southwest Arkansas (between Mal-

vern and Arkadelphia), where they encountered the Caddo people. Sabo, Paths of Our Children,

19-20, 50-52.

9. Velma Seamster Nieberding, The Quapaws: Those Who Went Downstream (Miami, Fla.: Dix-

ons, 1976); David Baird, The Quapaw Indians: A History of the Downstream People (Norman: Uni-

versity of Oklahoma Press, 1980); and Baird, The Quapaw People (Phoenix, Ariz.: Indian Tribal

Series, 1975).

10. The women were then instructed on how to gather ceremonially the roots of the water lily

for food for their little ones. "The water lily with which you feed your children is also a sacred food

and should be gathered with proper ceremony. It is a symbol of life." For the complete story of the

ceremony, see Garrick A. Bailey, ed., The Osage and the Invisible World: From the Works of Francis

La Flesche (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 176-79.

11. Baird, Quapaw People, 7.

12. Bailey, The Osage, 79.

13. Smith, Louisiana, 157.

14. Bailey, The Osage, 79.

15. Roger Coleman, The Arkansas Post Story: Arkansas Post National Monument (Santa Fe, N.M.:

National Park Service, 1987), 6.

16. Arnold, Unequal Laws, i; Arnold, Rumble of a Distant Drum, 15.

17. Vaughan Baker, "Cherchez les Femmes: Some Glimpses of Women in Early Eighteenth-Century

Louisiana," Louisiana History 31 (1990): 21-37, 235 Lawrence Powell, The Accidental City: Improvising

New Orleans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 3.

18. Arnold, Colonial Arkansas, 9.

19. Daniel Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Missis-

sippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 33.

20. These women were on board the Loire, which left the port of Lorient in 1720, bound for the

Sainte Catherine concession at Natchez. Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves, 47.

21. John Mathews, The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters (Norman: University of Oklahoma

Press, 1982), 188.

22. Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves, 32.

23. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Cul-

ture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 9, 64.

24. Edward Haas, Louisiana's Legal Heritage (Pensacola, Fla.: Perdido Bay Press, 1983), 7.

25. Judith Kelleher Schafer, Slavery, the Civil Law, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana (Baton

Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), i.

26. «Code Noir; ou, Loi Municipale, Servant de Reglement pour le Governement et Adminis-

tration de la Justice, Police, Discipline et le Commerce des Esclaves Negres, dans la Province de la

Louisianne, entreprit par Deliberation du Cabildo en Vertu des Ordres du Roi,» article 16, Xavier

University Archives, New Orleans, Louisiana; Schafer, Slavery, 2. Spain transferred Louisiana back

to France in 1801 in a secret treaty, but France did not take possession of the colony until Novem-

ber 30, 1803. Twenty days later, the Americans took possession of the territory, but during those

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24 S O N I A T O U D J I

twenty days the French reenacted the Code Noir and ordered its strict enforcement. After the Loui-

siana Purchase, the newly created Superior Court of the Territory of Orleans declared Spanish law,

rather than French law, to govern the territory unless it conflicted with American law.

27. Code Noir, articles 6 and 19; Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves, 50.

28. Kimberly Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans,

1769-1803 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 7.

29. Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Phila-

delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 7.

30. Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves, 48.

31. Smith, Louisiana, 118.

32. Albert James Pickett and McAdory Owen Thomas, History of Alabama and Incidentally of

Georgia and Mississippi from the Earliest Period (Birmingham, Ala.: Webb Book, 1900), 188.

33. Jennifer Spear, "Colonial Intimacies: Legislating Sex in French Louisiana," William and Mary

Quarterly 60, no. i (2003): 75-98, quote on 75.

34. Sophie White, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial

Louisiana (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 34; Saliha Belmessous, "Assimila-

tion and Racialism in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Policy," American

Historical Review no, no. 2 (2005): 322-49.

35. Duclos was hoping that "beautiful" single young women from Paris would counteract the ten-

dency toward intermarriage and have an effect on "the whiteness and the purity of blood in [their]

children." Carl J. Ekberg, Stealing Indian Women: Native Slavery in the Illinois Country (Urbana-

Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 25.

36. Pickett and Thomas, History of Alabama, 154. In his research, Vaughan Baker showed that the

king's ships sailing out of the ports of La Rochelle and Lorient transported ninety-six single women,

known as the "king's daughters," to Louisiana between 1717 and 1721. Baker, "Cherchez les Femmes"

37. The original quote from Bienville's letter reads: "on dois remarquer que 1'air est tres sain et les

femmes tres fecondes!" Archives Nationales, Paris, Archives Colonial, subser. ci3A, 30:257.

38. Dumont de Montigny "The History of Louisiana," 153-54, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

39. Morris Arnold suggested that the memoir most likely dates to the 17305. Arnold, Rumble of

a Distant Drum, 41.

40. Journal of Paul Du Ru, 1700, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

41. Henri Joutel, "An Historical Journal of the Last Voyage Performed by Monsr. de La Salle," 134,

National Archives, Washington, D.C..

42. Montigny, "History of Louisiana." Although the account is not describing a particular tribe,

but rather Indians in Louisiana in general, the Quapaw women probably had similar duties.

43. Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, "The Indians of Louisiana, Their Populations and the

Trading That Can Be Done with Them," National Archives, Washington, D.C.

