Parkin: Where De Soto Met the Casqui

On the eastern bank of the Saint Francis River in Arkansas, behind a modest visitors' center in the small town of Parkin, lie the earthen remnants of one of the most significant encounters between Native Americans and European explorers in the entire continent.

The site was occupied by Mississippian-culture people for at least five hundred years. At its height it was a substantial town, seventeen acres enclosed by the river on one side and a soggy defensive moat on three others. At the center stood a large earthen mound, the platform for the home and authority of the village chief. The people living here were part of the extensive Mississippian world of mound-building towns that stretched from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes.

In June of fifteen forty-one, the Spanish expedition of Hernando de Soto arrived. What happened next was, by the accounts of the chroniclers who traveled with de Soto, unusually peaceful. The chief of the people the Spanish called Casqui welcomed the soldiers. Catholic priests conducted a mass. A large wooden cross was erected on top of the chief's mound, a moment of religious theater on a pagan platform that the expedition leaders hoped would impress and pacify. De Soto reportedly claimed the cross would bring rain to the drought-stricken region.

For a brief time it seemed to work. Rain came. The chief gave gifts. The encounter stands in the records as one of the rare friendly contacts between the entrada and the peoples they met.

But friendliness did not protect the Casqui. The expedition carried European diseases against which the Mississippian population had no immunity. The town continued for roughly another century, but by about sixteen fifty the community had been abandoned, the mound empty, the moat filling with silt.

The state park today preserves the mound and continues archaeological work at the site. European trade goods recovered from excavations, glass beads, metal fragments from the de Soto era, confirm what the written records claim. This was Casqui. And Casqui did not survive the contact.