Environmental History Workshop: Arkansas Post National Memorial

Enamored with fur trade history in the Great Lakes region, I leaped at the chance to write a Historic Resource Study for Arkansas Post National Memorial in Arkansas. In some ways the story was familiar terrain, but as one of the oldest European settlements in French Louisiana it was also exotic. I never imagined when I was in graduate school that I would one day be studying the exploits of seventeenth-century Frenchmen with poodle haircuts. That is one of the elements of my work I find most enjoyable: I am always being surprised at what I get to research next.

Arkansas Post in 1689

Arkansas Post has a very rich history. Built in 1686 by Henri de Tonty to serve as a trading post with the Quapaw, first the French and then the Spanish made it into a military post to gird their alliance with the Quapaw and other tribes. British and Chickasaw attacked the post at the end of the Revolutionary War. Americans joined the largely French community there after the Louisiana Purchase, after which it became the capital of the new Arkansas Territory. Southern Indians streamed through the place on the Trail of Tears in the 1830's. During the Civil War, the Confederates built a new fort there to prevent a Union advance on Little Rock. Union forces attacked the stronghold with an overwhelming superiority of numbers, making one of the largest captures of Rebel soldiers in the war. The hallowed ground became a state park in 1929 and a national memorial in 1964.

About Us

ted.r.catton@gmail.com

dianekrahe@gmail.com

Theodore Catton is an associate research professor in the History Department at the University of Montana. He is the author of numerous books, articles, and reports on the national parks, including Inhabited Wilderness: Indians, Eskimos, and National Parks in Alaska, and National Park, City Playground: Mount Rainier in the Twentieth Century. He holds a PhD in environmental history from the University of Washington.

Diane L. Krahe is a research faculty affiliate at the University of Montana. She has written extensively on federal land management issues and is an expert on the history of Indian tribal wilderness in the twentieth century. She has a PhD in history from Washington State University and an MS in environmental studies from the University of Montana.

Catton and Krahe, who are married, reside in Missoula, Montana, where they research and write book-length reports for the National Park Service through both their faculty institution and their home business, Environmental History Workshop.

Collaborative writers since 2002, Catton and Krahe share a concern for the environment and an appreciation of national parks and wilderness areas. When they are not digging through boxes of old government records in the National Archives or pecking away on their laptops they enjoy hiking and camping in those special places that they are researching and writing about.

Some of our histories have been published on the web:

To Make a Better Nation: An Administrative History of the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act

Wonderland: An Administrative History of Mount Rainier National Park

Land Reborn: A History of Administration and Visitor Use in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve

Commemoration and Preservation: An Administrative History of Big Hole National Battlefield

Life, Leisure, and Hardship along the Buffalo: Historic Resource Study, Buffalo National River

Little Gem of the Cascades: Lassen Volcanic National Park Administrative History

Nez Perce National Historical Park Administrative History