After Yorktown

by Don Glickstein

  Fort Carlos III was thirty-five miles upstream from the Mississippi “in the middle of a hill that overlooks the Arkansas River, which may be forty-five feet in height when the river is low and six feet when it overflows,” a postwar American captain said. Beyond the clearing around the fort was a forest of oak, hickory, elm, and elder trees. Corn and wheat fields surrounded the dozen civilian homes outside the fort.29

  This was Quapaw land. They lived in three nearby villages with a population of about seven hundred led by their chief, Angaska. Like the Chickasaws—their former enemy-turned-ally—the Quapaws preserved their national integrity with a diplomatic balancing act. They cooperated with the Spanish around them, serving as scouts, but refused to undermine their relationship with the Chickasaws, as the Spanish would learn.

  As a trading center and military base, Arkansas Post offered entertainment beyond what its permanent population could support. In 1770, two licensed—and an unknown number of unlicensed—cantinas served residents and traders. A decade later, merchants tried to shut down a billiards room because, they said, hunters lost their money there and couldn’t pay their bills. The fort itself had thirteen-foot-high stockades, each pole with a diameter of ten to sixteen inches. It was, its commander said, “a solid post capable of resisting anything which may come to attack it without cannon.”30

  A later commander disagreed. As part of the efforts to improve security, Miró reinforced the garrison and ordered Captain Jacobo Dubreuil Saint-Cyr to take charge. Dubreuil arrived in January 1783. He found that the carriages of three of the fort’s four cannons had rotted. The stockade was solid, but it had been built without embrasures—slits in the wall for firing guns. The garrison’s provisions were low, and Dubreuil ordered many of his now sixty-seven soldiers to go game hunting. He told Miró that he had been forced to spend money to repair the fort: “I hope that it shall be the shelter from the insults of a rabble without discipline . . . and that the expense will merit your approval.”31

  Dubreuil was probably in his mid-thirties when he took command of Arkansas Post. He first appeared in army records in 1767 as a sub-lieutenant. By 1780, he was a captain. During the early 1780s, he provided a military escort for a supply convoy to St. Louis, and later commanded Ste. Genevieve, a Franco-Spanish village south of St. Louis. At Arkansas Post, he lived with his wife, Inez, and their two children. Dubreuil was more than the post’s military commander; he was its civil administrator and judge for the District of Arkansas.32

  In January 1783, civil duties weren’t Dubreuil’s priority. He heard reports that the enemy was in the vicinity. He sent Angaska and his Quapaws on a scouting mission, but they reported no signs of British Loyalists. In fact, Colbert was still planning an attack. It wasn’t until mid-April that he and his force—sixty-four Americans (mostly Loyalists, but a few Whigs), a Frenchman, five African Americans, and eleven mixed-race Chickasaws (many of them Colbert’s relations)—crossed the Mississippi in a small flotilla and headed up the Arkansas River to Arkansas Post.

  Their first challenge was to get by a Quapaw village either undetected or by agreement. This they did, using muffled oars, in the early hours of the morning of April 17. Around 2:30 A.M., they landed south of the fort, and immediately attacked the village outside. A ten-man guard tried to defend the homes, but they were overwhelmed. Two were killed (one of them scalped), a slave and a soldier wounded, the rest taken prisoner. One escaped to the fort because, he said, he “ran like a rabbit.” Colbert’s men also captured seven families, including that of Dubreuil’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Luis de Villars; they had moved outside the fort’s walls when their home blew down during a “violent wind.”33

  By 3 A.M., Colbert was at the gates of Fort Carlos III, and for the next six hours, the two sides kept up steady, but inconclusive, firing. Dubreuil’s cannons shot over the heads of the attackers, who were entrenched in a gully, while Colbert’s small arms were useless against the stockade. The bullets, Dubreuil said, were “piercing like a sieve” into the wood, but failed to penetrate through.

