GENEALOGICAL NOTES AND ANECDOTES

Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Volume 3 (Summer 1944), p. 97.

A LITTLE OF WHAT ARKANSAS WAS LIKE A HUNDRED YEARS AGO

BY DALLAS T. HERNDON

STATE HISTORIAN OF ARKANSAS

George William Featherstonhaugh, one of several enterprising Englishmen who wrote well and wisely of America in the early days of the Republic, made a tour of the South in 1834, which took him to Arkansas Territory in the latter part of that year. Thomas Nuttall, another of these English tourists whose visit to Arkansas in 1819 is memorable for the account he afterwards wrote of his travels, was looking, first of all, for rare and unknown forms of vegetation that he hoped he might find. Featherstonhaugh was, too, a specialist, having as the first interest of his tour a study of the rock formations of the Ozark county. He, too, like Nuttall, afterwards wrote a book of his travels, which is still much prized as a contemporary source of discerning information. Featherstonhaugh's book, titled "Excursion Through the Slave States," begins at the beginning of the author's tour from Baltimore, Maryland, to Arkansas, through Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri. It was in St. Louis, Missouri, that he found it necessary to provide himself with his own means of conveyance, because as he wrote, "We were now at the end of all stage coach travelling." For the conveyance of himself, his son, and the luggage they carried he brought "a nice little Dearborn wagon" and a stout, young horse, to which he gave the name "Missouri."

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Travelling in this fashion, the travelers entered Arkansas Territory by the Military Road from Missouri about November 1, 1834.

Featherstonhaugh spent all of two months in the Arkansas Territory, November and December, 1834. In that time he travelled across Arkansas from northeast to southwest by the new Military Road from Hix's Ferry on Current River to Fulton on Red River. Meanwhile, he spent, perhaps, two weeks in Little Rock, looking about him, as he said, and gathering all the information he could. He made several trips into the country round-about Little Rock for the purpose of getting the lay and structural formation of the land in the vicinity of the capital. He talked with people, any whom he chanced to meet, as he went about the town and country. Some of the people then living, whose names are familiar to the history of Arkansas, he sought out and interviewed in his eagerness to get all the facts he wanted for the journal he meant to write.

In due time, on the 27th of November to be exact, he left Little Rock and pushed on towards the southwest. One of the main objectives of the southernmost leg of his journey through the territory, "the Hot Springs of the Ouachita," as he identified it, necessitated the making of a detour from the route of the Military Road. Two days of travel from Little Rock took him to Magnet Cove, which place, because of its well known curious effect upon the magnetic needle, made a geological problem that stirred his imagination. The Military Road from Little Rock south, to the place where he left it, about 12 miles southwest of the present town of Benton, he describes as sadly out of repair. From the point of his departure from the Military Road into the trace to Hot Springs, however, the going was over a trail wherein the "sturdy" little wagon which he counted on to take him through safely was frequently in danger of being overturned and destroyed. Even so, the dismal and difficult trail, which had been described to him as the best route to Hot Springs, was no worse, perhaps, than most byways which, nearly everywhere in Arkansas in the year 1834, were the sole dependence of travelers for moving about the Territory from any place to almost any other place at all.

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It was not until after nightfall, in the evening of the second day after his departure from Little Rock, that Featherstonhaugh arrived at Magnet Cove. There, he was put up for the night at the unfinished cottage of Col. James S. Conway, who was then the surveyor-general of the Territory, and the same Colonel Conway who, two years later, was elected the first governor of the state of Arkansas. Conway, who had his plantation home at Walnut Hill near Red River, had built himself a cottage in the Cove as a retreat for his family from the intense heat of the summers at his Red River plantation. Despite the fact that it was the 28th day of November, the weather was mild and Featherstonhaugh rose before day dawned. The sun, which came up clear, found him already posted at a point high on the rim of the Cove, whence he got a clear view of the surrounding landscape, of which he wrote: "I was on a lofty elevation encircling a depression, which is in fact a deep basin of about 1200 acres. The land in the level floor of the basin's bottom is of the richest kind and is all densely wooded. It struck me as curious that this whole area, which rather affects a spheroidal than a circular form, is covered, both on the steep sides and in the cove, with deciduous trees, whilst without its limits the trees are evergreens and pines. The earth on which these deciduous trees grow is the decomposition of a very ancient greenstone that sometime intruded itself into the general strata of the sandstone of the surrounding country, which is wooded with evergreens and pines. Having returned to the house, and eaten a good breakfast, I went out again for a closer look at some of the singular curiosities of the strange place.

"Colonel Conway had told me that while surveying the country he had discovered that the needle of the compass would not traverse upon approach to this locality. The structure, as I soon learned by examination of the pebbles, is like that of the vein in Missouri which goes by the name of Iron Mountain, and is made up of vast masses of the magnetic metal, which, due to their great magnetic force, probably affect the country roundabout for a great distance.

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"In a small field, not far from the house, which had been recently plowed, and where there had been no timber growing, I found a great many Indian arrow points, made of a beautiful semi-transparent kind of novaculite. In another place I found an immense pile of chips and broken arrow points, all of which were of the same stone. Thus it does appear that the cove once had been a favorite retreat of the Indians. But curiously enough, I looked in vain for the mother rock of novaculite from which the chips and arrow points had been taken.

"Upon considering all the circumstances connected with this cove," wrote Featherstonhaugh, "the intrusive character of its rocks, the distinct origin and separation of its greenstone from the sandstone of the surrounding country, its minerals, the crater-like form of the cove, and the immense deposit of iron, I am of the opinion that Magnet Cove owes its origin to an ancient volcanic action, and that it is one of those extinct craters that is older, perhaps, than those craters in which basalt and lava are the principal products.

