History

March 4, 1861, a State convention assembled in Little Rock. The election of delegates was on February 18, preceding. The convention met the day Abraham Lincoln was inducted into office as president of the United States. The people of Arkansas were deeply concerned. The conservative minds of the State loved the Union as sincerely as they regretted the wanton assaults that had been made upon them by the extremists of the North. The members of that convention had been elected with a view to the consideration of those matters already visible in the dark war-clouds lowering upon the country. The … Read more

If there can be anything comical in a tragedy it is furnished just here in the fact that, in the twinkling of an eye, the adherents and voters of the two governors had changed places, and each was now fighting for the man whom he had opposed so vehemently. And in all these swift changes the supreme court had shown the greatest agility. By some remarkable legerdemain, Brooks, who was intrenching himself, had had his case again placed before the supreme court, and it promptly reversed itself and decided that the circuit court had jurisdiction. The wires to Washington were … Read more

In the preceding chapter are briefly traced the changes in the government of the Territory of Louisiana from its discovery to the year 1803, when it became a part of the territory of United States. Discovered by the Spanish, possessed by the French, divided and re-divided between the French, Spanish and English; settled by the Holy Mother Church, in the warp and woof of nations it was the flying shuttle-cock of the great weaver in its religion as well as allegiance for 261 years. This foundling, this waif of nations, was but an outcast, or a trophy chained to the … Read more

The New Madrid earthquake of 1811-12, commencing in the last of December, and the subterranean forces ceasing after three months’ duration, was of itself a noted era, but to the awful display of nature’s forces was added a far more important and lasting event, the result of the silent but mighty powers of the human mind. Simultaneously with the hour of the most violent convulsions of nature, the third day of the earthquake, there rode out at the mouth of the Ohio, into the lashed and foaming waters of the Mississippi, the first steamboat that ever ploughed the western waters … Read more

Jacques Marquette, a French Jesuit priest, had made expeditions along the Northern lakes, proselyting among the Indian tribes. He had conceived the idea that there was a great western river leading to China and Japan. He was joined in his ambition to find this route, and the tribes along it, by Joliet, a man fired with the ambition and daring of the bold explorer. These two men, with five employees, started on their great adventure May 17, 1673. They found the Upper Mississippi River and came down that to the mouth of the Arkansas River, thence proceeding up some distance, … Read more

The secretaries of Arkansas Territory have been: Robert Crittenden, appointed March 3, 1819; William Fulton, appointed April 8, 1829; Lewis Randolph, appointed February 23, 1835. Secretaries of State: Robert A. Watkins, September 10, 1836, to November 12, 1840; D. B. Greer, November 12, 1840, to May 9, 1842; John Winfrey, acting. May 9, to August 9, 1842; D. B. Greer, August 19, 1840, to September 3, 1859 (died); Alexander Boileau, Septembers, 1829, to January 21, 1860; S. M. Weaver, January 21, 1860, to March 20, 1860; John I. Stirman, March 24, 1860, to November 13, 1862; O. H. Gates, November … Read more

Nine years after Marquette and Joliet’s expedition, Chevalier de La Salle came from France, accompanied by Henry de Tonti, an Italian, filled with great schemes of empire in the new western world; it is charged, by some historians of that day, with no less ambition than securing the whole western portion of the continent and wresting Mexico from the Spaniards. When Canada was reached, La Salle was joined by Louis Hennepin, an ambitious, unscrupulous and daring Franciscan monk. It was evidently La Salle’s idea to found a military government in the new world, reaching with a line of forts and … Read more

The Chickasaws were the dreaded enemy of France; it was they who hurried the Natchez to that awful massacre; it was they whose cedar bark canoes, shooting boldly into the Mississippi, interrupted the connections between Kaskaskia and New Orleans, and delayed successful permanent settlements in the Arkansas. It was they who weakened the French empire in Louisiana. They colleagued with the English, and attempted to extirpate the French dominion in the valley. Such was Louisiana more than half a century after the first attempt at colonization by La Salle. Its population may have been 5,000 whites and half that number … Read more

