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Story Archives: Dreamers, schemers & swindlers along the Ouachita
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Dreamers, schemers & swindlers along the Ouachita
 When the Ouachita River Expedition arrived at Fort Miro (present day Monroe, La.), a place originally known as the Ouachita Post, on Tuesday, November 6, 1804, the crew and commanders walked around the newly-built American stockade.
The Spanish had established the Ouachita Post on the east bank in 1785 and by 1790, out of fear of Indian attack, built Fort Miro, which was designed as a place of refuge for women and children when the men went hunting. The Americans took possession of the post in 1804, shortly before the Ouachita River Expedition arrived as one of four explorations of the vast Louisiana Territory. The new, poorly-designed American stockade had just been constructed near the old Spanish post, which had been built on the private property of Captain Don Juan Filhiol.
A Frenchman, Filhiol briefed the expedition on the Ouachita River. The captain had joined the Spanish military in New Orleans in 1779 and was involved in the conquest of the British ports of Mobile and Pensacola during the American Revolution. After service at the Post of Opelousas, he moved to the Ouachita's banks in the early 1780s, where he later established and named Fort Miro in honor of Spanish Gov. Esteban Miro, the man who made Filhiol commander of the region. The governor also awarded Filhiol a land grant.
The Ouachita District, which stretched from present day Jonesville at its mouth northward to southern Arkansas, had a white population of 200 in 1788, including 74 men who could bear arms. However, Filhiol's attitude of the populace, mostly French and a few American, wasn't high: "These men are composed of the scum of all sorts of nations, several fugitives from their native countries...who...have become fixed...to their idleness and independence, perhaps even to escape from the pursuit of justice..." He said many were "Lazy to the uttermost." (Similar comments were made about part of the Natchez populace during the same period.)
Filhiol reported in the late 1780s that commerce in the region annually "does not exceed six to seven thousand pots of bear oil, two thousand deer skins, 2000 pounds of suet (beef or mutton fat), 500 beaver pelts and 100 otters. Wild game was abundant but the buffalo scarce, having been "hunted...too much" in the Fort Miro area.For the full story, subscribe to the The Concordia Sentinel's NEW E-Edition! |
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