Couple of tidbits . . .
Meanwhile the Comanches had discovered a new trading partner. The rumors of French traders on the plains which had prompted the ill-fated 1720 military expedition were based on fact, just a little premature. In 1724 a French trader named Bourgmont met with some Padoucah in southeastern Kansas (probably Plains Apache), but within a few years French traders were all over plains. In 1739 the Mallet brothers from Illinois showed up on the doorstep of the Spanish governor in Santa Fé wanting to open trade. They were treated well-enough and sent home, but afterwards the Spanish became alarmed, and the leader of the next French trading party was executed. By the 1740s French traders had worked their way up the Red River and were trading with the Wichita. After the French arranged a peace between the Comanches and Wichita in 1747 (reconfirmed in 1750), the exchange of French trade goods for Comanche horses expanded rapidly. All of which was a disaster for New Mexico! Not only were Comanches now armed with French firearms, but they were paying for them with horses and mules stolen in New Mexico.
http://www.dickshovel.com/ComancheTwo.html http://www.arkansasheritage.com/la_purc ... arency.pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/pss/40038232Arkansas area was under French and Spanish rule from 1686 through 1803
http://www.americanjourneys.org/aj-093/ ... /index.aspBorn in Normandy, France, in 1679, Etienne Veniard de Bourgmont (born 1679) was arrested as a teenager for poaching on the grounds of the local monastery. Rather than pay the fine, he fled to New France about 1695, and in 1702 was listed among soldiers fighting in the Ohio Valley. In 1706 he took command of Fort Ponchartrain at Detroit; censored for his conduct there, he deserted when his superiors came to inspect the situation.
For the next several years Bourgmont was on the run from French authorities. He lived in the wilderness as a coureur de bois (an illegal trader) around Lake Erie, where he met visiting Missouri Indians and married the young daughter of a Missouri chief. Traveling in Illinois with another coureur de bois and their Indian women, the group was denounced by church and government officials for its debauched and dissolute behavior. In 1712, perhaps to escape the mounting unpleasantness, Bourgmont fled south to the remote French outpost at Mobile, Alabama.
In 1719, with the French at war with the Spanish, Bourgmont helped capture Pensacola, Florida. In 1720 he returned to France and married a rich widow, but military affairs soon took him back to the American west. Under instruction from government officials, he left France in 1722 to establish Fort Orleans a few miles east of modern Kansas City, Missouri. In 1724 he arranged a fragile peace among the Comanche, Osage, Oto, Iowa, Kansas, and Omaha nations that allied them to France rather than Spain. In 1725 he led a delegation of their chiefs to France to cement the agreement (including his Indian wife disguised as the spouse of a servant), when he was elevated to noble status by the King in reward for his services. Sick and exhausted from his travels, however, Bourgmont soon retired, and details of his later life and death are unrecorded.
Missouri Expeditions of 1714
The French commander in Mobile hoped that with the aid of the Indians his country might eventually drive the Spanish from Texas and New Mexico and extend French control from Montreal to California. Bourgmont offered to use his tribal connections to bring the Plains nations under French influence.
In the spring of 1714, therefore, Bourgmont accompanied the Missouris back to their homeland, making him the first European known to have explored the Missouri valley. He traveled as far as present-day Pierre, South Dakota, describing the tribes who controlled the Plains and mapping the route carefully. From the notes made on this trip he drafted the report reproduced here.
Document Note
Bourgmont drafted two documents about the 1714 trip, “Route to be followed for ascending the Missouri River†(“Routte qu’il faut tenir pour remonter la riviere de Missouryâ€), which was a source for Delisle’s 1717 “Carte de la Louisiane et du Cours du Missisippiâ€; and “Exacte Description de la Louisianne†which is given here in English translation. Both manuscripts are in the French national archives.
