Arkansas Post National Memorial

Arkansas Post is the first European toehold in the lower Mississippi Valley — older than New Orleans, older than St. Louis, and half underwater now. Henri de Tonti put six men at the Quapaw village of Osotouy in 1686 to trade for beaver; the Quapaw kept the post alive, the French and Spanish moved it up and down the Arkansas for a century, and the river has been taking it back ever since.

The post ran the valley's whole colonial succession — the failed fur trade, John Law's bubble colony of German settlers, the Chickasaw attack of 1749 that carried off eight women and children, the Spanish administration, and finally the American town that was the territory's first capital. The 1819 Arkansas Gazette started here; the government moved to Little Rock in 1821 and the post declined into the river's floodplain.

The memorial preserves what's left — the town site where the state park interprets the 18th-century remains, the river that moved and took half the post, the archaeology under the water and the restored ground above it. The file keeps the first settlement's fate: the oldest European establishment in Arkansas, abandoned by its own success when the capital moved, claimed finally by the river it was built to serve.

Arkansas Post National Memorial is the archive's first-settlement file — the 1686 French trading post at the Quapaw village, the colonial capital that predates New Orleans, half of it now under the Arkansas River that made and took it.