4 The earliest published accounts were usually produced either by gentlemen travelers like the Englishman Frederick Marryat, who barely stirred from the deck of his Mississippi River steamboat before retiring to assure his readers that Arkansas court dockets were loaded with "more cases of stabbing and shooting than ten of the older States put together (3)," or by professional men from more settled regions whose visits were motivated by scientific purposes. Two of the latter were Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who wandered through the Ozarks in 1818 and 1819 looking for lead deposits, and Thomas Nuttall, an English botanist who ascended the Arkansas River in 1819 surveying and collecting plant life. Both men were often shocked by what they saw, and made their feelings clear when they remembered their experiences in print. Nuttall, stranded for two weeks at the Cadron settlement near present day Conway, characterized its recently opened tavern as a "vortex of swindling and idleness" and provided a lengthy denunciation: "Every reasonable and rational amusement appeared here to be swallowed up in dram-drinking, jockeying, and gambling; even our landlord, in defiance of the law, was often the ringleader of what was his duty to suppress (4)." Schoolcraft had his own uncomfortable moments at backwoods taverns---he wrote that he was happy to escape one such "scene of riot and drinking" without "bodily disfiguration"(5)---but his general attitude is clearest in his portrait of Ozark pioneers. "Composed of the unruly and the vicious from all quarters, insulated by a pathless wilderness, without the pale of civil law, or the restraints upon manner and actions imposed by refined society, this population are an extraordinary instance of the retrogression of society (6)." Descriptions like these, then, were typical of what was getting wide circulation back east during the 1820s. Arkansas, even before she was a state, was "a dog with a bad name." ______________________ 3. Frederick Marryat, The Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet in California, Sonora, and Western Texas (London, 1858), 285; quoted in Masterson, Arkansas Folklore, 4, 307. 4. Thomas Nuttall, A Journal of Travels into the Arkansas Territory During the Year 1819, ed., Savoie Lottinville (1821; Norman, 1980), 238-239. 5. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Schoolcraft in the Ozarks (Van Buren, Ark., 1955; first published in 1821 as Journal of a Tour into the Interior of Missouri and Arkansas in 1818 and 1819 ), 150-151. 6. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, A View of the Lead Mines of Missouri (1819; New York, 1972), 175.           Contents  Words  Study Questions  Related Sites Next