"Ghost walking" through history at Arkansas Post

Well, we're not quite to her birthday, but in just a few days Beth will turn 11, so I figured I'd give y'all a "throw-back" picture of her birthday in 2007...You can see how 3-year-old Beth was giddy about her birthday cake!

Yesterday, we participated in a really neat event--a "ghost walk" through history at Arkansas Post National Memorial.  We have taken many of you here when you visit us...Arkansas Post is about an hour from our home, and is the site of the first European settlement in Arkansas (an early version dated back to the late 1600s).  Most of you may be familiar with this location for other reasons--we usually take a spring picnic trip here, and this is where we photograph the alligators!

To our pleasant surprise, the slough where we usually see the gators was chock-full of flowers...I'm not sure what species these are, but the yellow ones were everywhere, and there were also some very pretty purple ones, too!  In the picture below, you may notice something a little different about the family:

We had a couple additions to Bragg Family South last night--Kenny's friend Mikey and Beth's friend Joanna joined us.  Since we had some time and hadn't been able to get to Arkansas Post in the spring of this year, we took advantage of the nice fall weather to have our picnic:

Below, Stephen had plenty of stories for Hope:

So the "Ghost Walk" is a bit of a misnomer...This wasn't designed to be scary, but rather the national park staff and volunteers dressed up as people from the various time periods of Arkansas Post to give quick samples of life during the various periods of history.  Our first stop was dedicated to the Quapaw Tribe, who occupied the area when the first French settlement at Arkansas Post was built.  The woman below was demonstrating pottery making:

This was particularly neat to me, because one of the artifacts we find the most while doing our archeological excavations are pottery sherds.  Below, you can see some examples of prehistoric pottery:

We also had a different tribal elder describe some of the other parts of Quapaw life from this period, including these buckskin leggings:

and Kenny, by answering a question right, got the honor of wearing a headdress:

They had a number of reenactors for the other periods, including the French occupation...The group of people below were from a gun crew, representing the colonial military presence at this site:

They were supposed to fire the cannon, but couldn't because of the burn ban we're under...Believe it or not, Arkansas Post had a brief Revolutionary War skirmish, where a contingent of British troops and their Chickasaw (I believe) Indian allies engaged the Spanish force at this site (Arkansas Post was alternatively French and Spanish prior to American control).  The picture below represents a French trading post and American fur traders:

The woman on the right with the lantern was our guide--this tour started just about at sunset.  My camera handled the low light conditions pretty well, so it was hard to see how dark it what starting to get.  Below, Hope tries a bit of Indian gaming, using their style of dice:

Needless to say, with Hope's gaming luck, we didn't run off to the nearest casino!  Below is a picture of the pathway we walked, with the luminaries to guide our path:

The lights in the luminaries were small electric "candles".  Below, a scene from a pre-Civil War tavern is shown:

They also had several other skits featuring territorial life at Arkansas Post, and a piece on the rather large Civil War battle that was fought here in 1863.  All in all, a very neat (and I daresay) educational evening for Bragg Family South (and friends)!