"I left this place of mystery," said he in parting, "full of admiration. If it were in social respects a desirable situation for a residence, the proprietor would certainly posses one of the most enviable estates in America."

After Magnet Cove, the fame of Hot Springs was the magnet that drew him on another fifteen miles off the plain trail of the Military Road. The Hot Springs trace, which he found to be bad going all the way, followed close to the course of the Ouachita River. As the travelers, father and son, drew near the place of the springs, the trace they were groping their way along veered to the right from the river through a deep, narrow valley, or "vale", and it was then they knew that they "had reached," as Featherstonhaugh wrote, "the Hot Springs of the Washita, so much the object of curiosity to men of science, and so little known to the world."

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How true it was that not anybody much, including men of science," knew not much of anything about the miracle of these springs, except as a matter of hearsay, is proven by the drab picture of desolation which this traveler draws of the meager accommodations of the place for human habitation. Four small cabins, all built of logs with roofs of boards, were the only house room in the tight little valley which, in the years since, has been done into the main street of the far-famed resort city of Hot Springs. One of the four cabins was occupied by Hiram A. Whittington, a thrifty young fellow from Boston, Massachusetts. This Whittington, while learning to be a printer in Brooklyn, New York, had learned also of the existence of the Arkansas Gazette at Little Rock, through an old friend of the Gazette's editor. Having an urge for adventure, the youthful printer, in 1826, had migrated to Little Rock, where he got a job with the Gazette, which perhaps, he was promised before ever he left New York. He worked six years for the Gazette. In 1832 his health failed him, and it was then that he went to the Hot Springs to try the waters there for a cure. As his health improved he looked about him for ways of getting on and soon hit upon the plan of setting himself up as a trader. With the money he had saved through the years of his employment as a printer he bought a small stock of goods, which he traded to the hunters of the region roundabout Hot Springs for the catch they brought in of bear skins and other furs.

The other three cabins which Featherstonhaugh mentions, and maybe, Wittington's too, were the property of one John Percival, a hunter, who, as Featherstonhaugh quotes him as saying, first found the springs as long ago as 1807. Sometime soon after that, he had taken possession of his discovery by building himself a cabin, and then in time, for the accommodation of visitors to the springs, he built the other cabins. He and his family lived in one cabin, where they took in visitors and travelers to board. Featherstonhaugh learned from the talk he had with Percival that the latter was representing himself as being in lawful possession of the springs and the land there about, by virtue of his settlement and habitation of the place.

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Percival had bigger and better ideas for the exploitation of his claim for profit by it as a private enterprise. In time, however, Percival disappeared, and so left merchantman Whittington as the first permanent settler in the valley.

Though the best food and quarters which innkeeper Percival could afford were not too tempting to his English guests, nevertheless they were not in a hurry to make their exit from the valley. Indeed, so great was the fascination of the intriguing wonders of this miracle spot that they were glad to put off the time of their departure for a period of nearly ten days. On December 6th, after having failed in an attempt to find a suitable guide as an escort for an expedition into the wilderness of mountains to the west of Hot Springs, the travelers took the trail again for the return to the Military Road at the place where they left it a few days before. After a hard journey, beset by several hair-raising experiences while crossing swollen streams, they found themselves again at Magnet Cove, where thy were received by Mrs. Conway, who put them up a second time for the night.

As the travelers headed south from Magnet Cove early next morning, they took a shortcut through the woods to the Military Road, along a trail about which they were told by Colonel Conway, who, from his long experience as a government surveyor in Arkansas, knew all the ins and outs of old Indian trails and the white man's roads in these parts. The travelers found the trail through the timber easily enough, and easy going too for a change, and so in good time came out onto the Military Road at a point two miles from the ferry over the Ouachita River. The detour to Hot Springs, as they soon discovered, had put to such hard usage the wagon which had served them so well in all the long journey from St. Louis that they decided to abandon it soon after they crossed the Ouachita. From there, with the horse they had and another they hired they continued their journey. By the end of the second day, after the night spent at Colonel Conway's, they got as far south as Caddo River.

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It was at this point, near where the road crossed the Caddo and within two or three miles of its union with the Ouachita, that they blinked their eyes in amazement at the sight before them of the first brick house they had seen in Arkansas up to that moment, excepting the two or three or, maybe, four such houses in Little Rock. The house, which had so taken them by surprise by its excellence and its brick construction, was known to those accustomed to pass that way as "Barkman's." Mr. Barkman, the owner, had built his house by his own wealth of enterprise. Having gone to that part of the country some years before as a German peddler, he had been content to settle down, and by hard work and thrift had accumulated a tidy fortune, built himself a fine house and a reputation moreover as a man of sterling character. In the absence of the master of the house, the two strangers were made welcome by the master's wife; who, by their own account, received them, perhaps, in the best style she knew. The food she served, though it may have lacked variety, was nevertheless both wholesome and appetizing. For once, there is, in the Englishman's appraisal of the food at Barkman's, no hint of his usual refrain of pity of himself for the things he had to eat in Arkansas. Incidentally, it did him no honor, however, that he did, without any point at all, depict with contempt the person and the manners of his hostess, whose hospitality he had been glad enough to accept.

It is a matter worth remembering of the Barkmans that they were exceptional not only for the style in which they lived, but because of the esteem in which they were held by their near neighbors. Next to doing business with him, perhaps the surest way to take the measure of a man's true worth is through study of the things people say of him. It was by this test that the Englishman rightly rated Barkman as a resourceful man of affairs. He was all that and more. The house he built was eloquent of the spirit of his enterprise. He possessed not only the energy, ability and the thrift to accumulate wealth, but he had also the gift of a lively imagination.