44. Louis F. Burns, Osage Indians: Customs and Myths (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,

1984), 106.

45. Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Border-

lands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 35.

46. In 1539, de Soto reached the west coast of Florida, accompanied by seven hundred individu-

als, including soldiers, craftsmen, priests, and at least two women, to establish a settlement in the

New World. De Soto crossed the Mississippi River in 1541 and explored the Mississippi River valley

in search of gold, which he never found. De Soto followed the White and Arkansas rivers and ex-

plored the region for two years, during which he encountered several Native tribes, including the

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Women in Early Frontier Arkansas 25

Casqui, Pacaha, Tula, Anilco, and Guachoya. Sabo, Paths of Our Children, 8, 13, 16; Buckingham Smith, Narratives of the Career ofHernando de Soto in the Conquest of Florida as Told by a Knight of Elvas (New York: Bradford Club Series, 1991), 115.

47. Barr, Peace Came, 87-88. 48. Sonia Toudji, "'The Happiest Consequences': Sexual Unions and Frontier Survival of French

and Quapaws at the Arkansas Post," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 70 (Spring 2011): 45-56. 49. Philip Marchand, Ghost Empire: How the French Almost Conquered North America (Toronto:

McClelland and Stewart, 2007), 352. 50. Baird, Quapaw People, 30; Key, "Calumet and the Cross," 165. 51. Joutel, "Historical Journal," 72,128,155. 52. Bourgmont wrote two accounts of what he saw during his expeditions to the west: The Exact

Description of Louisiana (1713) and The Route to Be Taken to Ascend the Missouri River (1714). See Kristie Wolferman, The Osage in Missouri (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 26.

53. Mathews, The Osages, 204. 54. Elliott West, "The West before Lewis and Clark: Three Lives," in his The Essential West (Nor-

man: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 143. 55. Bennett Wall et al., Louisiana: A History (Wheeling, WVa.: Harlan Davidson, 1997), 57. 56. Wolferman, The Osage in Missouri, 34. 57. Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves, 107,114; Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 304; Schafer,

Slavery, 2. 58. Morris Arnold, The Arkansas Post of Louisiana (Le Petit Rocher, France: Editions aux Arks,

2013), 4,17-19- 59. De Villiers to Galvez, May 15, 1780, Papeles de Cuba, file 192, Archivo General de Indias,

Seville, Spain. 60. Smith, Louisiana, 190; Arnold, Arkansas Post of Louisiana, 24. 61. Dorothy Core, Abstract of Catholic Register of Arkansas, 1764-1858 (Almyra, Ark.: Grand

Prairie Historical Society, 1976), 74,10-17. 62. Core Family Papers, box 24, file 4, from Cathedral Records, Funeral Register, 1772-1790, 8. 63. Jean Bernard Bossu was a French naval officer who traveled up the Mississippi valley and left

an extensive account of his observations on the French colony and its inhabitants. He claimed to have visited the Quapaws in 1751,1756, and 1770-1771. During his first trip, the Quapaws adopted Bossu, who acted as a military advisor during their war against the Chickasaws. See Bossu, Nou- veaux Voyages dans I'Amerique Septentrionale: Contenant une Collection de Lettres Ecrites sur les Lieux, par I'Auteur, a Son Ami, M. Douin .. . ci-devant Son Camarade dans le Nouveau Monde (Am- sterdam: Changuion, 1777), 106.

64. Papeles de Cuba, file 107, folio 6, Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain; Toudji, "Happiest Consequences," 49; Arnold, Arkansas Post of Louisiana, 24.

65. Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves, 7,108; Patricia Cleary, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: A History of Colonial St. Louis (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011), 112.

66. Herbert Eugene Bolton, ed. and trans., Athanase de Mezieres and the Louisiana-Texas Fron- tier, 1768-1780 (Cleveland, Ohio: Arthur H. Clark, 1914), 1:166-69.

67. Letter from Francoeur brothers to Commandant Demazellieres, June 17,1770, Translations of French and Spanish Documents, 1712-1785, Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain; Arkansas Post Investigation, Arkansas Colonial Papers, Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville.

68. Arnold, Colonial Arkansas, 62; DuVal, Native Ground, 109; Mathews, The Osages, 17, 84, 98.

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26 S O N I A T O U D J I

69. Mathews, The Osages, 116. In the French trading system the licensed trader, the voyageur, represented a vital link between French government officials and the Native tribes. The license stated the amount of goods he had to trade, the Indians with whom he would trade, the route to be taken to his destination, the number of his employees, and even what he would pay for the furs he purchased. The coureurs de bois, however, were unlicensed traders and trappers who lived beyond the control of French officials. Gilbert C. Din and A. P. Nasatir, The Imperial Osages: Spanish-Indian Diplomacy in the Mississippi Valley (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 27-28.

70. William E. Foley and C. David Rice, The First Chouteaus: River Barons of Early St. Louis (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 9.

71. Stephen Aron, American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 121.

72. Arnold, Arkansas Post of Louisiana, 53. 73. Ibid., 50-57. 74. Fran9ois Marie Perrin du Lac, Voyage dans les Deux Louisianes (Paris: N.p., 1805), 360. 75. Chouteau Family Papers, Missouri History Museum, St. Louis.

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