West of the Revolution by Claudio Saunt

Author:Claudio Saunt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

CHAPTER SEVEN

An Invasion of Malefactors: Osage Country

Though Joseph Orieta commanded Arkansas Post in the name of the Most Serene and Potent Prince, Charles III, king of Spain and of the Indies, there was nothing glorious about the assignment. The fort, situated in a floodplain about ten miles above the mouth of the Arkansas River, was a ruin, with rotting palisades, roofless barracks, and useless cannons. When Joseph de la Miranda arrived in April 1776 to present Orieta with the head of an Osage man, the fort was knee-deep in stagnant floodwater. The grim gift could hardly have lightened the commandant’s mood. As a final indignity, when Orieta died two months later, his corpse reeked so badly that it was hastily buried without ceremony. Arkansas Post, concluded one officer, was “the most disagreeable hole in the universe.”1

From the perspective of imperial administrators, the middle Mississippi was in disarray after the Treaty of Paris. Several dozen soldiers and officers, scattered among a few isolated and undermanned forts, were charged with bringing order to the entire region. Though the forts were situated at strategic locations on the river, the distances between them made it impossible to impose on local residents.

Arkansas Post sat three hundred miles up the winding Mississippi River from the closest of Spanish Louisiana’s tobacco and indigo plantations. North of Arkansas Post, it took another six hundred miles of arduous rowing to reach the next colonial outpost, Ste. Genevieve. The village shared Paris’s patron saint, but the two locales had nothing else in common. Of the seven hundred residents of Ste. Genevieve, which was known as Misère, or “misery,” 40 percent were enslaved. St. Louis stood fifty miles farther upriver on the same side. Though it was situated impressively on a tall limestone bank overlooking the Mississippi, it had earned its own disparaging nickname: Paincourt, or “Short of Bread.”2

Britain’s sole garrison in the area was Fort Chartres, across the river from Ste. Genevieve. One cheery visitor described it as “the most commodious and best built fort in North America,” even though the British were in a losing battle to keep its two-foot-thick walls from washing into the Mississippi. Laboring in vain, soldiers reinforced the bank with earth and fascines. In the space of a year, however, the river eroded seventy-five yards, and in 1772 the British abandoned the post, just before the south wall collapsed.3

Even worse problems plagued the garrison at Fort Chartres. The fort was surrounded by “innumerable” stagnant pools of water, the ideal environment for producing deadly “Summer Exhalations.” (Why would the French have chosen a place “so cursed with surrounding Evils,” wondered one scornful British officer.) No colonist born there ever reached the age of fifty, it was claimed, and only a few survived into their forties.4

Newcomers, such as the British regiment that arrived at Fort Chartres in 1768, were hit especially hard. “The Groans & cries of the Sick Was the only Noise to be heard within the Fort,” wrote a witness, who was fortunate enough to survive.

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