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The house he built himself was such a house as leaves no room for doubt of its builder as a man with the vision to make good use of his money. He had in him the love of an ordered domesticated way of life. In his way, he was a master of the trick of salesmanship. Best of all, he had a personality which sold himself, sold him as a man who could be trusted, to men of every sort. Than he, none in Jacob Barkman's time, by sheer force example, sold the virtues of thrift and fair dealing at better profit as the way of a good life.

At a point on the Military Road about three miles north of the little town of Washington, the traveler turned into a path that he followed for a short distance to the home of Judge Edward Cross. The main house of that fine gentleman, in its outward appearance, was a cabin of ordinary Southern conventional type, having two rooms with an ample, open hallway between the two, the whole being housed under a single two way roof. The hallway of such a house was sometimes spoken of colloquially as the "dog run." It was no ordinary cabin this, though, as the critical eye of the traveler was soon privileged to discover; a look at the interior of the house opened the eyes of the visitor with amazement; the more he saw of it, the more his wonder grew. The hour of his arrival was soon after dark. The room, wherein he first presented himself as a traveler needing to be sheltered for the night, was a tidy living room, with shining white walls of plaster, a well laid floor with a real rug on it. The whole scene was made more cheering by a blazing fire that burned on the hearth.

There was a feeling of something in the room, as sensed by the stranger while he was still in the act of presenting himself, which, as he remembered well, put him quite at his ease. As he became better acquainted, he saw revealed in the demeanor of the pair who were his hosts and hostess the personalities of two contented people who knew, as if by instinct, the fine art of living in the manner of the best traditions of old Virginia and the newer Kentucky, the latter with a background of simple cordiality similar to that of Virginia.

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Born in Virginia and reared in Kentucky, Edward Cross had migrated to Arkansas Territory in 1824, at the age of 26. There he settled and began the practice of law at Washington, which, as a place, or townsite, was then hardly more than a name, through it had been even then designated as the county seat of Hempstead County. In 1831, three years before the chanced visit of this English traveler to his house, Cross had married Laura Frances Elliott, a daughter of Benjamin Elliott of Missouri. Another of Elliott's gentle daughters was the wife of Chester Ashley (U. S. Senator from Arkansas 1844-1848). The Elliott sisters were also near kinsmen of Stephen F. Austin, founder of Texas. Both were women of fine intelligence, skilled in domestic management and socially beloved by all who knew them. It was said of Mrs. Cross that she was wise at the game of chess, a feat which is supposed to be the proof positive of a rare order of intellectuality. In 1832, the year after Cross' marriage, President Andrew Jackson appointed him to the bench, in the highest court of Arkansas Territory, and it was in that position that he was serving at the time of the unexpected visit of the touring Englishman.

(In 1834, at the age of 36, Judge Cross was beginning a public career of varied activities, which carried through another period of nearly fifty years. In all things at all times, he bore himself with the simple, quiet dignity that is the hallmark of a wise, good man. He continued to hold his place on the bench until 1836, when Arkansas Territory became the State of Arkansas; was appointed surveyor-general of U. S. public lands in Arkansas in 1836; was elected to Congress as the sole representative of Arkansas in the House in 1838, was re-elected to that office in 1840 and again in 1842. In 1845 he was appointed an associate justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court, and continued as such ten years, until 1855, when he retired to become president of the Cairo and Fulton Railroad company. During the War between the States, he was an assistant to the Secretary of the Confederate Treasury.

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In 1874, he assisted in the restoration of Constitutional government in Arkansas, after the overthrow of the mob law of the carpetbaggers. The last ten years of his life were spent in retirement at his plantation home, "Marlbrook," near Washington, where had been his home in all the years of his residence in Arkansas.)

On the morrow, after a night spent in the repose of a simple hospitality such as was habitual among the gentle folk the Arkansas, the Englishman rode next morning the three miles down the road to Washington in company with the Judge. The town, which by then was a village possibly of one hundred inhabitants, seemed alive that day with signs of more activity than the size of the place seemed to account for. For one thing, the government was holding there then one of its periodical sessions of public lands sales; for another thing, which perhaps was the main thing, there was in town on that occasion an influential group of men from far away places whose business was plainly something else other than the purchase of some newly surveyed tract of public lands. For, as a matter of fact, there were then vast acres of fabulously rich lands in that part of Arkansas which had been for years on the market for sale to buyers at the nominal government price $1.25 an acre, and there was nothing much about the routine of a regular land sale to get men together. It was plain to see that there was more in the show of activity there in evidence than that. Indeed, there was a tenseness in the situation which gave the impression of the mystery of an adventure in the making.

Among those mentioned by name as present in Washington at the moment, apparently for reasons more than met the eye, was the inexplicable Honorable Sam Houston, late of Tennessee, who, for all the public was supposed to know, was living then in exile, like a make-believe, play-like Indian, among his old Indian friends of the Cherokee tribe. Whatever it was that was "cooking" in Washington that December day in 1834 it was suspect as of Houston's doing.

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Washington had in that day, placed at the fork of the Military Road, one road leading to the west and another to the southwest, a well-patronized saloon to which went many of the male population, some to be refreshed and some to take a hand at faro or another gambler's game. It was there that Houston went to play and to plan the adventure he had on the fire. Men were there, coming and going from places far and near, holding interviews with Houston in secret, about which the public gossiped and speculated eagerly, without any certain information for a build up of precisely the thing that Houston meant to do. Naturally, though, enough leaked out of his and his helper's doings to create the popular conviction of a conspiracy in the making to bring about the secession of Texas from the Republic of Mexico.

