The Jacksons’ Mississippi Honeymoon

In August 1791, Andrew Jackson married Rachel Donelson Robards near Natchez, Mississippi, both of them twenty-four years old at the time.  Rachel had suffered through an abusive first marriage to a Kentuckian named Lewis Robards, from whom she separated in 1790.   The daughter of Nashville co-founder John Donelson, the beautiful Rachel returned to her mother’s home in Tennessee after leaving the jealous and cruel Robards.  It so happened that a young Andrew Jackson was a boarder at Donelson’s Nashville home, and, well, one thing led to another.

Robards would divorce Rachel, so he said, and he was granted a bill from the Virginia legislature to seek the divorce before a jury.  His young socialite “ex-wife” was left in an inauspicious position for a twenty-something year-old woman in the 1790’s.  Jackson, her rescuer, maybe more than that, asked Rachel’s mother Rachel Stokley Donelson for permission to “offer his hand and heart to her daughter.”

“Mr. Jackson, would you sacrifice your life to save my poor child’s good name?” Mother Donelson asked.

“Ten thousand lives, Madame, if I had them,” came the answer.  Andrew Jackson had a flair for the dramatic, even at twenty-four.

The soon-to-be-wed Jacksons made what must have been a romantic riverboat trip down the Cumberland, to the Ohio, and ultimately to the Mississippi.  They floated south, in the company of other travelers, until finally they reached their destination, Natchez.  They were wed, tradition holds, in the still-standing home of Thomas Marston Green, Jr., “Springfield.”  Andrew had business interests in Natchez and had acquired a tract of land near the Green’s property in Bruinsburg, where the Mississippi River intersects with the Bayou Pierre, about 25 miles north of Natchez.  He had constructed a log house there overlooking both the bayou and the river.  A lover of horse-racing, Andrew dreamed of building a racetrack on his property, and he spoke often of it to his wife and others.

Andrew Jackson was a young man with dreams and ambitions who had just married the most beautiful woman in Nashville, Tennessee.  And the happy couple honeymooned for a time in south Mississippi.  Jackson was not always the old man on the twenty-dollar bill.  A visitor to the Jackson’s Mississippi home later wrote, “I cannot [ever] lose the remembrance of the agreeable hours at Bayou Pierre.”

A young Andrew and Rachel Donelson Jackson.

Peace and serenity never lasted long around the aspiring future president, and about a month after their marriage, in September 1791, land deals and law practice concerns forced a return journey to Nashville by the young couple.  They would travel north up the Natchez Trace in the company of approximately one hundred people.  Those in the group had their own individual reasons for trekking up the ancient road, but they all shared a common denominator.  They believed in “safety in numbers.”  The Natchez Trace was a dangerous road where small groups were often fallen upon by robbers and murderers, and less often, hostile Indians.  The Chickasaw and Choctaw were generally friendly and accommodating, but the perpetually dissatisfied and aggrieved Creek Indians would sometimes strike out to the west of their Alabama territories and wreak havoc.  In any case, Andrew Jackson certainly felt travelling in a group would be the more prudent course of action if for no other reason than he travelled with his prized Rachel.

A hundred citizens of the frontier marched and rode up the Natchez Trace in September of 1791.  Of that group, only three names are known – Andrew and Rachel Jackson, and a Kentucky soldier and Indian fighter named Hugh McGary. 

McGary had pioneered Kentucky with Daniel Boone, and he and his family had settled in Boonesborough, travelling there with Boone himself on his second expedition through the Cumberland Gap.  Loud and domineering, McGary had a fierce temper which could be an important asset in battle, but in daily life, for the most part, he rubbed people the wrong way. 

By the time the forty-seven-year-old McGary headed towards Nashville alongside the Jackson’s, he had already been fired from his military command, court martialed, and found guilty of murdering a Shawnee Indian sachem.  He had also had run-in’s with Boone and was known to have butchered another Shawnee combatant during a skirmish in Kentucky.  McGary was beyond volatile.

It was written that McGary was “void of humane and gentle qualities” and that he was “a quarrelsome and unpleasant man in civil life.”  Ironically, his wife Mary is said to have brought the first Bible into Kentucky.  Unfortunately, she wasn’t on this trip.

Andrew Jackson, often characterized as a hothead of sorts in his own right, his new wife Rachel, and Hugh McGary moved north together on the Natchez Trace in September of 1791. 

In the still-muggy fall Mississippi air, trouble was surely a’brewing.

To be continued …

Hugh McGary’s Untempered Bravado

It is September of 1791, and a company of a hundred citizens of the western frontier travel north on the Natchez Trace bound for Nashville, Tennessee.  A twenty-four-year-old Andrew Jackson – a lawyer, horse trader and, in his youth, sometimes slave dealer – had just married the love of his life, the most beautiful girl in the west, Rachel Donelson.  Rachel was also twenty-four.  She was the daughter of the late Nashville co-founder John Donelson, and for the western territories, Rachel represented the higher ranks of society.  The couple had married in Natchez at the palatial mansion of a wealthy friend, Thomas Marston Green, Jr.  They had then honeymooned for a month at Jackson’s log home in Bruinsburg which overlooked the mighty Mississip’ and the Bayou Pierre from the Mississippi Territory.

Rachel, however, was no “city girl.”  As a teenager, she was in the pioneer flotilla with her father, her family, and many others as they made their way up the Cumberland River to the spot where they would meet Colonel James Robertson’s overland party, the spot where Nashville was born.  Rachel had loaded weapons for her father and brothers as they fought off attacking Cherokee Indians both on the water and from the shore.  And she had fired the rifles, too, when she had to.  Rachel may have been as beautiful as a flower, but she certainly was not subject to wilting when the heat was on.  In fact, she had already survived a short marriage to a brutal Kentuckian, named Lewis Robards, before she and Andrew had eloped to Natchez a month and a half prior to their current trip.

