Rumble of a Distant Drum The Quapaws and the Old World Newcomers, 1673-1804

The Rumble of a Distant Drum opens in 1673 when Marquette and Jolliet sailed down the Mississippi River and found the Quapaws already in residence in the Arkansas Post, where the Arkansas River flowed into the Mississippi. Here they established the first European settlement in this part of the country, thirty years before New Orleans and eighty years before St. Louis. Morris S. Arnold draws on his many years of archival research and writing on colonial Arkansas to produce this elegant account of the cultural intersections of the French and Spanish with the native American peoples. He demonstrates that the Quapaws and Frenchmen created a highly symbiotic society in which the two disparate peoples became connected in complex and subtle ways--through intermarriage, trade, religious practice, and political/military alliances.Arnold, Morris S. is the author of 'Rumble of a Distant Drum The Quapaws and the Old World Newcomers, 1673-1804', published 2007 under ISBN 9781557288394 and ISBN 1557288399.