The Rumble of a Distant Drum

The Quapaws and Old World Newcomers, 1673–1804

Morris Arnold

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781557288394
• eBook ISBN: 9781610753579
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Winner of the 2001 Booker Worthen Literary Prize
Winner of the 2002 S. G. Ragsdale Award for Arkansas History

The Rumble of a Distant Drum opens in 1673 when Marquette and Jolliet sailed down the Mississippi River and found the Quapaw living in the area where the Arkansas River flowed into the Mississippi. In 1686 Henri de Tonti would found Arkansas Post in this same location. It was the first European settlement in this part of the country, established thirty years before New Orleans and eighty before St. Louis.

Morris S. Arnold draws on his many years of archival research and writing on colonial Arkansas to produce this elegant account of the cultural intersections of the French and Spanish with the native American peoples. He demonstrates that the Quapaws and Frenchmen created a highly symbiotic society in which the two disparate peoples became connected in complex and subtle ways—through intermarriage, trade, religious practice, and political/military alliances.

I

Family Ties: Dalliances and Alliances

Early French travelers reported that Quapaw rituals of welcome were elaborate and sometimes lasted for days. Henri de Tonty, for instance, has left an account of a four-day ceremony at Kappa in 1689 during which “there was nothing but drumming, feasting, and masquerading after their manner.”¹ Visitors to the Quapaws were commonly carried to the villages on the shoulders or backs of their hosts.² There they were seated on the chief’s roofed scaffold situated in the town square, the floor of which was often covered with willows, fine rush mats, bear skins, or panther skins.³ Crowds of people gathered round to witness and participate in the ceremonies and feasts.⁴

Not all of the French were able to endure the complete marathon. Father St. Cosme grumbled that the Quapaws’ rattles and drums made “a music which is not the most agreeable, while an Indian who was behind us rocked us.” He eventually begged off: He and his companions “put some of our people in our place after staying there a little while,” and, he recollected with satisfaction, “they had the pleasure of being rocked all night.”⁵ Father Du Poisson, on the other hand (though he found that the Quapaw dances “as you may well imagine, are somewhat odd”), nevertheless greatly admired “the precision with which [the Quapaws] mark time” and found it “as surprising as the contortions and efforts that they make.”⁶

Henri Joutel recorded some of his ruminations upon being introduced into Quapaw society in 1687, and while his reactions no doubt were somewhat idiosyncratic, we cannot think that they were altogether atypical of the first impressions of other seventeenth-century French visitors to the Arkansas upon encountering what was for them a strange if hospitable people. “What gave me the most pleasure,” he said, “was to see the posture in which they were, being altogether naked, some being painted, each having attached to his belt three or four gourds or calabashes, in which there were some little pebbles or a little corn, in order to make noise, and each with a horse or buffalo tail hanging out back. When they moved, they made a very funny clinking sound, and we had a lot of trouble to keep from laughing when we saw these kinds of figures, though we had to pretend.”⁷ He also could barely contain himself when he noticed a “waiter at the meals” who “takes care to paint himself with various colors, and seats himself on his backside like a monkey while he keeps his dignity.”⁸

We can be sure that the Quapaws had an equally hard time restraining their laughter over the looks and deportment of their visitors, but, alas, we have only one relevant snippet on the subject, and this from Jean-Bernard Bossu, hardly a reliable source: He reported that the Quapaws, who “usually . . . have no hair on their bodies, except on their heads . . . say we resemble animals in that respect,” and he claimed that they expressed similar views “when they see us eat herbs and salads.”⁹

I.

From the first time that they laid eyes on the Quapaws, most Frenchmen very much liked what they saw: Tonty said that “[i]t may be affirmed that these are the best-formed Savages we have seen”;¹⁰ and even Joutel allowed that they “were very well made and lively—the women are better made than those of the last village that we passed.”¹¹ Father Membré, comparing them to the Indians “at the north,” who, he said, were “all sad and severe in their temper,” pronounced the Quapaws “far better made, honest, liberal [i.e., generous], and gay.”¹² Another version of Father Membré’s evaluation of the Arkansas Indians has him saying that they were “all so well formed and proportioned that we admired their beauty.”¹³ Another priest described the Quapaws as the “best made, frankest and best disposed men that we have seen.”¹⁴