With business concerns calling Andrew back to Nashville, he and his new bride, and possibly a small company of servants, were making their way to their primary home in Tennessee.  While she was as robust on a horse, or with a gun, as her husband, Rachel was to Andrew that thing now to be protected at any cost.  It is likely his protection of his new spouse that caused Andrew Jackson to run afoul of Major Hugh McGary.

The Battle of Blue Licks

McGary was loud and pushy and twenty years Jackson’s elder.  If there was a “leader” of the hundred persons who were walking and riding up the Natchez Trace, it was probably McGary, a position he would likely have claimed through force of will rather than a record of sound frontier decisions.

If McGary is given the benefit of the doubt, he might be considered the kind of brutal man that was required in taming a wild country – fierce, tough, decisive, and bold.  But by 1791, McGary’s total body of evidence indicated he also had a strong tendency towards endangering those in his company through his rash actions.

The most famous example of McGary’s untempered bravado came in the last stages of the Revolutionary War, in fact, ten months after Cornwallis had surrendered to Washington at Yorktown.  In August of 1782, nine years before McGary’s trip up the Trace with the Jacksons, three hundred mostly Shawnee Indians led by British officers invaded Kentucky and cut a swath through American settlements, burning and killing as they came.  Ultimately, the British and Indian force laid siege to Bryan Station, killing all the settlement’s livestock and setting fire to everything outside the community’s central stockade.  Upon hearing that a Kentucky militia was on its way, the attackers withdrew into the wilderness.  Hugh McGary was a major in the approaching colonial militia serving alongside his fellow pioneer Colonel Daniel Boone and Boone’s son Israel.  A decision was made by the group’s highest-ranking commander Colonel John Todd to purse the Indians, despite Boone’s suggestion that they wait on reinforcements before striking out against a force of unknown size.  Daniel Boone further pointed out that their targets would have as much as a forty-mile lead as well.  He was overruled, and the 180-man militia began its pursuit of the Indians. 

Soon, near a salt lick on the Licking River, Boone began to suspect that the obvious trail the militia followed was leading them directly into a trap.  And he expressed his concerns to Colonel Todd who, perhaps beginning to sense the same, had requested a council with Boone.  Seeing a few Indians watching from a nearby ridge, Hugh McGary, the hothead, urged an immediate attack.  No officers listened, which infuriated McGary.  He mounted his horse and proclaimed, “Them that ain’t cowards follow me.”  The enlisted men quickly fell in behind McGary, and all his bluster, and immediately crossed the river.  The militia officers followed the insubordinates, hoping to somehow restore order on the other side.  Colonel Boone solemnly remarked, before crossing the river himself, “We are all slaughtered men.”

As Boone had suspected the British and Indian forces waited just across the river hidden in ravines and gullies.  As soon as the Kentucky militia reached the top of a rise just north of the river, a fiery and unrelenting ambush was unleashed upon them.  Seventy-two soon-to-be Americans were killed on the spot that would come to be known as Blue Licks.  The British and Indian attackers lost only seven men.

As most of the Kentuckians fled, or tried to, back down the hill and across the river, Daniel Boone, his son Israel, and a few others fought hand-to-hand with the Shawnee on the left flank of the battle.  McGary seeing Boone’s contingent pinned down rode directly into their midst to inform them that all others had retreated.  McGary may have been a fool, but he was not a coward.  Boone grabbed a riderless horse and held it while his son Israel mounted, but before the boy could ride away, a Shawnee or British mini-ball blew through his neck killing him instantly.  Seeing his son dead, Boone mounted the horse himself and joined McGary in retreat.

Nine years after his ill-fated race into battle at Blue Licks, which clearly led to the death of Israel Boone and seventy-one other Kentuckians, former Major Hugh McGary travelled with Andrew and Rachel Jackson through a new “Indian Country.”

During the fateful return trip to Nashville on the Natchez Trace, the forty-seven-year-old, loud and rash hothead McGary and the twenty-four-year-old, substantially rash but also newly-wed, Jackson would disagree on how to proceed when suspicions of a “meditated Indian attack” were aroused.  So, McGary and Jackson came into conflict.  Imagine that.

Next week … the aftermath and the Jackson’s marriage problems.

Jackson v. McGary

In September of 1791, the newly married Andrew and Rachel Donelson Jackson were traveling north on the Natchez Trace, returning to Nashville, with a group of about a hundred fellow frontiersmen.  Among the group was a volatile Indian fighter named Hugh McGary.  McGary had famously pioneered Kentucky with Daniel Boone and had reached the rank of Major in service to various frontier militias.  McGary, however, had rightfully cultivated a poor reputation resulting from his often brash and brutal actions, especially against Indian combatants.  In fact, more than a few times, McGary’s dealings had led to defeat, death, or – at a minimum – a continued escalation of hostilities directed at those with whom he served. 

In “The Devil’s Backbone: The Story of the Natchez Trace,” historian Jonathan Daniels wrote, “Fools were more often to be feared than rogues on the frontier.  There may have been some of both in McGary … as boastful frontier fool, McGary became most famous.”

At the time of this particular trip up the Natchez Trace, both of the Jacksons were twenty-four years old.  McGary was forty-seven and likely the recognized leader of the assembled travelers.

