![]() ![]() and John Pullen (main thoroughfares were named for them). Steamboat travel soon opened the hamlet to expanding settlement, bringing to the area such men as French-born Napoleonic soldier Antoine Barraque (Pine Bluff’s principal east-west street was named for him) and brothers James T. ![]() One Quapaw leader, Sarasin, later returned to Jefferson County and is buried in Pine Bluff. At Major John Harrington’s lodge, said to be in Jefferson County on the north bank of the Arkansas, the Indians signed away the last of their tribal lands on November 15, 1824. Crittenden quickly set about exploiting the remaining Quapaw in southeast Arkansas to relinquish their last tracts of land. ![]() On March 3, 1819, President James Monroe named Robert Crittenden territorial secretary. The encampment soon became a tavern and small inn. A few years later, James Scull, also from Arkansas Post, arrived and set up an encampment on the north bank across from the future site of Pine Bluff. In the autumn of 1819, Joseph Bonne, making his way upstream from Arkansas Post, built a crude cabin for his Quapaw wife and family on a “high bluff covered with pine trees” on the river’s south bank. Louisiana Purchase through Early Statehood One of his lieutenants, Henri de Tonti, an Italian by birth, erected a group of crude encampments near the mouth of the Arkansas and named it Arkansas Post. In 1682, French Canadian René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle boated down the Mississippi with a party of fifty-four and claimed southeast Arkansas and its river. Despite possessing a rich history and being home to a university, the city was in decline by the beginning of the twenty-first century, facing population loss and crumbling infrastructure.Īfter Spaniard Hernando de Soto had trekked through southeast Arkansas 145 years earlier in 1541, leaving behind death and disease, the French arrived to claim the lower Mississippi River Valley. The city was hit hard, however, by flooding, drought, and economic depression in the early twentieth century, although World War II proved to be an economic boon to the city, which opened a munitions arsenal during the war. The city thrived during the last part of the nineteenth century due to its status as a cotton center and river port. Like Jefferson County, Pine Bluff is a historical offspring of Arkansas Post (Arkansas County)-the first European foothold in Arkansas, founded in 1686 by the French and built near the mouth of the Arkansas River. ![]()
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