Almost within the hour of his arrival in Washington, the Englishman saw enough to prove to his own satisfaction his suspicions of Houston's activity as aimed at the dismemberment of Mexico. Nor was he less alert to detect that he himself was suspect as a possible spy in Houston's camp. And having turned that thought over in his own mind, he as promptly came to the decisively disconcerting conclusion that Washington at the moment was much too hot a place for the comfort of a stranger, such as was he, whose business there it might be not too easy to explain to the perfect satisfaction of a man of Houston's hot temper. When, after his return to the home of Judge Cross, he had time to look about him at the quality of the soil of the Judge's farm, he wrote of himself as not a little mystified by his observation of so many home owners who seemed intent on passing up the opportunity to settle in the fine country of south Arkansas to go farther to Texas in all probability to do really much worse by themselves. In the practical philosophy of the Englishman, the strange urge which blinded men's eyes to the good that was near and easy to get and sent them farther a field into strange places in search of something different on the sheer possibility of finding something better did not, as he complained, make any sense.

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It was in this mood of mystification at some men's sheer love of adventure that he wrote:

"Fertile and beautiful as is the country where Judge Cross resides, it is singular, although it is one of the finest sections of the fine territory of Arkansas, and enjoys such a temperate climate how American citizens from great distances are constantly traversing it, amid all sorts of privations and difficulties, to seek a precarious existence in the unknown lands of Texas. Hundreds of thousands of acres of the very first quality, which they could obtain at the nominal price of a dollar and a quarter an acre, are passed by as if the land did not deserve attention. Put in motion by the insidious arts of unprincipled adventurers who have for a long period contemplated this great robbery of the Mexican government, with their cupidity awakened by the vision of magnificent farms to be obtained for nothing, they hasten on top a country possessing fewer advantages, little suspecting that they are but tools employed by their tempters to defend the plunder these have in contemplation. I never meet with wagons filled with these Texas emigrants without looking upon the men as victims and the women and children as widows and orphans."

It is passing strange how this traveler failed, clever as he clearly was, to see in the situation, which he in another place describes, the possibility of a partial answer to the riddle of the seemingly unseeing eyes of the many movers he saw as "bound for Texas in spite of hell and high-water." It is a graphic story that he tells of oppression practiced on the poor an unsuspecting by scheming speculators in the sales of the public lands. The thieving scheming he describes, whether few or many, were clearly of the devil's soing. Information of evil the like of which the writer describes, in any time and place at all, has ways mysterious of getting around and of carrying far. If it was true that any such practices of fraud were as prevalent in Arkansas as he seems to mean to say they were, then assuredly it is not to be wondered at that those who knew of the fleecing that they might expect chose to hazard the chances of a try in Texas for the lands they wanted rather than enter the list for an unequal battle of wits with Arkansas speculators.

From the home of Judge Cross, the traveler hurried on south to the Red River for a look at the Great Raft, which so choked the channel of the mighty river in many miles of its meandering course as to render it practically useless for the much needed convenience of navigation. Towards the close of his first day in this part of the world, he met by chance with a gentleman farmer who had the kindness to take him in for the night. This new acquaintance, with whom the traveler was as much taken as was he with any of the many he had learned to know in Arkansas as truly gentle folk, turned out to be Virginian, who, some three years since, had established himself in the valley of the Red River as the proprietor of a cotton plantation, which was situated on the Texas side of the river. However, because of the discomforts of the climate at his farm the planter had built a residence for himself and his family on the Arkansas side of the river. It was to this place that the friendly planter showed the tired traveler the way and put him up in style the like of which he had never imagined possible in a place so remote and so little touched by the usages of civilized man.

The home of the planter was placed on slightly high ground, ten miles from the river, deep in a forest of majestic pines, primeval and vast. The "big house" was a mansion in its way; was strong and neatly built of massive timbers in a style that set the traveler thinking of some ancient manor houses he had known, possibly in his native England. The two men arrived at the house after dusk, within the hour between daylight and darkness. There was a light of candles shining from within. In the dying twilight of day, the traveler, swept off his feet as by surprise, did in his mind, perhaps, an over-painted picture of the planter's property, just as he may have, on other occasions, colored too darkly his thinking of others whose poverty or easy-going ways he took for something worse. There was a piano in the house of the Red River planter, and other signs everywhere of the refinements of good living.

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The stranger had never thought of the possibility of the miracle of such a home "within ten miles of the Mexican frontier." The fine manners and good taste of the planter's excellent lady and her young daughter were but the unaffected expression of the gentility which was natural with them.

The morning after an evening spent in surroundings refreshing to his soul, after an early breakfast, the traveler rode away to the south feeling a new uplift of faith for the future of a country of which he had sometimes been in the depths of despair in the course of his tour through Arkansas. The day was December 10, 1834. Midway between breakfast and noon, he was ferried over Red River to the Texas side. The day was bright, the weather mild. Near the shore of the river he noted the growth of the palmetto palm and other tropical and semi-tropical vegetation. On he rode as far as Lost Prarie, where he saw as many as three hundred dead-level acres of cotton in a single solid field. It made a sight such as he had never seen. This and other fields he saw, in Little Prarie, in Fisher's, Elam's and Hickman's Prarie, were all ripe for the harvest and only partly picked. The yield of these vastly fertile plantations of more than a bale per acre started him thinking of the spreading roots of negro slavery, which was an unholy horror to the natural Puritan manner of his English way of thinking.

He spent the night at the home of another plantation owner who had his residence near the Lost Prarie. People with whom he talked on the Texas side of the river added conviction to the thought which had been forming for sometime in his mind to the effect that Texas was on the point of revolution. He had meant to push on farther into the Texas country. However, he had no stomach for getting himself mixed up in a fight with hard looking fellows the like of whom he remembered only too well as having seen at Washington in the company of Sam Houston. There was ever in his mind the haunting fear of these adventures as having had their suspicions of him as a spy.