Charlton Heston & Susan Hayward star as Andrew & Rachel Jackson in 1953’s “The President’s Lady”

The Mississippi Territory through which the Natchez Trace passed in 1791 was recognized by the United States government as being under the control of the Choctaw Indians in the south and the Chickasaws in the north.  Both tribes were on notably friendly terms with the U.S. and were key parties in peace treaties signed in Nashville in 1783 and in Hopewell, South Carolina, in 1786.  Encounters between Chickasaw and Choctaw Indians and travelers on the Natchez Trace were common in the 1790’s and were usually anything but dangerous.  Typically, a trading exchange of some sort was the impetus for interactions between the parties, or just as likely, simple visitations between people who at this point in history had met personally before, possibly many times for routine travelers.

Nonetheless, a conflict arose on the trip to Nashville between Andrew Jackson and Hugh McGary regarding a “meditated Indian attack.”

It is not known exactly what potential Indian conflict had arisen or was perceived to have arisen during the trip.  What is known is that Jackson and McGary quickly and firmly held to opposing courses of action in response.  It is reasonable to speculate – given the documented, bombastic nature of McGary and the fact that Andrew Jackson traveled with his young bride of less than two months – that McGary instigated for a fight and Jackson, the protector, resisted the idea and counseled otherwise.  Perhaps, Jackson pointed out McGary’s history of poor decisions in this arena to the hundred or so fellow travelers, who would have found it logical that no credible attack by Chickasaws or Choctaws was looming.   And there wasn’t.  Whatever the “threat” had been, if any, it passed into the ether without incident, and the Jacksons, McGary and the rest safely reached Nashville in October of 1791. 

The conflict on the trail had made McGary a lifelong enemy of Jackson.  Jackson’s business partner John Overton clarified the origination of the feud between the men decades later:  “Circumstances then occurred calculated to excite in McGary a strong feeling of dislike toward General Jackson, which it is unnecessary to detail as they related solely to a meditated attack by the Indians.”

So, because of some unspecified affront by Jackson, the rash Kentuckian McGary had found a new target for his wrath.  He would surely do Jackson harm if he found opportunity, and unfortunately for Rachel and Andrew Jackson, opportunity soon presented itself. 

Why were John Overton’s remarks required decades later? The answer is that he was defending Andrew Jackson against charges of adultery … committed with his own wife Rachel.

Rachel’s first husband Lewis Robards had been granted a bill by the Virginia legislature in 1790 allowing him to seek a divorce from his estranged wife before a jury.  However, unknown to Rachel and Andrew Jackson, he had never acted on that bill and technically remained married to Rachel.  In 1793, Robards finally brought his act before a jury along with a star witness for the proceedings, Hugh McGary.  McGary testified that on the return trip from their Natchez “honeymoon” that Andrew and Rachel Jackson had “slept under the same blanket.”  Subsequently, the jury found that “the defendant Rachel Robards hath deserted the plaintiff Lewis Robards and hath and doth still live in adultery with another man.”

McGary had his revenge.

Jackson vehemently swore that he and Rachel would not “remarry” because his wedding before God was true and legal in “the understanding of every person in the country.”  But, upon the advice of his friend Overton, Andrew and Rachel Jackson ultimately submitted to a second ceremony on January 17, 1794.

Rachel Jackson never escaped the scandal, which had been bolstered by the testimony of the frontier braggart Hugh McGary.  McGary died in 1806, but his vengeance lived on.

When Andrew Jackson ran for president in 1828, John Quincy Adams targeted the Jacksons’ “passion and lack of self-control” as the key reason Jackson should not win election.  One newspaper expounded on the theme, asking, “Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband to be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian land?”

Her husband just elected president, Rachel Jackson finally yielded to the strain of it all and died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-one on December 22, 1828.  As a result, Andrew Jackson arrived for his inauguration as President of the United States a widower.  Jackson was a harsher man from that day forward.

“May God Almighty forgive her murderers,” Jackson said at Rachel’s funeral, “I never can.”

At its core, the fabric of all the stories of human existence is woven from our basic emotions, good and bad, and those actions, good and bad, that are derived from them … even the stories of presidents.

Revolutionary Times in Mississippi

When we modern Americans – most of us anyway – think of the Revolutionary War, we conjure images of military activities in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, naval battles in Baltimore and off the coasts of the Carolinas.  What we rarely consider, or know of at all, are the parallel battles and maneuvers that went on in what was then the western frontier of the United States, the territories east of the Mississippi River and those just to the west of it.

Strategically, control of the Mississippi River was vital to all combatants – colonists, the British, the other European powers involved (France and Spain), and all the native Americans tribes who occupied the frontier on both sides of the river.  Given that fact, it seems obvious now that one could expect to find skirmishes and intrigue all along the river, from its headwaters in Minnesota (which was Upper Louisiana at the time) to its mouth at the Gulf of Mexico.  And guess what … they are there.

I have taken a particular interest in the historic Chickasaw Nation lately primarily due to the fact that the center of their “Homeland” in those times was approximately the place where I currently reside.  In fact, all of North Mississippi was theirs.  As the revolutionary conflicts began to break out, the Chickasaws found themselves in a precarious position.  They were not the largest tribe east of the Mississippi, by any means, and were therefore always subject to potential annihilation from overwhelming numbers by antagonists.  Nonetheless, they were a fierce and feared nation in war.  Without doubt, they knew how to fight and when to fight.  Most importantly, I contend, they knew who to fight.  The carefully crafted alliances the Chickasaws made, and how they shifted those alliances over time, was a diplomatic key to their success story.  More on that in future columns.

