Bragg Family South 2013 spring break, part 2

After our first day's coastal adventure, we stayed much closer to our campsite on Day 2...the early Red River community of Natchitoches, Louisiana.  Pronounced "NAC-a-tish", this community was one of the earliest in Louisiana, settled by the French in 1714 to guard the border between French and Spanish claims in the New World.  A reconstruction of an early French fort, St. Jean Baptiste, was our first stop of the day.  The original fort was washed away long ago, but they have recreated much of the original plan, including a store with representative goods for that period:

Here is an image of the Catholic chapel the French soldiers would have experienced:

Here is a picture of the interior of the wood palisade walled fort, with its multitude of soldier and officer quarters:

This is probably a pretty realistic depiction of the hard life these soldiers had on the far fringes of the French empire at the time.  The Spanish had a similar fort (which we didn't visit on this trip) only a few miles away, and shortly after America acquired Louisiana in 1803, the Americans also built a frontier fort in the area (more on this later).  By the American occupation, large-scale agriculture began to appear in the region, so our next stop a few miles outside of Natchitoches was the Oakland Plantation, which was constructed about 1820:

The Oakland Plantation is one of several historic facilities that comprise Cane River Creole National Historic Park (http://www.nps.gov/cari/index.htm).  Compared to some of the grander plantations across the South, Oakland was relatively modest, although it did house quite a few slaves who worked in the cotton and other farm fields of the plantation, plus the household slaves.  In stark contrast to the wealthy plantation owner home pictured above, most of their slaves lived in much drearier conditions, pictured below:

Some of these former slave quarters were later occupied by tenant farmers and other workers who toiled in conditions nearly as bad in the post-Civil War era.  We always want our kids to know the background of the conditions found across the region they're growing up in, both the good and the bad, so they are better rounded individuals and students of history.  Seeing the abject poverty of slaves and tenant farmers is as same as the relative wealth of this area...Downtown Natchitoches still has much of its original French and antebellum charms:

We spent much of the afternoon walking around the downtown, stopping in many of the small shops and taking in the sights.  We had purchased some local food favorites (meat pies, tamales, and boudain sausage balls) and ate these along the flower-lined lake that parallels the historic downtown:

We also walked near the impressive if somewhat small basilica found in Natchitoches:

That afternoon, as we returned to our campsite at North Toledo Bend State Park, we stopped at Fort Jesup State Historic Site, which was the early American fort built to guard the frontier with Mexico before the annexation of Texas and the Mexican-American War.  Below, I pose with a period flintlock musket, which was quite a heavy weapon to have to tote around:

The reconstructed inside portions of this fort were spartan, but felt roomier and brighter than those we saw at the French fort earlier in the day.  Below is a picture of part of what the mess hall looked like:

 This still would have been a very rough life for the hundreds of American soldiers and officers who were stationed here at some of the farthest reaches of the country.  After our visit to Fort Jesup, we returned to our campground, and I took the kids fishing at one of the public fishing piers at the state park:

Fishing was fairly tough from this spot, as the reservoir is still pretty low from a couple years of drought.  I'm also sure that this spot is heavily fished, too.  Final tallies:  Beth: 3 good-sized panfish; Kenny, 0; and Stephen, 0.  After fishing, we returned to our campsite.  Kenny had packed up his tent and joined us in the camper for the final night, because we wanted to speed up our departure the next morning, and we had seen rain in the forecast and didn't want to pack away wet gear.  Good thing we did, too, as it stormed for a while during the night, with some lightning and thunder and a fair rain.  But the conditions weren't too stormy, and the much needed rain helped cut down on the smoke and pine pollen that had been filling the area.  The next day dawned clear and cooler, with a stiff northerly breeze.  We packed up camp and started heading home, stopping about an hour away for a quick visit to the Mansfield State Historic Site (http://www.crt.state.la.us/parks/imansfld.aspx), which covers part of a little-known Civil War battle:

This was part of the Union Army's ill-fated Red River campaign in 1864 which achieved very little, but ended up with a number of fierce, bloody, but (in terms of Civil War scale) fairly small battle.  Below, Hope and the kids read a number of monuments erected to recognize some of the soldiers and officers involved in this battle:

Like I said, by 1864 this was considered a relatively small battle, but was far from it for the men involved--of the approximately 26,000 men engaged in the one-day battle, approximately 3,000 were killed, wounded, or captured...and many of these same men fought a similarly pitched battle the very next day at a nearby community of Pleasant Hill that resulted in roughly the same number of casualties!  Imagine if we saw these kind of casualty rates coming out of Iraq or Afghanistan today!

Our trip ended later that afternoon, but the kids still had a couple days of break left.  I went to work in the morning for a couple of days, but in the afternoon we made a couple more local visits, including one to Lakeport Plantation (http://lakeport.astate.edu/), about an hour southeast of Monticello near Lake Village, Arkansas.  The grand Lakeport Plantation home, pictured below, was built on a large slave-holding plantation just before the beginning of the Civil War, and has been recently acquired and restored by Arkansas State University:

The gentleman pictured above, Dr. Blake Wintory, is one of the directors of this facility, and gave us a nice tour of the very well refurbished plantation home.  Below, Hope and the kids admire the large brick cistern located behind the home:

Cisterns are really neat features of many historic homes--many places did not have access to wells or (obviously) city water systems, so the would build these large, mostly below-ground storage tanks that would fill with rainwater funneled off of the roofs into the cistern for later use for cooking, cleaning, drinking, bathing, etc.

This last week, the kids returned to school, but I took three days off to help on an excavation at Toltec Mounds State Archeological Park near Little Rock.  Below, you can see the largest of the earthen mounds built approximately 1,000 years ago at this site:

We were not excavating on the mounds, but rather in the large, flat, open "plaza" area nearby, from which modern technology had suggested may contain the remains of some large prehistoric structures.  We dug a number of test units approximately 6 feet by 6 feet by 3 feet deep on this site, and though we found some artifacts, we didn't find much evidence of the structures.

I think the archeologists learn something anytime they excavate, so the effort was not in vane...plus, it is great exercise, and got me outside in some cool but clear weather!