Other Internet and Reference Sources
Bourgmont’s very detailed account of his later 1724 trip is online at
http://www.nebraskastudies.org/0300/sto ... 12_00.html. It provides some of the earliest facts about Indian nations in the central and southern Plains.
A timeline of Bourgmont’s career is available from the National Park Service at
http://www.nps.gov/jeff/LewisClark2/The ... osium2002/ Papers/Hechenberger_Dan.htm
The standard biography is Bourgmont: Explorer of the Missouri, 1698-1725, by Frank Norall (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1988).
http://www.kansasgenealogy.com/history/bourgmont.htmhttp://www.jstor.org/pss/40018446http://www.san.beck.org/11-6-NewFrance1663-1744.htmlThe missionary Jacques Marquette learned six native languages, and he accompanied Jolliet on an expedition Governor Frontenac commissioned to explore the Mississippi River. In June 1673 they traveled down the Mississippi to the land of the Arkansas and learned that the great river flows into the Gulf of Mexico. Mississippi means "great river" in Algonquian. . . . About halfway between the Ohio and the Arkansas rivers Pierre Prud'homme got lost and was left to recover at a fort named after him. They separated into three groups to follow the three tributaries at the delta, and after joining again in the Gulf of Mexico on April 9, 1682 La Salle claimed the country of Louisiana for Louis XIV. On the return La Salle suffered a fever for forty days. He rebuilt Crevecoeur and renamed it Fort St. Louis. La Salle established a colony there with several thousand Indians; but Frontenac was no longer governor, and La Barre ordered La Salle to abandon Fort St. Louis . . . Bourgmont persuaded some of the Kansas to go with him to meet the Comanches. At a meeting north of the Arkansas River he urged the Comanches to live in peace with their usual enemies, the Missouris, Osages, Kansas, Otoes, Omahas, and Pawnees, and he offered them trade with the French and free passage through their territory to trade with the Spaniards too. The Comanche chief accepted their gifts that included a French flag . . .
Lower Mississippi Region: The Louisiana Mission
The “Louisiana Mission†of the French colonial period included the present States of Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, with the Tamarois foundation near Cahokia in Illinois, but excluding the Caddo establishments on the disputed Spanish frontier of Texas. For several reasons, rivalries and changes among the religious orders, intrigues of English traders, and general neglect or open hostility of the Louisiana colonial administration, these southern missions never attained any large measure of prosperity or permanent success. In 1673 the Jesuit Marquette had descended the Mississippi as far as the villages of the Arkansas, later known as Quapaw, at the mouth of the river of the same name, making the earliest map of the region and indicating the position of the various tribes, but without undertaking a foundation.
In 1682 the Recollect Franciscan Father Zenobius Membré, with the party of the commander La Salle, descended the Mississippi to its mouth and returned, planting a cross among the Arkansas, and preaching to them and to the Taensa, Natches, end others farther down. In 1683 a French fort was built at the Arkansas, and the commander Tonty set apart a mission site and made formal request for a Jesuit missionary, but apparently without result. In 1698, under authority of the Bishop of Quebec, the priests of the seminary of Quebec, an offshoot of the Paris Congregation of Foreign Missions, undertook the lower Mississippi field despite the protests of the Jesuits, who considered it partly at least within their own sphere. Early in 1699, three seminary priests having arrived, as many missions were established, viz., among the Tamaroa (Tamarois), a tribe of the Illinois confederacy, at Cahokia, Illinois, by Father Jean-François de St-Cosme; among the Taensa, above the present Natchez, Mississippi, by François-J. de Montigny; and among the Tonica, at the present Fort Adams, Mississippi, by Father Antoine Davion. Father de Montigny shortly afterwards transferred his mission to the kindred and more important Natchez tribe, about the present city of that name, ministering thus to both tribes. Father Davion laboured also with the Yazoo and minor tribes on that river. Other priests of the same society arrived later. In the meantime Iberville, the father of the Louisiana colony, had brought out from France (1700) the Jesuit father, Paul du Ru, who, first at Biloxi, Mississippi, and later at Mobile, Alabama, ministered to the small tribes gathered about the French post, including a band of fugitive Apalachee from the revived Florida mission. In the same year another Jesuit, Father Joseph de Limoges, from Canada, planted a mission among the Huma and Bayagula, Choctaw bands about the mouth of the Red River, Louisiana.