To increase my knowledge on the general topic of the Chickasaw world of the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, I decided to read a book by a local Baldwyn author Mitch Caver (and his co-author Thomas Cowger) called “Piominko: Chickasaw Leader.”  Sometimes the accomplishments of local people are not fully recognized by those geographically closest to them.  Mitch Caver (with whom I enjoy an occasional email exchange, which never fails to point me towards interesting new materials for these columns) has grown a lifetime fascination with the Chickasaw Nation into a recognized position of prominence in the national historic community with regard not only to the Chickasaws but also to the world in which they lived.  The fact that he was made an honorary member of the Chickasaw Nation for his research, authorship, and diligent advocacy to protect places and artifacts important to Chickasaw history says it all.  His book is available at the Final Stands Interpretive Center in Baldwyn and at Amazon.com.  I highly recommend it.

What I have found in Mitch’s book and in other sources is that, from the earliest days when the Spaniard Hernando de Soto wandered through Mississippi (where he was attacked and almost annihilated by the Chickasaws) until the day that President Andrew Jackson reversed his friendship and commitments to his former battlefield allies and signed the act that ultimately removed their nation to Oklahoma in 1837, a rich and important history of America occurred right here.  Yet strangely, it is a history that is largely ignored outside a small circle of academics. 

Author Mitch Caver and statue of historic Chickasaw leader Piominko. Photo by Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal.

I have a theory.  I believe the voluminous and extensive studies of the Civil War have so dominated historical considerations of the South that the “founding moments” and the Revolutionary and Indian periods are simply obscured.  The early tales don’t reach the consciousness of today’s general population or students.  The stories that I’m now studying, and find to be so interesting and relevant, get no modern love.  I suggest we need a reversal of that trend … and a world that existed a half century before, full of highly intense adventure, mystery, and human drama, will be revealed to a wide audience.  Sounds like a multi-season television series.  I could get on board with that.

Maybe I’m just more curious than the typical person, but I want to know why the Mississippi counties of Tishomingo, Itawamba, and De Soto are named as such.  I want to know why our capital is called Jackson and why Coffeeville is Coffeeville.  I want to know the connections between General James Wilkinson (proven a traitor to Spain after his death) and Thomas Jefferson, and how that may have impacted the death of explorer Meriwether Lewis.  I want to know if there was any conspiracy around the 1784 death of the Scottish trader James Logan Colbert (a friend of the Chickasaws) which might have involved Spain, the British, a Scottish trading company in Mobile, and a quasi-counterpart of Colbert’s among the Creek Indians named Andrew McGillivray.

I want to know what Bernardo de Galvez, Jim Bowie, James Audubon, Aaron Burr, Andrew Jackson and his wife Rachel, Davy Crockett, and the Shawnee chief Tecumseh were all doing in Mississippi around  the turn of the 19^th century.  And I really want to know why I never heard any of these stories until I was fifty years old!

My current obsession has caused me to build up a queue of tales so long that I can never tell them all.  But I am thinking of trying it anyway.

The Natchez Trace: James Logan Colbert, Scotsman and Chickasaw

James Logan Colbert, a Scottish trader and trapper, had six sons, all of whom were chiefs and leaders among the Chickasaw Indians.  His son George Colbert operated a ferry, through an agreement with the young United States government, across the Tennessee River at the turn of the nineteenth century, and George’s brother Levi, also known as Itawamba, operated an inn and a trading post at Buzzard’s Roost along the Natchez Trace in what is now Alabama.  George and Levi were chief negotiators for the Chickasaw nation when the tribe finally accepted removal from Mississippi and relocated to Oklahoma in 1837.  The Chickasaws, thanks largely to the work of the Colbert family, were the only nation among the so-called “civilized” tribes to actually receive payments from the U.S. government for their lands east of the Mississippi River.

We know quite a bit about the origins and actions of the Colbert sons as they participated heavily in regional and American history over the course of their lifetimes.  But we know substantially less about their father – James Logan Colbert, a Scotsman who somehow landed in the Mississippi wilderness in a preeminent position in the Chickasaw nation.  In fact, there is some question as to whether “Logan” was truly even his middle name.

Local Chickasaw historian Mitch Caver thinks it unlikely.

“Actually, ‘Logan’ is not used as his middle name early on,” Caver explained.  “Someone started using it [without much evidence] and many today do say ‘James Logan Colbert.’  [The name] is a good way to know if it is the ‘senior’ or ‘junior’ – James Colbert had a son of the same name – but I don’t really think that ‘Logan’ was his middle name. Nor does [fellow Chickasaw historian Dr. Brad] Lieb.”

The end date of James Logan Colbert’s life and most of the circumstances surrounding his death are not in question – though whether or not foul play played a role remains disputed; more on that later – but Colbert’s beginnings are something of an enigma.  There are primarily two stories as to how James Logan Colbert arrived in Chickasaw Territory as a twenty-year-old man around 1742.

First, Colbert family tradition suggests that the young man came from Scotland alone, likely an orphan, and immediately set out into the wilderness, finding a home first with a band of Chickasaws living near what is now Augusta, Georgia.

Image by Chickasaw.tv

Second, it has also been suggested that Colbert was instead orphaned while already in America, somewhere in the Carolina and Georgia areas of the country and was given by the British to the Chickasaws to raise as their own.  As unusual as this might sound, this was an actual practice of the time.  The British found that English-speaking orphans would be incorporated into the indigenous nations and could then later serve as communication liaisons between the British and Native American tribes.  This explanation is the one held by both Caver and Lieb. 

While there remains dispute as to Colbert’s origins, even among his own sons (in their later writings), Colbert himself is documented, at least on a few occasions, as saying he was born “in the Carolinas.”