  Around 9 A.M., the two leaders simultaneously changed tactics. Colbert released Villars’s wife, sending her as a messenger with a white flag to the fort with a surrender demand: “M. Le Capitaine Colbert is sent by his superiors to take the post of the Arkansas, and by this power, sir, he demands that you capitulate. It is his plan to take it with all his forces, having already taken all the inhabitants.” Colbert told Mrs. Villars to give Dubreuil an additional message: If the fort didn’t surrender, he would return at noon with both Loyalist and five hundred Chickasaw reinforcements. “You can judge my fury. . . . If the commandant of the fort doesn’t surrender before the given time, if he doesn’t wish to be vanquished, as no doubt he will be unless I restrain my men, and if he arouses the Arkansas [Quapaws] against us, I shall certainly kill all the prisoners.”

  As Mrs. Villars approached the fort, Dubreuil sent ten Spanish soldiers and four Quapaw warriors out the gate to attack. “Our sally was not stopped by the white flag,” Dubreuil said. Instead, the Quapaws’ cries spooked Colbert’s men, who retreated, fearing other Spanish soldiers would encircle them. Dubreuil heard Colbert’s men shout, “Let’s go! Let’s go! The Indians are upon us.”

  Once Colbert reached his boats, he released his captured women and children, taking the male prisoners with him. One of Colbert’s men had been killed, and another wounded.34

  At the fort, Colbert’s noon deadline passed, but instead of the enemy with five hundred reinforcements returning, Angaska appeared with one hundred Quapaws. Dubreuil berated him. “I blamed [him] roundly for having allowed the enemy to enter this river without giving me the usual notice,” he told Miró. Angaska’s excuse was that the Quapaws themselves had been deceived because they hadn’t heard or seen Colbert the night before. As for failing to immediately come to Dubreuil’s aid, Angaska said his men were “scattered in the mountains, some hunting, others seeking rations to sustain their families which had no other hope of provisions, for the harvest had failed entirely the past year.” (Support of Quapaw’s modest cooperation with the Spanish wasn’t universally popular among the Quapaws. One chief refused any involvement with either side because, he said, he was “not obligated to help the whites make war.”)35

  Dubreuil let the matter drop because he wanted to use the Quapaws to track the enemy, negotiate for the release of prisoners, and then attack them. To ensure Angaska would follow orders, Dubreuil sent a Spanish lieutenant and twenty soldiers—“which were my pride”—to accompany the Quapaws.

  About a week later, the Quapaw-Spanish force caught up with Colbert on the Mississippi, about ten miles below the mouth of the Arkansas. Given the Quapaw-Chickasaw alliance, Angaska wasn’t about to attack Colbert. Instead, according to the Spanish account (the only extant account), Angaska hid most of his men, and told Colbert that he had two hundred fifty, not the one hundred twenty he really had. Given this supposedly overwhelming force, Colbert released all but eight prisoners: four Spanish soldiers, three slaves, and a boy. Colbert paroled Lieutenant Villars on the condition that five Loyalist Natchez leaders be released. If not, Villars must pay Colbert a ransom.36

  Dubreuil wasn’t pleased with the agreement. He told Miró that because Colbert retained hostages, his plan “to destroy the unworthy dogs of pirates” wasn’t executed.

  Neither Colbert nor Dubreuil knew that the preliminary peace treaty had been signed, and that at the request of a British diplomat in Jamaica, Gálvez ordered the parole of the Natchez prisoners, on condition they never return to Natchez. The prisoners agreed, and they were released from their New Orleans jail several days after the Angaska-Colbert negotiations. Soon, the now-parolees were on a British ship headed to Jamaica.37

  But word of peace had yet to reach the lower Mississippi. Colbert continued to raid Spanish boats. On May 11, a Spanish convoy spotted signs of Colbert’s band near the mouth of the St. Francis River about ninety miles northeast of Arkansas Post. About one hundred white a
nd two dozen Quapaw volunteers pursued them. They caught up with some stragglers, including Colbert’s second-in-command, who was killed. One man drowned, another broke his arm, but the others got away, allowing three of their Spanish prisoners to be liberated.