Piecing all he had seen and heard together, he came quickly to a decision which featured for his imagination as how it was better to be safe than sorry. It was with some such dark thought of the possibilities in his mind that he returned to the Arkansas side of the river, after a stay in Texas of one night and part of two days. Thereafter he satisfied his curiosity as to the wonders of Texas with a look at as much of the landscape there as could be seen from across the river.

Heading his horse towards the southeast, once he got to the north side of the river again, the traveler rode for some miles down the stream for a critical look at the work that was then in progress to clear a channel in Red River, so as to make it usable for navigation. He viewed hurriedly the marvels of achievement wrought by the genius of Captain Henry Shreve, who, within the brief span of a single year, had, by his energy and ingenuity, opened a ship channel wide and deep enough for the accommodation of the largest river steamers through seventy miles of the Great Raft. As the traveler sat astride his horse taking in the scene spread before him, he felt, apparently, a thrill of generous admiration for the imagination and energy of a people having the vision to support a national policy working towards the reclamation of the many possible blessings of its natural resources. The project, as he sized it up in his mind, was liberally subsidized by an enterprising government of the United States, whose sponsorship of the enterprise was inspired by a double motive. The opening of the river navigation would make possible the drainage of many thousands of acres of incredibly rich bottom lands, which were the property of the government. Already similar lands were selling at prices ranging from ten dollars to thirty dollars per acre. The opening of the river channel to navigation, would serve to stimulate the influx of immigrants, which, in turn would increase the demand for the purchase of the land made tillable by reason of its drainage. In time the river would swarm with the traffic of commerce, and the government would collect a handsome profit by its initial investment for the removal of the Great Raft which had rendered much land worse than worthless for cultivation and the river useless to navigation.

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There was in the traveler's thinking, however, a dark side to this otherwise praiseworthy enterprise, which darkness sorely distressed the Puritanism of his English soul. He saw, in his mind's eye, thousands of toiling negro slaves driven to the back-breaking labor of clearing away the timber, ditch digging, and breaking the land to cultivation. The opening up of the river would tend to encourage a further expansion of the cultivation of cotton for profit, and cotton growing under the plantation system of the South, was the mainstay of the argument favorable to the extension of slavery.

With his emotion stirred into a conflict of likes and dislikes by his observations, he took hurried leave of the Red River country and rode back thirty six miles to the house of Judge Edward Cross. There he spent the night, and the next day continued his journey northward. He rejoined his son at a place where he had left the wagon in which the two of them had driven from St. Louis. As they entered the lowlands of the Little Missouri River country, the elder of the Feathersonhaughs struck out a-foot by a short route through the wilderness of swamps to follow his bent for the joy of exploration, leaving the son to bring up the horse and wagon, by the longer way of the main road. This detour from the Military Road by the traveler was an adventure of which, before it was finished, he was to pray that it be not his own finish. There were times when he could not be certain of his bearings. It was a dense and dismal swampland through which he had to pick and choose his way. The shades of approaching darkness complicated the difficulties of his bewilderment, and the yarns he had heard of the savageness of the big black bear, the panthers and timber wolves of the region stirred in him sensations of chilliness which penetrated to the marrow of his spinal column. Right glad he was, he wrote after suffering many regrets for the folly of his adventure, to be joined up again with his son and on the highroad to a place of habitation.

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Pressing on by the road to the north with as much speed as the faithful little horse could do, the travelers arrived at Little Rock on or about the 20th of December, little the worse for the wear of their travels of a month, which had taken them twice over the road to the Texas border, with time out for a sojourn of several days at Hot Springs and shorter detours of a day or so at several other places. It was now the decision of the traveler to finish his tour of Arkansas aboard a river steamboat down the Arkansas River. As was not unusual for the season, the river was then at low stage, and all of the larger steamers were laid up, or restricted to the navigation of the Mississippi, while they waited for a rise in the Arkansas. In preparation for the day of his departure from Little Rock, the traveler was forced to face the necessity of the disposal of the splendid little horse which had taken him safely through many a tough spot of a long and often a difficult road. Nothing that the traveler wrote in his book better becomes him than his confession of sorrow for the necessity of having had to part with his possession of plucky little "Missouri," as the sensible little beast knew himself and was known by his master. The love of the man for his horse made a showing of quality of the traveler's soul which went far towards proving him a man whose opinions are worthy to be treated with respect, as one indubitably endowed with the virtue of true sincerity.

While the travelers idled at Little Rock, waiting for a boat, came Christmas Eve. The occasion was being celebrated with a public ball by one of the two hotels in the town. As a matter of curiosity and partly to pass the time, the travelers decided that they would for the nonce join in the fun and find out for themselves about the layout of a Christmas ball in Arkansas. The party, as they seemed to think, proved well worth the effort it was, if any, to get admitted. Of the guests who attended, there were one hundred males, no less, to pair in the dancing with as few as three females. What manner of creatures the three women were the traveler leaves the reader to his wits to figure out for himself.