If it is true that the British “placed” an orphaned Colbert with the Chickasaw in hopes of growing and strengthening their ties with the tribe, it may have been one of the best decisions, in a strategic sense if not a personal one, ever made by a colonial power in the new world.  If the orphan placement story is true, that one single domino ultimately strengthened the entire Chickasaw nation’s alliance with the British, and in a necessary evolution at the time of the American Revolution, with the United States.   More so than the British traders who preceded him into the Chickasaw wilderness of Mississippi, those who fought with the tribe when they defeated the French at the Battle of Ackia in 1736, James Logan Colbert “became” Chickasaw, through his three marriages to high-ranking Chickasaw women, in 1740, 1742 and 1768.  The six sons of Colbert and his royal wives, in their nation’s matrilineal power system, would one day be chiefs of the tribe, their mixed blood notwithstanding.  And they were. 

The Colbert sons negotiated with the likes of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson on behalf of their people, and they consistently influenced their Chickasaw brothers to remain firm allies of the United States.  Although it did not ultimately save their lands east of the Mississippi river, the longstanding friendship did place the Chickasaws in a favorable position at a negotiating table in Pontotoc when their land was bought, rather than on a wilderness battlefield against an American army where it might simply have been taken.

At the age of sixty-two, James Logan Colbert died on January 7, 1784, having fallen from his horse as he returned from St. Augustine, Florida, and a meeting with the Creek chief Andrew McGillivray.  It was rumored, shortly after, that Colbert’s death was not accidental but, in fact, resulted from the intentional actions of a slave who travelled with the Chickasaw leader.

More on the Scotsman/Chickasaw James Logan Colbert next week …

The Natchez Trace: Colbert’s Raid, Part 1

Note: The information in this story is reprinted, and edited with embellishments, directly from materials found in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas and in a Special History Report by Edwin C. Bearss of the National Park Service.

Early on the morning of April 17, 1783, a pro-British force commanded by James Logan Colbert, the sixty-year-old Scottish trader who had a bult a life in the Mississippi wilderness among the Chickasaw Indians, attacked the Spanish-held settlement at Arkansas Post on the Arkansas River.  “Colbert’s Raid” would be the only Revolutionary War engagement to occur in what is now Arkansas.

Background

In 1762, Spain took control of French Louisiana west of the Mississippi after King Louis XV ceded the area in anticipation of losing the ongoing French and Indian War. It was 1766 before Spanish troops arrived to take over Arkansas Post from the French garrison. The Spanish struggled to maintain order at the post, which was still mainly populated by French trappers, and to protect it from the English who held the territory just across the Mississippi River.

In 1779, a few years after the American Revolution had begun, Spain offered assistance to the colonists as an ally of France.  Even before this action was taken, Indian allies of the Spanish were overtly operating militarily against the British and their own Native American allies in the area.

When news of the alliance between the French and American colonists finally arrived at Arkansas Post, the Spanish garrison there was in the midst of completing a move of their fort to higher ground and a more defensible position, one less likely to flood.  Always at the ready for an attack on the British, the Spanish soldiers at the post traveled down river and took the abandoned British post of Concordia, located across from the mouth of the Arkansas River on the eastern bank of the Mississippi.  The Spanish then laid claim to territory all the way from the mouths of the St. Francis and White Rivers (near modern-day Helena, Arkansas, and Rosedale, Mississippi) to their garrison in Natchez.

Over the next year, fighting continued between the Spanish garrisons on the lower Mississippi and British troops, with each side always involving their Indian allies.  Over time, many of the English soldiers in the area were captured, but a handful managed to escape and join with the Chickasaw Indians who under the command of James Colbert.  Colbert, besides being a frontier trader for almost forty years, had also once been commissioned as a captain in the British army.

Colbert’s small group would not be able to entirely drive the Spanish from the area, but he could nonetheless continually disrupt the flow of commerce on the Mississippi River.  As pirate or loyalist, depending upon the perspective from which his actions were viewed, Colbert and his militia ultimately targeted the Spanish garrison at Arkansas Post.  If Arkansas Post could be neutralized, Colbert and his men reasoned that they would be able to terrorize any boat on the Mississippi River north of Spanish-held Natchez.

(It is interesting to note here that James Colbert and his Chickasaw allies were sided with the British during this phase of the Revolutionary War.  The enemies which Colbert fought, however, were not the American colonists and patriots far to the east but were instead the forces of European powers – Spain and France — who had joined the American fight as an opportunity to strike at Great Britain even in the New World.  It is reported that James Colbert disavowed his alliance with the British before his death in 1784.  In any case, the Chickasaws and Colbert’s sons clearly reversed course and became strong allies of the young United States immediately following the war.)

Next week … the raid.

The Natchez Trace: Colbert’s Raid, Part 2

Note: The information in this story is reprinted, and edited with embellishments, directly from materials found in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas and a Special History Report by Edwin C. Bearss of the National Park Service.

Early on the morning of April 17, 1783, a pro-British force commanded by James Logan Colbert, the sixty-year-old Scottish trader who had a built a life in the Mississippi wilderness among the Chickasaw Indians, attacked the Spanish-held settlement at Arkansas Post on the Arkansas River.  “Colbert’s Raid” would be the only Revolutionary War engagement to occur in what is now Arkansas.

James Colbert’s Raid on Arkansas Post

James Colbert’s attack on the Spanish fort was launched early in the pre-dawn hours of April 17, 1783.  

Stopping at the Quapaw village downstream from the fort, Colbert misinformed the Indians, who were reportedly intoxicated, that he and those with him were Americans who wished to simply visit with the Spanish garrison.  Arriving at the small village surrounding the Arkansas Post fort, Colbert’s English and Chickasaw allies, in total numbering about a hundred and including Colbert’s sons, prepared for an attack.   With the very first shot of the engagement, Colbert’s men managed to capture Spain’s second-in-command of the garrison – Lieutenant de Villars – by surprising the officer, along with his entire family, outside the fort’s walls.  

