Explorer Bienville among the last to see Ouachita Indians by Stanley Nelson - posted Tuesday, July 3rd, 2012 @ 2:15 pm  E-mail Story |  Print Story  In 1786, the commander of the Spanish Ouachita Post (present day Monroe) wrote that were it not for the memories of other Native Americans one might question whether the Ouachita Indians had ever existed. A Frenchman appointed commander of the Ouachita District in the 1780s, Capt. John Filhiol noted in a report to the governor of Spanish Louisiana that the oldest white people there "do not remember ever having seen a single one of them, and if some story tellers of the nation did not assure having seen five or six with the Panis and the Chits bearing the name of Ouachita, one would doubt that a nation so called might ever have existed." BIENVILLE'S JOURNEY More than seven decades earlier, in 1700, French explorer Bienville, traveling west from Natchez, met a Ouachita Indian in present day Tensas Parish. Bienville's traveling party was made up of 22 Canadians, including St. Denis, the founder of Natchitoches, and six Tensas Indians. The Ouachita Indian agreed to guide Bienville on his journey west. At the time, rivers and streams were flooded and still rising. From the Tensas villages to the Red River, much of the low land was submerged. At times Bienville's men, departing on foot on March 22, 1700, climbed trees just to have a dry place to sit and rest. Despite the obstacles, they managed to walk and wade 10 to 12 miles before dark the first day. Bienville wrote in his journal: "I marched all day in an overflowed country, the water half-way up the leg, or to the knees. In the evening I arrived at the bank of a little river (Tensas) about seventy paces wide and very deep, four and a half leagues distant, to the west" of the Tensas Indian villages. "I found there some Ouachitas, with several pirogues partly loaded with salt. They were abandoning their village to go and live with the Tensas. They had come from their home by little rivers navigable only in high water." On the 23rd, Bienville noted that the Tensas Indians "deserted on account of bad roads (foot paths) and cold weather; they do not like walking naked through the water." A short man, Bienville realized that a person "of medium height is at great disadvantage in such countries. I see some of my men with the water only up to their waists, while I and others are nearly swimming, pushing our bundles before us on rafts, to keep them from getting wet." On a due west route from Lake St. Joseph to the Ouachita Indian village along the river at present day Columbia in Caldwell Parish, Bienville's men killed three deer and 12 fat turkeys in the Boeuf River prairie of southern Franklin Parish. Two days later, the party "came to the village of the Ouachitas...There are not more than five cabins there, and about seventy men..." For the full story, subscribe to the The Concordia Sentinel's NEW E-Edition!