FOOTNOTES:
[194] Sylvanus Phillips later platted and became chief owner of Helena, a town named for his daughter, about ten miles below the mouth of St. Francis River. Phillips County, Arkansas, takes its name from this pioneer.—Ed.
[195] Arkansas Post (or Poste aux Arkansas) was accounted the oldest white settlement in the lower Mississippi Valley. Tonty, on his voyage of relief in search of La Salle (1686), ascended the Arkansas River to a village of a tribe by the same name, where he left a detachment of six men headed by Couture. Thither, the following year, came the survivors of La Salle’s ill-fated Texas colony, and related the assassination of their leader. The post was maintained as a trading centre and Jesuit mission throughout the French occupation, and survived an unexpected attack by the Chickasaws in 1748. The Jesuits abandoned it as an unfruitful field in 1763. During the Spanish occupation, the importance of this post as a trading station increased. Pierre Laclède, founder of St. Louis, had a branch warehouse at Arkansas Post, and died here in 1778. Upon the American occupation, civil government was established (1804), and it was the capital for the territory until 1820, when superseded by Little Rock. Arkansas Post was captured by the Union forces from the Confederates, in 1863. It is now a small town about seventy-five miles southeast of Little Rock.—Ed.