Colbert’s Raid Historic Marker

As the attackers approached the stronghold, the Spaniards were awakened by the sounds of gunfire, and they quickly launched a counterattack intended to rescue the captured officer and other civilians.  Colbert and his men, however, easily repulsed the effort.  Because of the Spanish structure’s poor location, Colbert’s men were able to approach the walls within a “pistol shot” while still remaining under cover.

The opposing forces settled into a long-range duel that lasted for several hours. With the Spanish relatively safe inside the fort’s walls, Colbert’s men took a counter position and found shelter in a nearby gully.  From that position, Colbert’s men were able to protect themselves from Spanish cannon fire while continuing to pelt the garrison with small-arms fire.

Having risen to such a preeminent position in the American wilderness among both the native tribes and the British, Colbert clearly possessed skills in warfare, but he likewise had substantial abilities in the areas of discernment and negotiation to boot.   Colbert sent a message to the garrison placed in the hands of the wife of the captured officer.  His message demanded the Spanish surrender of the fort.  The Spanish commander – Captain Dubreuil – ignored the offer and instead ordered a quick counterattack.

Ten soldiers, accompanied by four Quapaw Indians, rushed from the fort screaming as they went.  This unanticipated move surprised Colbert and his men, who likely doubted their capability in countering a frontal assault by the Spanish.  As a result, Colbert and his allies fled to their canoes and commenced a quick escape, holding on to a few captives to barter for safe passage if needed. 

During the skirmishing and retreat, one of Colbert’s men was killed and another Chickasaw wounded.

The Quapaw who had been earlier duped by Colbert soon pursued him down the Mississippi in an effort to redeem themselves to their Spanish allies.  Finally surrounding Colbert’s party south of the mouth of the Arkansas River, the Quapaw were able to gain the release of all but four prisoners, who were later used by Colbert as protection during his trip back to Chickasaw territory.  In the full course of the battle, the Spanish suffered two dead, one wounded, and had eight taken prisoner. The British-Chickasaw force lost only the one man with a second man wounded.

The impact of Colbert’s raid on Arkansas Post was minimal. Few people were injured or lost their lives, and traffic on the Mississippi was ultimately not greatly disrupted.

The Colbert Raid is interpreted by the National Park Service at Arkansas Post National Memorial near Gillett, Arkansas.

The Natchez Trace: Sieur de Bienville, Part 1

Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, was born in 1680 in Montreal, New France.  Bienville, as he became known historically, was one of twelve Le Moyne brothers, all prolific explorers, politicians, and military achievers for France in the New World.  Bienville is credited with co-founding the cities of Mobile, Alabama, and Biloxi, Mississippi, as well as founding New Orleans, Louisiana, outright.  Additionally, he administered the relocation of the capital of the French Colony of Louisiana from Mobile to Biloxi (in 1719) and from Biloxi to New Orleans (in 1722).

Jean Baptiste was only 26 years old, in 1706, when his older brother, Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur de Iberville, with whom he served in the original establishment of Louisiana, died of yellow fever.  He was, however, already serving as the French Colonial Governor of Louisiana and had been since 1701 (when he was 21 years old).

For a brief time, from 1713 to 1716, Bienville was recalled to France and replaced as governor by Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac.  Cadillac, for whom the modern automobile takes its name, was an ineffectual governor, and Bienville returned to the Louisiana governorship in 1717.

Let’s just say that Bienville continued in and out of power as the leader of colonial Louisiana over the next three decades at the whims and impulses of the French monarch Louis XV.  All told, Bienville was governor of Louisiana four separate times and served in the capacity a total of twenty-eight years.

Today, there is a Bienville Parrish in Louisiana as well as a city of the same name.  A statue exists in New Orleans recognizing Bienville as the city’s founder, and the man is generally considered the “Father of Louisiana.”  Even contemporary best-selling author Greg Iles gives a nod to Bienville, setting several of his works in the fictional city of “Bienville, Mississippi.”

Statue of New Orleans Founder Jean Baptiste LeMoyne

So, what does Jean Baptiste Le Moyne have to do with the Natchez Trace?  What does “Bienville” have to do with the ground we walk today in north Mississippi?  I hoped you ask.

Let’s start with a little perspective.  In 1712, a census was made of the entire European population existing from Mobile all the way to the still-future site of New Orleans.  The total number of colonists counted was a whopping 324.  Four years later, when Bienville returned to the Louisiana gulf coast in 1716, it was not initially a “return to his glory days” (he was now thirty-six years old). He was sent to the low country by the sitting governor, Cadillac, after he had failed in courtship of Cadillac’s daughter.  How love failed, what specifically happened between the pair and the girl’s father, is not entirely known, but suffice to say, if your ex-girlfriend’s father sends you and forty-nine men to subdue an entire nation of indigenous people – in this case, the Natchez Indians – it is unlikely that feelings between Cadillac and Bienville were rosy.

Yet, Bienville had been there before, and he had managed to operate peacefully with the native American tribes, for the most part.  The Choctaw in central Mississippi were clear allies of the French.  In the north the Chickasaws, a small but fierce nation, generally aligned themselves with the British.  The Natchez in the south were the wild card.

The Natchez Indians more than the other two tribes practiced a unique brand of religion and generally functioned similarly to the ancient Aztecs, their assumed ancestors.  The high chief of the Natchez was referred to as “The Great Sun.”  The Natchez were known to be a beautiful people, but to say that they could resort to violence of the harshest kind would be the ultimate understatement.

