François Ménard, a Colonial Arkansas Marchand and Habitant

Anglo-American visitors to Arkansas Post in early nineteenth century were unstinting in their condescension when evaluating old-time French inhabitants whom they encountered there, and those evaluations closely echoed ones that other sojourners from East were voicing elsewhere in Mississippi Valley at about same time. Among these travelers there was virtually unanimous agreement on nature and character of colonial holdovers they observed: French were an amiable but essentially indolent lot, not much given to enterprise, and overly fond of idle pursuits like drinking, dancing, gambling, playing billiards, and racing their horses. In 1819, for instance, Thomas Nuttall, Harvard botanist-and an Englishman at that-hammered Post with a fearsome invective, indicting and sundry: The love of amusements, here, he said, in most of French colonies, is carried to extravagance, particularly gambling, and dancing parties or balls. But sum of general industry is, as yet, totally insufficient for support of any thing like a town. . . . [Tjhese Canadian descendants, so long nurtured amidst savages, have become strangers to civilized comforts and regular industry. They must, however, in time give way to introduction of more enterprising inhabitants.1Examples of this kind of take on Arkansas French could easily be multiplied, but Washington Irving's musings can perhaps serve as a proxy for remarkably uniform descriptions of them that found their way into print during early national period. In his story The Creole Village, which is about his visit to Arkansas Post in 1830s, Irving caricatured both French, whom he portrayed as somnolent, carefree fiddle-players, and newly arrived Anglo-Americans, whom he limned as aggressive, hard-driving republican entrepreneurs. Irving filled his Arkansas Post, depicted as a sleepy, ruinous souvenir of a lost empire, with passive, enervated creoles. He outfitted Little Rock, new territorial capital up Arkansas River, with rival newspapers, a courthouse, and two banks, all built of pine boards, on model of Grecian temples, along with lawyers by score. By end of his story, Irving had not merely warmed to contrast he was drawing, he was positively on fire with it. Here he is upon leaving Post: As we swept away from shore, I cast a wistful eye upon moss-grown roofs and ancient elms of village, and prayed that inhabitants might long retain their happy ignorance, their absence of enterprise and improvement, their respect for fiddle, and their contempt for almighty dollar. He could not resist ending narrative with a rhetorical coup de grâce. Alas! he cried, is to become of our poor little creole village!2The figures that these effusions draw are deliberate literary caricatures to be sure, but they closely resemble necessarily less overblown descriptions of Arkansas French that other visitors left behind. In any case, truth is that, pace Washington Irving and other detractors and romanticizers of colonial Arkansas, Post had a number of enterprising merchants and habitants (farmers) in eighteenth century who, though their obscured lives are usually beyond recovery, were in fact busily engaged in pursuing Irving's almighty dollar.3 principal exception to their virtual anonymity is a man named Jean Francois Menard.4Jean Francois Menard-he would soon lose Jean-was born in 1745 or 1746 in central France in tiny farming village of Sagonne (present-day population about two hundred) in what was then province of Bourbonnais. Francois's birthplace lay within what his first will called the jurisdiction of Moulin, meaning diocese see of which was Moulins, a city about thirty-five miles southeast of Sagonne. His par- ents, Antoine Menard and Jeanne Ferand, were also natives of Sagonne, and there is no telling how many generations of his family had hailed from town, which was already ancient when Francois was bom. …

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