In 1702 Father Nicholas Foucault, of the Seminarists, who had established a mission among the Arkansas two years before, was murdered, with three companions, by the savage Koroa of Upper Mississippi while on his way to Mobile. Their remains were found and interred by Father Davion. In 1706 Father St-Cosme, then stationed at the Natchez mission, was murdered by the Shetimasha, near the mouth of the Mississippi, while asleep in a night camp.
The Tonica station was abandoned in 1708, being threatened by the Chickasaw in the English interest. The whole southern work languished, the Indians themselves being either indifferent or openly hostile to Christianity, and when Father Charlevoix made his western tour in 1721 he found but one priest on the lower Mississippi, Father Juif, among the Yazoo. Partly in consequence of Father Charlevoix’s report, the Louisiana Company, which had taken over control of the colony, gave permission to the Jesuits to under take the Indian work, while the French posts and settlements were assigned to other priests. In 1726, therefore, Father Paul du Poisson restored the Arkansas mission, which had been vacant since 1702; Father Alexis de Guyenne undertook the Alibamon, a tribe of the Creek nation, above Mobile, and Father Mathurin le Petit began work among the Choctaw in southern Mississippi. The Ursuline convent foundation at New Orleans in 1727 is due to Jesuit effort. In the a next year the Jesuit father, Michel Baudouin, undertook a mission among the warlike Chickasaw.
In 1729 the southern missions were almost ruined by the outbreak of war with the Natchez, provoked by the arbitrary exactions of the French commandant in their country. The war began on 28 November with a massacre of the French garrison, the first victim being Father du Poisson, who was struck down, and his head hacked off, while on his way to attend a dying man. Father Souel was killed on 11 December by the Yazoo, who then turned upon the French garrison in their country. On New Year’s Day, 1730, the Jesuit Father Doutreleau, on his way down the river with some boatmen, was fired upon at close range by some of the same tribe while saying Mass on shore, but escaped although badly wounded. The war involved the whole lower Mississippi, and ended in the extinction of the Natchez as a people. A part of the refugees having fled to the Chickasaw, a war ensued with that tribe in 1736, during which a French expedition was cut to pieces, and the Jesuit chaplain, Father Antoninus Senat, was burnt at the stake.
http://www.tngenweb.org/tnfirst/catholic-missions.html In 1730 Father Gaston, a newly-arrived Seminarist, had been killed at the Tamarois (Cahokia) mission. In 1754 the last Seminarist was sent out as a parish priest. The Arkansas mission had been killed by official neglect. The missionary among the Alibamon Greeks was driven out by the French commander at Fort Toulouse (Montgomery, Alabama) for his opposition to the liquor traffic. Father Baudouin continued with good effect among the Choctaw for eighteen years until appointed vicar-general in 1757, when his place was filled by Father Nicholas le Febvre until 1764 (?). The Alibamon mission was restored and continued under Father Jean Le Prédour from 1754 until the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1764, which brought the “Louisiana Mission†to a close. The Natchez and Yazoo are long since extinct, but a considerable portion of the Choctaw, Quapaw, and mixed-blood Huma still keep the Faith.
http://www.nps.gov/history/history/onli ... /chap2.htmThe French at New Orleans, hearing of Mallet's success, began planning a "trade invasion" of New Mexico, using the plains route of 1739. A party led by Fabry de la Bruyere made it part way up the Canadian River in 1741, but had to turn back due to low water and hostile natives.
Hope some of this helps.
r/
MM
Topic: Arkansas Post Habitant/Hunter (Read 123 times)