In 1716, Bienville and his men constructed Fort Rosalie on the site that would one day be Natchez, Mississippi, a high bluff beside the river, right in the heart of the Natchez tribe.  The location was selected to gain control of river traffic and to secure middle America for the French, opposing British traders and trappers who continued to push closer and closer.  Bienville and his men had no choice but to locate exactly where they were.  They simply had to make it work, but the Natchez would not make it an easy task.

When a Natchez raiding party killed four Frenchmen and ransacked a stockpile of supplies, Bienville was forced to respond.  But rather than lead his men directly into the superior numbers of the Natchez, Bienville, by now the consummate wily and battle-hardened leader, masterfully executed a capture of the Great Sun himself.  What Bienville was unlikely to accomplish with his small French-Canadian force in an all-out assault on the Natchez, he achieved perfectly with a targeted strike against, and the subsequent coercion of, the Natchez king.

The Natchez not only turned over the perpetrators of the killings, they additionally were forced, in direct trade for their chief, to provide the French with large quantities of cypress and acacia raw materials with which Bienville’s men would shore up Fort Rosalie.

Relations between the French and the Natchez improved for a few years thereafter.  In fact, the groups were working so well  together that Bienville had to request women be sent from France for his soldiers to marry, as an alternate to the willing and beautiful young women of the Natchez tribe.  Bienville felt, perhaps rightly, that too much French-Natchez interaction of the amorous nature could leave his command in a compromised position.

The quality of Bienville’s leadership was unquestionable.  However, in 1724, he was inopportunely recalled to France (to face charges nonetheless) and replaced as both governor and as the commandant of Fort Rosalie.

Things went quickly south from there, on the land that would one day be Natchez, Mississippi – very, very quickly.

Disaster happens, Bienville returns and ends up in both Tupelo and Memphis, locked in battle against the south’s most capable warriors – The Chickasaw – next week.

The Natchez Trace: Sieur de Beinville, Part 2

“Sieur de Bienville” is a French title which literally means “Sir (noble or gentleman) of Bienville,” an area in northern France near Compiegne. 

Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, the man who most famously held the title, as far as we know, never went there.  To the contrary, he was born in Montreal, New France, in 1680.  “Bienville,” as Jean Baptiste became known historically, was one of twelve Le Moyne brothers – all prolific explorers, politicians, and military achievers for France in the New World.  Bienville is credited with founding the “Crescent City,” New Orleans, and with co-founding Mobile, Alabama, and Biloxi, Mississippi, with his older brother Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur de Iberville. 

Jean Baptiste was first made Colonial Governor of Louisiana when he was only 21 years old.  All told, Bienville served the French monarchy as governor of Louisiana four separate times for a total of twenty-eight years.  He administered the relocation of the capital of the French Colony of Louisiana from Mobile to Biloxi (in 1719) and from Biloxi to New Orleans (in 1722).  In 1716, Bienville constructed Fort Rosalie on the Mississippi River, near present day Natchez, making it the farthest inland reach of French power from the Gulf of Mexico at that time.  “Power” is a subjective term when speaking of colonial control in the new world in the early 1700’s.  When he built the fort on the river bluff that would one day be Natchez, Bienville had but fifty men with him, to hold his claimed ground against all other European powers present and the powerful and numerous Native American tribes who surrounded him.

Despite his loyalty to the French crown and his vast achievements for the monarchy in Louisiana, Bienville was recalled to France under charges in 1724 – politics of that day not being much different than today – and he was in control of neither Louisiana nor Fort Rosalie when trouble brewed with the Natchez Indians in the fall of 1729.

Prior to the local tribe’s fall harvest celebrations, it became known among the Natchez that the current commandant of Fort Rosalie, Sieur de Chopart, had plans to increase demands from the Indians, including the forfeiture of the lands at the tribe’s “White Apple Village,” which contained their pyramidal, ancestral burial mounds.  The greedy overreach by the French commander prompted a bloody plot by the Indians.

On November 28, 1729, the Natchez came to the French at Fort Rosalie, led by their chief “The Great Sun,” with fabricated news of an imminent attack by the Choctaws. Ironically, the French did not question the validity of the report which would pit them against their closest allies among the native tribes, at least not to the point of bringing suspicion on the Natchez.  The Great Sun took his forces inside Fort Rosalie, and the warriors dispersed among the French, house to house.  The soldiers even provided guns to some of the Indians.  The Natchez chief went to the home of Sieur de Chopart, along with a few of his best warriors and a few chickens.  Not cowardly tribesmen – actual chickens.  The Great Sun told the French commander that he had some “fowl” which he wished to trade.  Chopart, perturbed, wanted nothing of it and reached down to toss out one of the chickens.  As he stooped, the Natchez attacked killing the commander and almost every Frenchmen in the fort. 

The massacre lasted until about 4 o’clock in the afternoon and resulted in the reported deaths of 144 men, 35 women, and 56 children.  The Natchez herded up as many of the French women and the slaves of the settlement as could be captured.  Everyone else was butchered.  The cruelties of the attack culminated with the slaughter of infants and young children and then the beheading of the dead.  The mutilated bodies of the slain French were piled at the feet of the Great Sun in the center of the compound and were ultimately left to the dogs and buzzards.

The Natchez Attack

The French responded quickly and with equal brutality.  Sitting Louisiana governor Etienne de Perier immediately ordered a superior French force and its Choctaw allies to destroy the Natchez, which they did, before the tribe had even finished their victory celebrations.  The Natchez who were not killed in the first assaults by the French-Choctaw army fled west across the river.  When they were caught in the wilderness by the pursuing Frenchmen, the now-outnumbered Natchez attempted to fly a flag of truce.  The French, and the Choctaws with them, simply ignored it and killed the bulk of the remaining Natchez force.