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Since Little Rock then was a frontier village of not more than three hundred souls, it may well have been that there were but three females in the place who thought little enough of themselves to be seen at a public dance where everybody was made welcome by blanket invitation. The writer affirms that the men, to a man, were "armed to the teeth," as an old phrase has it; which may not have been too far from the truth to quibble about the detail of whether everybody did really have a gun. As a matter of fact, it is probably putting it not too strongly to affirm that, of the men of Arkansas of that day, most went armed as much as a matter of course as they practiced the habit of wearing a hat. Both were worn as a matter of self-protection, the one being counted, true or not, about as much of a ever present necessity as the other. The possession of a gun or a dagger or both for ever ready use, as for defense, was part of the code of the hard realism of the frontier, of which, though the necessity no longer existed, the practice still persisted. Though these strangers to ways of the west spent the evening ever in the fear of a scene of bloodshed, the traveler was fair enough to confess that the behavior of everybody was well in keeping with the friendly spirit of the holiday which the occasions was intended to celebrate. The way the strangers saw it, the strangest thing of all about the whole affair was this, that everybody in the party kept in the best of temper, while "all got amazingly drunk" on the free liquor which the proprietor of the hotel was kept busy all evening passing out to his guests.

The rain came, and with it, the steam-boat for which they had waited. But despite the rain, still for want of enough water in the river, the boat ran aground many miles short of its destination of the town of Little Rock. In these circumstances, there was no other alternative, since the boat could not get up to them, but for them, as best they might, and that, too, as speedily as possible, to get themselves and their belongings down to the boat. The boat was stalled at a place in the river called the Eagle's Nest Bend. The place was distant from Little Rock, by the north-shore road to the post of Arkansas, some twenty miles , as nearly as they could guess from such information

115

News of the arrival of the boat and of its predicament at the Eagle's Nest Bend had got into town sometime before noon of the day before Christmas. As if to pile tribulation higher in a situation already trying enough, it was a cold rain, which beat on any who had to take it in a steady downpour. The Captain was all set to get his boat under full-stream for the south that very afternoon. He had, according to all reports, sent the word into town that if there were those who wanted to go with him they must get themselves aboard by a certain early hour in the evening or else. The hour he appointed made the time left for getting down to the boat from Little Rock seem all too short for the feat to be done. However, in his eagerness to be off, the traveler decided for a try to catch up to the boat, in spite of the beating tempest, and having succeeded in hiring a horse, he hurried off to find and detain the boat, if possible, while his son and another passenger were feverishly employed with the business of hauling down the luggage to the place of departure. As if "by the skin of his teeth," the traveler had the good fortune to catch up with the boat, truly, just in the nick of time. All hands of the crew were at work with the final preparations of getting ready for the departure. The captain, however, proved not really as hardboiled as he said he was and the rest was easy.

The boat's accommodations, such as they were, the traveler was glad of his chance to enjoy. There were cabins of a sort for the passengers, enough for all, including those who got aboard from Little Rock. Daylight was fading fast by the time the traveler got himself settled down for his first night aboard the steamer. But before he could be content to tuck himself in bed to take his ease, he must have a look around him for the purpose of seeing things about which his curiosity kept him awake. The boat, as he soon discovered, was chiefly engaged on its current voyage in the traffic of transporting cotton to New Orleans from anybody's landing on the river where there was

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The boat touched at all private landings of plantation owners. Where there was cotton to be got aboard, there was always much making of merriment and banter, as between the boat hands and the plantation "darkies"; which as often as this clatter and chatter of the toilers was turned loose without restraint in the calm of the night, reduced the possibilities for a wink of sleep into the limbo of total impossibility.

There were two or more passengers on board whom the traveler soon spotted as persons whose bad manners made them hard to live with as fellow-travelers. The Englishman's safest retreat from the company of these ruffians was in his cabin, where he spent much time at the work of bringing up his journal to date from the notations he had made from day to day in the course of his travels. For diversion from his writing, there was much of the greatest interest in nature that he could see from his place on deck, as the boat seemed to feel out its passage through the winding and sometimes hazardous channel of the river. Happily, however, the voyage was not wholly barren of friendly associations. At the plantation of Judge Samuel C. Roane (near the site where later grew the town of Pine Bluff) that fine gentleman got aboard the boat for the ride to Embree plantation at Roboy, which was the girlhood home of Judge Roane's wife, Julia Embree Roane. Rightly did the traveler recognize in Roane a personality worthy of any man's acquaintance. The large plantation of the Embrees was one of the oldest and best on the river, and since it happened to be one of the several places where the traveler had time while the boat took on a big consignment of cotton for an appraisal of the orderly operations of a well managed Arkansas River cotton plantation, the many agreeable things that he saw were a partial cure for the self-pity of having to live on the same boat with a few rowdy travelers whose ill manners were hard to take.

At New Gascony, some miles more down the river, the traveler had the chance he had hoped not to miss of a look at a sample of the dwindling French population of Arkansas.

By 1834, there remained, mostly domiciled in the lower reaches of the valley of the river Arkansas, probably not more than one thousand people in Arkansas who, as the lineal descendants of the colonial French, were the first Arkansas pioneers of European origin. The French of the New Gascony settlement were, for the most part, a high-spirited, cultivated people who were "as proud as Lucifer" of their inheritance of the traditions of France. The family of Antoine Barraque, who resided at New Gascony, were born to the best traditions of the colonial French of Arkansas. Barraque himself was a true son of France, was a veteran of the Napoleonic wars, who when the star of Napoleon fell never to rise again, had migrated to America and settled in Arkansas. It was there that he took as his wife the daughter of a proud colonial family, who resided at the ancient Post of Arkansas. When the Englishman was received at the house of the Barraques by invitation of its courtly master, the traveler saw there, in this out of the way place in the New World, a family as French as any reared to the most urban style of the cultivated French of France. The lady of this son of France, and also pleasing young daughters of the pair, though there were traces of favor in them of enough blood of the Arkansas Indians to mark them, perhaps, as Creole French, all appeared no less pleasing and attractive for the likeness in them that proved them kin to the Indians.

