Ouachita Parish, Louisiana: History
=== Prehistory ===
Ouachita Parish was the home to many succeeding Native American groups in the thousands of years before Europeans colonized the area. Peoples of the Marksville culture, Troyville culture, Coles Creek culture and Plaquemine culture built villages and earthwork mound sites throughout the area. Notable examples include the Filhiol Mound Site, located on a natural levee of the Ouachita River.
The oldest and most significant is Watson Brake, the most ancient mound complex in North America, dated to 5400 BP (before present), or about 3500 BC. Its dating changed archeologists' understanding of the antiquity of mounds in North America and what types of cultures constructed them. This site is located on private land and not available for viewing.
The parish was named after the Ouachita River, which flows through southern Arkansas and northeastern Louisiana, and the Ouachita tribe who lived along it. Beginning about 1720, French settlers arrived in what became organized as modern Ouachita Parish. Colonists developed a plantation on Bayou DeSiard that used African slave labor. The Natchez Indians destroyed the Ouachita plantations during the Natchez Revolt of 1729–1731, and the French did not return.
Beginning in the 1750s, Choctaw Indians began hunting in northern Louisiana, including the Ouachita country, expanding from their traditional territory in what is now Mississippi. At the time, only a few French families moved north into this area from the Opelousas Post on the Red River.
Following its defeat in the Seven Years' War, in 1763 France ceded its territories in North America east of the Mississippi River to the victor Great Britain. Spain took over French territories west of the Mississippi, including nominally in Louisiana. In 1769, Alejandro O'Reilly, the first Spanish governor to rule successfully in West Louisiana, claimed Ouachita Parish for Spain. A census of the parish that year recorded 110 white people. In 1769 Spain abolished the Indian slave trade and Indian slavery in its colonies.
Even in the 19th century, after the United States acquired this territory in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, some mixed-race American slaves were able to win freedom suits by proving Indian ancestry in their maternal line; under most southern state slave laws, children were born into the status of the mother. Thus a mixed-race child of an Indian mother or grandmother was legally free in former Spanish territory west of the Mississippi River, such as Louisiana, Arkansas or Missouri, as the Indians had been free people since 1769.
In 1783, Don Juan Filhiol was among Frenchmen who began to work for the Spanish colonial government in Louisiana. (He was born Jean-Baptiste Filhiol (1740) in Eymet, France (near Bordeaux), to French Calvinists François Filhiol and Anne Marie Teyssonnière, cloth merchants.) He was assigned that year to establish the first European outpost in the area of the Ouachita River Valley, called Poste d'Ouachita. With his wife, a few soldiers and slaves, his small party made the slow, arduous journey by keelboat up the Mississippi, Red, Black and Ouachita rivers to reach this area. In 1785 the European population of the entire Ouachita District (which extended into present-day Arkansas) was only 207.
Originally based in Arkansas, Filhiol surveyed his grant and settled in 1785 at Prairie des Canots (included within the present-day city of Monroe). …