It was probably Father Charlevoix, though, who praised the Quapaws’ physical appearance most fulsomely. “The Arkansas,” he said, “are reckoned the largest and handsomest of men of all the Indians of this continent, and are called by way of distinction les beaux hommes, or the handsome men.”¹⁵ In 1700, Pénicaut found the Quapaw women “very pretty and white,” while, he said, “the men, for the most part, are large and stocky.”¹⁶ The only discordant voice in this otherwise extravagant chorus of praise was Le Sueur’s: While he admitted that “the men are very tall, large, and well made,” he unfortunately found “the women very ugly.”¹⁷

For the most part, too, the early French found the Quapaws easy and tractable. Father Montigny thought that the Quapaws were “very mild,” and reported that “they give a warm welcome and have esteem for the French.”¹⁸ To Father Membré, they were “cheerful, polite, and generous.”¹⁹ And Le Page du Pratz outdid even himself when it came time to describe the Arkansas region and its native people. “I am so biased in . . . favor” of the Arkansas country, he said, “that I am persuaded that the beauty of its climate influences the character of its inhabitants, who are at the same time very gentle and very brave—for along with the peaceful qualities that everyone knows them for, they exhibit a courage without reproach.”²⁰

There was only an occasional dissent from the highly favorable evaluations of the Quapaws’ temperament that one generally encounters in the French sources. The Quapaws were not a race of Tontos (“tonto” is the Spanish word for “stupid”); they had their own personal and national agendas which, as we shall see, they shrewdly pursued, and, quite naturally, they were not inclined to tolerate rude or disrespectful treatment from their visitors. For instance, in 1722 Bénard de La Harpe complained bitterly that the tribe was “very large and of ill will,”²¹ but that was only because the Quapaws had refused to help him in his effort to penetrate the upper reaches of the Arkansas River, a reluctance almost certainly caused by their fear that that penetration would result in the French trading guns to their enemies the Osages. La Harpe, moreover, had commandeered one of the Quapaws’ boats for his expedition, and then rather oddly condemned them for resenting it.

The French also seemed to exhibit a reasonably detached kind of tolerance when it came to describing the Quapaws’ religious practices. Diron d’Artaguiette provides the only real exception: “These are surely the coarsest and most superstitious savages that I know in Louisiana,” he wrote, speaking of the Quapaws, and he then went on to describe “a method of healing their sick which is very peculiar.” Quapaw “jugglers” would yell loudly to drive out the evil spirits, pour five or six pails of water over the sick person, chase the spirit away, “and, acting as if they had it, they put it out of the tent.”²²

But perhaps partly because the Quapaws usually respected the “black chiefs,” as they called the Roman Catholic priests who visited and settled among them, missionaries did not indulge in invective when discussing Quapaw religious practices; instead, they described them, if frequently incorrectly, more or less matter-of-factly. The Quapaws extended a polite and politic invitation to early priests to stay in their country, and even offered one group to build them a house.²³ One priest, speaking of the Tunicas, remarked that “[r]eligion may be greatly advanced among them, as well as among the Arkansas, both those nations being half-civilized,” something of an encomium coming from the mouth of a seventeenth-century Christian missionary. But Father Du Poisson’s hopes were not that high, and he was on the spot: “Pray to God,” he enjoined his correspondent, “that he may give me grace to devote all the strength that I have to the conversion of the Savages; to judge humanly, no great good can be done among them, at least in the beginning.”²⁴

Bossu, who, in his own self-promoting and crude way, was a writer of the “noble savage” school, had, as we would expect, some very good things to say about Quapaw religion. “Here,” speaking of Arkansas, he exuded, “everything is submissive to the will of the Great Spirit or to the Supreme Being. It is here that He is served in a most agreeable manner in a simple, undecorated temple . . . without cunning artfulness on the part of the medicine men or priests. . . . The soul unaided worships Him and offers words of truth to Him. It is sufficient to be conscious of this dear benefactor, this Master of Life.”²⁵ It does not require much imaginative sophistication to make out the anticlericalism in Bossu’s observations, which his eighteenth-century readers would have picked up on and appreciated in an immediate way.²⁶ He is using the Quapaws to bash the Roman Catholic clergy and along with them what he perceived to be an extravagant and materialistic church.

II.