  In mid-May, Miró ordered Dubreuil to contact Colbert to inform him of the peace. He sent Dubreuil a Jamaica newspaper that announced the treaty, as well as a copy of the treaty translated into English. Dubreuil wrote a personal letter to Colbert, addressing him as a “subject of His British Majesty, Chickasaw Nation.” The newspaper and the treaty translation proved that “you can see without doubt that I am authorized to reclaim the prisoners,” including slaves. He also asked Colbert to reimburse the Spanish for the supplies he took from Arkansas Post.38

  Colbert received the letter nearly four months later. He told Dubreuil he would immediately release his remaining prisoners, but asked about Chickasaw prisoners still held in St. Louis. As for reimbursements, “I am persuaded by the articles of the peace that I am within my rights in not paying, although the price is cheap. . . . You seem very much interested in charging me for too many articles far more than they are worth.” He told Dubreuil that he intended to seek guidance from the British governor in St. Augustine. His war, however, was over.39

  Even as Dubreuil was trying to reach Colbert, the main body of Chickasaws made peace with Spain. Their self-interest lay in disassociating themselves from their adopted son. “A party of Chickasaw came to ratify the peace,” Dubreuil told Miró in August 1783. “They assured me that with the exception of the Colbert family, all the Chickasaws are well contented with the new friendship which they have agreed upon, and they see clearly that all the promises of Colbert’s have been nothing more than falsehoods. And, notwithstanding that they paid very little attention to him, he threatened them that he would not live in peace in the Spanish possessions. To keep from being ill-treated or suffering the consequences, he tells them [it] is only a matter of playing the cards right. He tries to make them believe that the war which has been carried on with the Americans is nothing more than a sham, and that the Treaty of Peace which closed it between Spain and Great Britain will last only a short time on the part of the English, and so on. Forty thousand lies to prejudice them!”40

  After the war, Colbert continued to work on the Chickasaws’ behalf, trying to position the tribe between the Spanish and Americans. Depending on the account, he either went to St. Augustine in 1784 to consult with the British, or to Georgia to consult with the Creeks. En route home, somewhere in Alabama, he either was thrown from his horse and died, or his black slave, Cesar, murdered him.41

  Despite his anger with Angaska, Dubreuil was sympathetic to the Quapaws. He pleaded with Miró for supplies, ammunition, and food for the Quapaws. Dubreuil allowed their women and children to stay by the fort due to “the sad plight of these poor people in sustaining their families.”42

  Promoted to lieutenant colonel, Dubreuil stayed at Arkansas Post until 1787, approving marriages, wills, and land grants, regulating trade, advertising for escaped slaves, managing Indian relations, and regulating liquor sales. In 1802, as commander of San Marcos Apalachie, in West Florida, he outlasted a siege by a group of Creeks, Seminoles, and assorted blacks and whites led by an adventurer and idealist trying to establish an independent Indian state. A Spanish relief fleet broke the siege. Dubreuil died in 1804.43

  Under the peace treaty, Spain took possession of East Florida, and in 1785, the last British exiles in St. Augustine left: 3,400 whites and 6,500 free and enslaved blacks.44

  Spain and the U.S. settled a border dispute in 1795, and Spain opened the lower Mississippi and New Orleans to American traders. Five years later, the Spanish and French agreed to a swap: the Louisiana Territory for an Italian duchy. The French, in turn, flipped the territory to the Americans in 1803. In January 1804, the commander of Fort Carlos III transferred the post to an American representative. Arkansas Post became a thriving town of 3,500 people, and, until 1821, the Arkansas Territory capital. During the Civil War, U.S. troops seized the town after a two-day battle. After the war, Arkansas Post faded, and its residents moved elsewhere. It became a state park in 1929, and a unit of the National Park Service in 1960. The site of Fort Carlos III is now under water.

  23. Between Two Hells

  PARLIAMENT’S FEBRUARY 1782 ORDER TO END OFFENSIVE MILITARY operations in North America reached the British commanders at Niagara, Detroit, and Charlestown that spring. That summer, field commanders passed the word to their Indian allies: No more raids, no more arms supplies—just a reassurance that the British wouldn’t forget their allies once a final peace treaty was signed.