The successful class of immigrants to the west of the Mississippi were the French Canadians, who had brought little or nothing with them save the clothes on their backs, and an old flintlock gun with which to secure game. They colonized after the French mode of villages and long strips of farms, and a public commons. They propitiated the best they could the neighboring Indian tribes, erected their altars, hunted, and frolicked, and were an honest, simple-minded and just people, but little vexed with ambitious pride or grasping avarice. The mouth of the Arkansas River was the attractive point for … Read more

Ferdinand de Soto, the discoverer of the Mississippi, was the first civilized white man to put foot upon any part of what is now the State of Arkansas. He and his band of adventurous followers had forged their way over immense obstacles, through the trackless wastes, and in the pleasant month of June, 1541, reached the Mississippi River at, as is supposed, Chickasaw Bluffs, a short distance below Memphis. He had sailed from San Lucan in April, 1538, with 600 men, twenty officers and twenty-four priests. He represented his king and church, and came to make discoveries for his master … Read more

The first English speaking settlers were Tennesseans, Kentuckians and Alabamians. The earliest came down the Mississippi River, and then penetrating Arkansas at the mouths of the streams from the west, ascended these in the search for future homes. The date of the first coming of English speaking colonists may be given as 1807, those prior to that time being only trappers, hunters and voyagers on expeditions of discovery, or those whose names cannot now be ascertained. South Carolina and Georgia also gave their small quotas to the first pioneers of Arkansas. From the States south of Tennessee the route was … Read more

The Jesuits and fur-traders were the founders of Illinois; Louis XIV and privileged companies were the patrons of Southern Louisiana, while the honor of beginning the work of colonizing the southwest of our republic belongs to the illustrious Canadian, Lemoine D’ Iberville. He was a worthy successor of La Salle. He also sought to find the mouth of the Mississippi, and guided by floating trees and turbid waters, he reached it on March 2, 1699. He perfected the line of communication between Quebec and the Gulf; extended east and west the already boundless possessions of France; erected forts and carved … Read more

The act of 1812, changing the District of Louisiana to Missouri Territory, provided for a Territorial legislature consisting of nine members, and empowered the governor to lay off that part where the Indian title had been extinguished into thirteen counties. The county of New Madrid, as then formed, extended into the Arkansas territorial limits, “down to the Mississippi to a point directly east of the mouth of Little Red River; thence to the mouth of Red River; thence up the Red River to the Osage purchase,” etc. In other words it did not embrace the whole of what is now … Read more

The constitution of 1868, as a whole, was not devoid of merit. It opened the way for an age of internal improvements, and intended the establishment of a liberal public free school system, and at the same time provided safeguards to protect the public treasury and restrain reckless extravagance. Then the legislatures elected under it, the State officers, and the representatives in the upper and lower Congress, were in political accord with the dominant party of the country. Gen. Grant was president; Powell Clayton, governor; Robert J. L. White, secretary of State; J. R. Berry, auditor, and Henry Page, treasurer. … Read more

In the long gone reaches of time perhaps only to be measured by geological periods, races of men have been here, grown, flourished, declined and passed away, many not even leaving a track behind; others transmitting fossil traces, dim and crumbling, and still later ones, the successors of the earlier ones, who had no traditions of their predecessors, have left something of the measure of their existence in the deftly cut flints, broken pottery, adobe walls, or great earth-works standing in the whilom silent wilderness as mute and enduring monuments to their existence; man, races, civilizations, systems of religion passing … Read more

When the white man discovered and took possession of North America, he found the red man and his many tribes here, and under a total misapprehension of having found a new continent, he named this strange people Indians. The new world might have been called Columbia, and the people Columbians. Again, instead of being sparse tribes of individuals fringing the shores of the Atlantic Ocean there were 478 tribes, occupying nearly the whole of the north half of this western hemisphere; some in powerful tribes, like the Iroquois; some were rude agricultural and commercial peoples, some living in houses of … Read more