To the sounding of a signal giving warning of the readiness of the boat to be on the move again, the traveler hurried off to the house of the Barraques, in return for the courtesies shown him, "to make my bow," as he says of himself, "and to my surprise I found Mons. Barraque also ready in his traveling dress, intending to go down the river as far as the Post of Arkansas." The going from New Gascony to the Post proved to be the most tedious part of the trip which they thus far had experienced. The boat by now was carrying a heavy burden of cotton, and the river, despite the rains which had drenched the travelers at Little Rock, was still at a stage too low for the easy navigation of the heavily laden boat.

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Even so, the more than two days that they spent in this leg of the voyage, except for an incident of the unprovoked insolence of a drunken youth, went off pleasantly enough in the company of the Frenchman, whom he found to be, as the traveler said, "a most agreeable and intelligent fellow passenger, whose conversation of his opinions and adventures were both entertaining and amusing."

Finally, on the 29th day of December, the boat arrived at a point within three miles of the Post, where, while its crew were engaged in the business of taking on some planter's shipment of cotton, the traveler was glad of the chance to stretch his legs in a walk of three miles through the woods into the village. In this ancient place, he made the acquaintance of another gallant Frenchman, Colonel Frederick Notrebe, of whom it is said that he was the richest man in all of Arkansas. Notrebe, like Barraque, was too a veteran of the Napoleonic wars, who, in distrust of Napoleon's policies of imperialism, had migrated to America and settled in Arkansas as long ago as 1809. There, he had prospered greatly as a trader, had acquired large plantation holdings, taken a French Creole as his wife, and was by now, at the beginning of 1834, fully matured into the tycoon type of man. The town itself, as such, depressed the traveler as sorely disappointing. Of the place as whole, he wrote, "it is on the left, or north, shore of the river, at the edge of an extensive prairie, and consist of a number of straggling houses, principally occupied by the descendants of the ancient French settlers, who appear to live drab, comfortless lives." The house of Colonel Notrebe he took to be the one notable exception to his description of the place as decadent and down at the heel. "His house seems a comfortable place enough; it has a store-house attached to it, where the most of the mercantile business of this part of the country is transacted." As for the two taverns, which were kept by Americans, he thought as little of the accommodations they offered for the patronage of travelers as of any he had seen in any of his travels.

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They were a day and a night at the Post, loading cotton from Colonel Notrebe's vast store of the staple, many bales of which they were obliged to leave behind for want of room on the boat for its storage. At 10 o'clock in the morning of December 30, when there was a sounding of the signal of everything in readiness aboard to pull away, "the bales of cotton were piled so high everywhere from bow to stern that the steamer looked from the shore like one immense pile of bales amongst which some pieces of machinery had been stuck. I almost feared, as I went aboard, we might be too deeply laden to move, but as to that I was left no long in doubt. The boat was still in good trim, and in the open stream was able to make her eight and ten knots an hour."

From the Post of the mouth of White River, by the way of the cut off, the distance was forty-five miles. Going by this route from the Post of Arkansas, steamers steered part of the way by the main channel of the Arkansas,then through the cut-off from the Arkansas, into White River, which route led into the White at a point but a few miles above its mouth into the Mississippi. It was this passage that the traveler's cotton laden steamer was taking him, as the safest way of getting out into the deep waters of the mighty moving Mississippi. It was mid-afternoon when they got into the cut-off, which left them, perhaps with twenty miles yet to go to the Mississippi. The cut-off accounted for the first half of twenty miles left of the passage, with the channel of the White River making up the last lap of the traveler's tour of Arkansas. This cut-off between the Arkansas River and the White, as it was when the traveler saw it, had the look of a nature-made canal, as if purposely intended for the safe passage of boats from one river to the other. Its channel was deep and two hundred and fifty feet from bank to bank. It was all still water, as smooth as a lake, "the Arkansas rushing past it at the south end, and White River at the north end, damming up its waters as if it were a millpond."

Darkness had overtaken them when the boat "brought up. . . for a short stop at Montgomery's Point, as was known the habitation which stood there on the high point of land on the north side of White River, where that river and the Mississippi meet. The place got both its name and its reputation from the fame of its owner, who was well and widely esteemed as a genial gentleman sportsman and an able, honorable man of affairs. None who passed by his door by the White and Mississippi Rivers in the hey-dey of his success but knew him by reputation, or from association with him, as General William Montgomery, with the title meaning more than empty flattery of him, as he was in 1834 at the beginning of his fifteenth year of residence in Arkansas. For he was by then a man who had made more history of more different kinds than do most men; which, if only the proud and much traveled Englishman might have known more of the many sides of, he, perhaps, would have saved himself the reproach of the pious, graceless dig which he aimed at one of whom he might have learned much of the way of wisdom. At all events, inspite of his flare for conceit of himself as an Englishman, he might possibly have thought better of it than to by-pass Montgomery and his house as fully and fairly described by the single defaming word "notorious."

Montgomery had moved from Louisiana to the Post of Arkansas in 1819, possibly before, or perhaps, as is more likely, soon after the formation of Arkansas Territory. In October, 1820, he offered in a proposal he made to the General Assembly, which was then in session at the Post, to build a house for the legislature to meet in at Little Rock, which central site the legislature had, but a few days before, chosen as the site of the capital, or permanent seat of government, for Arkansas. Montgomery, while he resided at the Post, made his living as a merchant. Sometime in the year 1821, he moved his family and his mercantile business to the mouth of White River, where the traveler saw him established at the close of the year 1834, and, for the success he had made of himself as a man of affairs, did him the injustice of snubbing him as "notorious."

As his parting gesture to Arkansas, it was a graceless act on the part of a visitor who, by his own confessions, had been the beneficiary of many courtesies through the kindness of more than one of General Montgomery's good friends, while on his tour of critical inspection through Arkansas.