Over the following days and weeks, the dwindling number of Natchez families who somehow managed to escape death or capture west of the river ultimately maneuvered their way back across the Mississippi and up the Natchez Trace, where they found refuge, finally, with the Chickasaws, who were no friends of the French or the Choctaw.

The brutality that had been exercised in 1729 between opposing forces in the wilderness of colonial Louisiana and the Mississippi Territory bred intense fear among the populace.  A festering swamp of hatred had been established, and it percolated on the brink of paranoia and panic for several years. 

The Chickasaw were in clear alliance with the British, and the French knew it.  And now that northern Mississippi tribe harbored the remnant of those who had massacred and desecrated French men, women and children.  An action against this insult by the Chickasaw had to be taken, and in 1733, Sieur de Bienville was sent back to the Americas to take it.

Along Pontotoc Ridge, near modern day Tupelo, where they had almost destroyed the Spanish forces of Hernando Desoto two centuries before, a prepared and fierce Chickasaw nation waited.

Next week … A French force from Illinois reaches the Chickasaw, before Bienville, at “The Battle of Ackia.”  Bienville goes to war in Tupelo and Memphis.

The Natchez Trace: Sieur de Bienville, Part 3

“The Natchez Indians, a nation established ninety leagues above New Orleans, having information towards the end of last November that the French wished to force them to abandon their villages and their lands in keeping with the order of Sieur de Chopart, who was in command at that fort, conspired to slaughter all the French who were established there,” Diron d’Artaguiette, the commandant at Mobile, wrote, in December 1729, to the minister of the French Navy, Comte de Maurepas.

D’Artaguiette’s letter to his commander in Europe was not a warning of disaster to come, it was instead a news report of a massacre which had already occurred November 28, 1729, at Fort Rosalie, the site of the future city of Natchez, Mississippi.

The Natchez Indians, falsely reporting to the French of an imminent attack from the Choctaws, had entered Fort Rosalie, with the full blessings of Chopart, to assist the Frenchmen in the coming battle.  But the battle did not come from outside the fort on the morning of the 28^th.  It came from inside, and it came at the signal of the Natchez chief “The Great Sun.”  The carnage lasted until 4 o’clock in the afternoon. 

D’Artaguiette reported to Comte de Maurepas that only two French men had survived the attack, and he complained of the ineptitude of Louisiana colonial governor Etienne de Perier.  He pled to his superior that more men be sent to Mobile.

The world, of course, moved too slowly in 1729 for any timely help to truly come from Europe.  Luckily, despite both his perceived and real ineptitudes, Perier did quickly manage to send a large army of Frenchmen and Choctaws in pursuit of the Natchez.  The French-Choctaw force all but wiped out their quarry, with only a remnant of the Natchez escaping the French and finding refuge up the Natchez Trace near modern-day Tupelo among the Chickasaws.

The Battle of Ackia

The Chickasaw, regarded among fiercest warriors in all the Native American tribes, were enemies of both the French and the Choctaw.  The Natchez survivors, being common enemies with both groups as well, essentially found themselves under the watch-care of the Chickasaws.  The Natchez would eventually assimilate with the Chickasaws or continue farther north and disappear altogether, but that’s another story.

The French requested that the Chickasaw return the Natchez refugees to suffer their fates at the hands of the French and the Choctaw.  The Chickasaw refused the request, and a new battle line was drawn.

The French monarchy apparently did not believe Governor Etienne de Perier up to the task of avenging French honor at the snub by the Chickasaw, despite his initial successes against the Natchez.  They instead turned to a former governor, the founder of New Orleans, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, who at the time of the Fort Rosalie ambush, and the subsequent fighting, had been recalled to Paris to answer political charges. 

Beinville returned to the governorship of Louisiana in 1733 and immediately set about establishing a new tranquility, in the manner in which most colonial powers maintained peace and harmony … by going to war.  Bienville would move against the Chickasaw, his motivations being partially to seek more vengeance on the Natchez and those who harbored them and partially to strike at the obvious growing coalition between the Chickasaw and British traders and trappers and, by extension, British armed forces.

Bienville’s plan was to bring an army commanded by Major Pierre d’Artaguiette, the brother of Diron, south from Illinois to meet Bienville’s own force, complete with Choctaw allies, who would come north up the Natchez Trace.  The two French armies would attack the hopefully unsuspecting and undermanned Chickasaws from two directions.

Speeding down the Mississippi River to Chickasaw Bluff (modern-day Memphis), Major d’Artaguiette’s men were able to reach the Chickasaw nation quartered near Pontotoc Ridge northwest of Tupelo a full two months ahead of Bienville, on March 24, 1736.  Nonetheless, d’Artaguiette attacked with 130 Frenchman and 366 Illini, Iroquois, Arkansas and Miami Indians.  Though the French fought valiantly, they were no match for the fewer Chickasaws as they defended their own homeland.  The Chickasaw warriors quickly pinned down d’Arataguiette’s army and forced an immediate retreat from the French and their allies.  The north Mississippi tribe then captured d’Artaguiette (who had been wounded three times in the battle), his company’s priest, and eighteen other French soldiers. 

No strangers to the brutality that was commonplace among enemies in the American wilderness, the Chickasaw burned the captured Frenchmen at the stake, some of them lit on fire after having their bodies completely covered in pine splinters by the red-hot barrels of the soldiers’ own guns.  The Frenchmen who made it the escape path back to the northwest reported that no Frenchmen would have survived the Chickasaws at all had it not been for staunch resistance from the Iroquois and the Arkansas Indians covering the army’s retreat. 

D’Artaguiette nor any of his force ever saw Bienville.

Next week … Bienville will face the Chickasaws himself in The Battle of Ackia in the final chapter of “Sieur de Beinville.”