  In the South, Leslie ordered that “that no offensive operations be carried on by the Indians against the frontiers,” said Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Brown, the British Indian superintendent. Brown directed his agents to “prevent the Indians from acting offensively without special orders and recommend to them to pursue their hunting within the limits of their respective territories in order to divert their thoughts from war.” He told his superiors in London about his concern for the Cherokees. “From the exposed situation of their towns, they have twice been laid in ashes and their plantations laid waste by the rebels from the frontiers of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Numbers of their women and children have been butchered in cold blood or burned alive; yet no species of rebel barbarity or the loss of their towns, provisions, families, or friends have induced them to abandon His Majesty’s service.”1

  Even a Whig colonel acknowledged the Cherokees’ plight: “The miseries of those people, from what I see and hear, seem to exceed description. Here are men, women, and children almost naked. . . . But this is not the greatest of their evils: Their crops this year have been worse than was ever known, so that their corn and potatoes, it is supposed, will be all done [eaten] before April. And many are already out, particularly widows and fatherless children.”2

  Other Indians were furious at what they felt was a British betrayal. “The English put the bloody tomahawk into our hands,” a Chickasaw chief said. They “have done their utmost and left us in our adversity. We find them full of deceit and dissimulation.”3

  Joseph Brant, the Mohawk and Loyalist captain, vented to his cousin, the British northern Indian superintendent, Brigadier General John Johnson, son of Sir William. He said “the white savages, the Virginians” had mistreated Shawnee prisoners. He mocked the British suggestion that Indians return to their traditional pursuits. “I beg of you, don’t tell us to go hunt deer . . . because we shall soon forget the war, for we are gone too far that way already against the rebels to be doing other things.” He tried to shame the British into supporting a new offensive against the rebels in spring 1783. “Let us not hang our heads between our knees and be looking there.” Although he was “as much forward to go to war as I ever did,” he was “not so well contented as I used to be formerly, because the warriors are in want. They are treated worse instead of better.”

  Brant predicted that “the rebels will ruin us at last if we go on as we do, one year after another, doing nothing” except using up supplies, with the British “crying out all the while for the great expenses. So we are, as it were, between two hells.”4

  The end of British support for Indian raids meant a corresponding increase in Whig efforts to take Indian land and push the Indians farther west—or kill them. If the British wouldn’t stop Indian resistance, said one newspaper in late 1782, the settlers “will cry aloud from the valleys to Congress—RETALIATE—the hills will resound RETALIATE—and the sound will reverberate . . . from mountain to mountain, with increasing repetitions RETALIATE, RETALIATE, RETALIATE!”5

  Irvine, at Fort Pitt, told the secretary of war that the settlers were moving quickly. “The people are in great numbers flocking over the Ohio into what has hitherto been called the Indian country and are busy taking up and improving lands.”6

  More than a century later, Theodore Roosevelt—no friend to
Indians—described the unabated seizure of their lands during this period. “The whites were now, in their turn, the aggressors, the trouble being, as usual, that they encroached on lands secured to the red men by solemn treaty. . . . The rage for land speculation, however, which had continued even in the stormiest days of the Revolution, grew tenfold in strength after Yorktown.”7

  In January 1783, more than two thousand Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee fighters showed up in British-controlled St. Augustine, Florida, asking for aid to fight the rebels. They didn’t get it.8

  Not a single one of the Paris peace treaty’s two thousand words referred to Indians. Instead, the British ceded all land east of the Mississippi to the Americans, ignoring that Indians had a legal claim to much of the land. The Indians and sympathetic British were astounded:

  After nine years of service to the British, we “find ourselves and country betrayed to our enemies.” The betrayal is “cruel and ungenerous”—Alexander McGillivray (Hoboi-Hili-Miko), Creek chief.9

  Giving Indian country “to the Americans without their consent or consulting them . . . [is] an act of cruelty and injustice that Christians only were capable of doing.” The Indians “were a free people subject to no power upon earth . . . faithful allies of the King of England, but not his subjects”—Captain Aaron Hill (Kanonraron), Mohawk war chief.10

  “The peacemakers and our enemies have talked away our lands at a rum drinking”—Little Turkey, Cherokee chief.11

  “These Indians have great merit and sufferings to plead in the cause of Great Britain. It will be a difficult task after what has happened to convince them of our good faith. They seem peculiarly hurt that no mention is made of them in the treaty”—Canadian governor Frederick Haldimand.12