From the foregoing it should be reasonably clear that the Frenchmen of the Arkansas were quite high on the Quapaw nation and would hardly have been averse to establishing various kinds of liaisons with them, including sexual and connubial ones. We first hear of Quapaw women when Robert Cavalier de La Salle approached the village of Kappa in 1682: The Quapaws, he said, “thinking their enemies were upon them, sent away their women and children.”²⁷ Once matters calmed down, however, and it became clear that the French party had no hostile intentions, the women returned and brought their visitors corn, beans, corn flour, and fruits, “in return for the little gifts which we gave them and with which they were delighted because of their novelty.”²⁸ (This incident provides some evidence of Quapaw women’s ownership and control of the food supply, a property right presumably bottomed on the fact that the women planted and tended the gardens.) Several French visitors remarked that Quapaw women worked harder than the men,²⁹ and Bossu allowed that there was “no country where the women are more industrious.” According to him, they did the cooking and housekeeping and cared for the children, fetched the game from the woods, dressed hides to make clothes and leggings, and cultivated the gardens.³⁰

Quapaw women did not lack for a wide range of foods to serve their families. The Quapaws were accomplished horticulturalists and led a sedentary life most of the year, but they hunted various animals extensively in the winter to supplement their diet and for other purposes. Corn, of course, was an important agricultural product: Early visitors reported that the Quapaws made three different corn crops a year,³¹ indicating probably a considerable amount of experimentation on their part (or on the part of tribes with whom they had come in contact) and the development of strains selected for their differing characteristics. Joutel admired a field of four or five square miles from which the Quapaws harvested “corn, pumpkins, melons, sunflowers, beans, and other like stuff, as well as lots of peaches and plums.”³² The French were impressed with the variety of the fruits available at the Arkansas, which included peaches, plums, persimmons (the French always compared these very favorably with their medlars), watermelons, mulberries, and even grapes from which the Quapaws made a wine.³³

The French found that the food that the Quapaw women prepared was very much to their liking. A great deal of creativity went into dressing up the ubiquitous corn dishes: Sometimes ground corn was “seasoned plentifully with dried peaches, sometimes with turkey”;³⁴ and Joutel tells us that the Quapaws made “several kinds of corn bread”³⁵ which they served to visitors along with smoked meat and fruit. Jean-Bernard Bossu quite evidently relished the “broiled venison cutlets and sun-dried bear tongues” with which the Quapaws regaled him in 1770.³⁶ The Quapaws were also excellent at spearing fish,³⁷ and even, according to Tonty, had domesticated some cocks and hens.³⁸ The Quapaw women cooked all these in ways that visitors frequently found most agreeable.

Diron claimed, in fact, that Quapaw women did “all the work except the hunting, which is the ordinary occupation of the men, as is also the dressing of the buffalo skins, upon which they paint designs with vermilion and other colors.”³⁹ But the men must also have cleared fields whenever that was necessary,⁴⁰ and, of course, they were responsible as well for making war and deciding the course of village and tribal affairs in the council meetings, gatherings from which Quapaw women were excluded. Although women were also excluded, it seems, from some of the dances (as, for instance and for obvious reasons, the dances preparatory to war), they were included in many others, and they participated in important religious rituals like the mourning rites that Father Charlevoix observed in 1721. A smallpox epidemic had devastated a Quapaw village in that year, and Father Charlevoix saw the women in a large graveyard, among “a forest of poles and stakes, weeping over the dead, singing nihahani over and over again.” One woman, he said, was crying over her son’s grave and pouring sagamite (a corn dish) over it; another had lit “a fire beside a neighbouring tomb, probably in order to warm the deceased person.”⁴¹

The nurturing and spiritual qualities, and, not least of all, the practical skills that the Quapaw women possessed, would have made them ideal mates and partners for the French hunters of the Arkansas, who, as we shall see, made their livelihood in much the same way that many Indians sometimes made theirs, namely, by hunting and by trading the product of their hunt for European goods. It was a natural match that could not have failed to occur, especially given the advantages that the Indians themselves saw in establishing family ties, social and cultural advantages that were similar to those that a conjugal connection brought in European society, but advantages that were a good deal broader as well. That was, as we shall see, because in Indian societies families (or rather clans) performed functions that in European societies w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Maps and Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter I - Family Ties: Dalliances and Alliances
• Chapter II - An Animal and Human Refuge
• Chapter III - The French and Quapaw Alliance Illustrated
• Chapter IV - French and Spanish Hearts as One?
• Chapter V - Competing Fathers and Quapaw European Policy
• Chapter VI - Whose Law, Whose Religion?
• Chapter VII - Fin de Siècle/Fin del Siglo/End of an Era
• Abbreviations
• Appendix I - Quapaw Population, 1682–1805
• Appendix II - Arkansas Post Interpreters
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index