Montgomery's place at the mouth of White River, soon after he took it over, became known throughout the southwest as "Montgomery's Landing." There, for a livelihood, he engaged in merchandising, storage for hire, and in shipping on commission. Not the least lucrative, perhaps, of his several pursuits was the "house of public entertainment," which he kept for profit to himself and for the accommodation of travelers as well. It was the common saying of him that his warehouses were always filled with goods which were of the best that the markets afforded. His public house, where also he lived with his family, was built in the style of French houses, and was commonly thought of as a mansion for its day. There, he entertained his patrons and guests, as was said, with a lavish hand, "and with a hospitality that was genuine." Like many another Southerner of the class to which he belonged, he had "a passion for cards," loved "to play the horses," nor was he, perhaps, indifferent to the sport of cock-fighting. For his own diversion and profit, and for the entertainment of his guests, he kept, in connection with his "house of public entertainment," decks of playing cards and a full assortment of other "gaming devices" then in current use.

Thus did "Montgomery's," as the place was popularly known, get a reputation in time which carried far. In its "palmy days," it was thought of in something of the same way as was the famous Casino of Monte Carlo which at a somewhat later date came to be looked upon by all the world, as a place where men of wealth and position went in their leisure to look for diversion in the games by which men play at gambling for the thrill which a game of chance is and always will be.

As for the genial proprietor of "Montgomery's," he was ever and to all a courteous host, and "a prince of a good fellow" with men like Robert Crittenden, Ambrose H. Sevier, Henry W. Conway, Colonel Ben Desha, Major Elias Rector, and many another, who were the notable political figures and men of big affairs in his and their day.

William Montgomery, like most of his best known Arkansas contemporaries, was a son of Tennessee, born in Sumner County of the Volunteer State in or about the year 1790. At the age of twenty-one, he went to Louisiana to look for his one big chance in life. It was said of him by his friend, Colonel Ben Desha, that Montgomery was "a self-made man," as much so as was ever true of any man of exceptional achievement. In 1818, or 1819, when he moved to Arkansas, he was still a young man, mostly with himself yet to make. The environment with which he fell in in Arkansas, was well suited to a youth of his robust nature. There were in him no concealments, no pretense. What he did, he did in the open. His virtues and his vices were an open book. Full in his enjoyment of the worldliness of the world, there was in him nevertheless plenty of the spirit of reverence. He was sort of man who is poison to bigots. The poor opinion of Montgomery which the Englishman put in his book, if Montgomery could have seen it, perhaps he might have laughed at as a little thing too much less than nothing for a busy man's bother.

By 1830, Montgomery had served repeatedly and well in the General Assembly of Arkansas. As a legislator, he was the peer of any, perhaps, with whom he served. Ambrose H. Sevier, who was one that worked with him in the legislature and held him in esteem, later became the first Arkansan to sit in the United States Senate. There were others whose confidence Montgomery enjoyed who made places for themselves in history, both State and National. In January, 1828, when General Andrew Jackson passed down the Mississippi on his way to New Orleans, whither he went to attend the celebration of himself as the hero of the battle of New Orleans, the proprietor of Montgomery's Point made history for Arkansas which was long one of the State's proudest traditions.

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General Jackson was wildly acclaimed as he passed down the Mississippi by all the river towns. At Montgomery's Landing, as the pageant of escort steamers to the Old Hero's flag ship neared the mouth of White River, the gallant and effective proprietor of Montgomery's was prepared to go into action. In honor of the occasion, he had made ready to fire a salute "of one hundred guns to the fleet and its conquering hero." When Jackson went ashore on this his first and only visit to Arkansas, he was borne to Montgomery's, as is affirmed by tradition, on the shoulders of certain of the veterans of Jackson's wars, who then were residents in Arkansas. At Montgomery's, Jackson was wined and dined and toasted as none knew better how to plan and provide than Montgomery.

The next year, soon after he was inaugurated President of the United States on March 4, 1829, Jackson made Montgomery a Brigadier General, and put him in command of the Second Brigade of Arkansas Territorial Militia. It was Jackson, too, who, five years later in his second term as President, gave his blessing to the precedent-breaking procedure by which Arkansas took the initiative of setting its affairs in order for admission to the Union without the formality of an enabling act of Congress. Though General Montgomery had died in 1835, not many months before the goal of statehood was achieved, Sevier's leadership which got the application of Arkansas properly put up to the President and the Congress, had had the hearty backing of Montgomery. It is a good gamble to guess that Jackson was not left uninformed of the wishes of his friend Montgomery with reference to the freeing of Arkansas of its territorial status. The individualistic realism of Jackson's political creed of the backwoods made it possible for him to read into the constitution and the laws of the United States an easy way out on his conscience of any check they might oppose to the wilfulness of his own impulses. None was ever President, none certainly before he was, whose administration of the affairs of government was so wholly motivated by the personal whims and hates of the main himself as was the administration of Andrew Jackson. In view [page 124 begins here] of his hatred of its author, John C. Calhoun, for example, who can say with any showing of assurance just how much of the toughness of Jackson's words of warning to South Carolina for its threat of nullification might or might not have stemmed from his hot head? That such good friends of his in Arkansas as Montgomery wanted Arkansas in the Union was justification enough for Jackson's approval of any short cut that it might be expedient to take as the surest way to get Arkansas where it was going. Jackson, as blandly as ever he repaid a favor, might have had the thought, why be bothered by the small change of a precedent of law, when the aims of politics can better be served in the breach than in the observance of precedent.

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RETURN: Antecedents and Descendants of John Barkman (30 July 1786 - 8 October 1870)

RETURN: George William Featherstonhaugh

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