Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Volume 48 (Spring 1989), p. 3 "Low, Degrading Scoundrels": George W. Featherstonhaugh's Contribution to the Bad Name of Arkansas BY ROBERT B. COCHRAN Department of English, Kimpel Hall, Room 333 University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas 72701   PERHAPS THE BEST KNOWN EXAMPLE is the scene in Huckleberry Finn where the fraudulent duke, promoting the Royal Nonesuch, designs an advertisement to attract a crowd of "Arkansaw lunkheads." The most prominent line is at the bottom--"LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED" --and the duke is confident of success. "'There'," he says, " 'if that line don't fetch them, I don't know Arkansaw' (1)." But by the time of Huckleberry Finn's American publication in 1885, Arkansans could have been offended but not surprised at such treatment. Abusing Arkansas was by then a well-established national pastime. "From territorial times to the present," wrote one scholar in the 1940s, "the reputation of Arkansas has been notorious. Her ill frame has marked her, more than any other State in the Union, as a target for reproach and ridicule (2)." That early observers of the Arkansas frontier found much to disappoint them is hardly surprising. ___________________ *The author is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. 1. Samuel L. Clemens [Mark Twain], Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Boston, 1958), (first published in the United States, in 1885), 126-127. 2. James R. Masterson, Arkansas Folklore (1942; Little Rock, 1974), 1.           Contents  Words  Study Questions  Related Sites Next