Yet even with change the forest remains an impressive tract of mountain greenery, bigger, at 2,500 square miles, than the state of Delaware, and the river that flows out of it is one of the prettiest in the country.
Early trappers and market hunters paddled their canoes up it, far past Camden, the present head of navigation, past the bluff where the Caddo enters at Arkadelphia, past “the hot springs,” and on to the hills not far from the present town of Mena. This upper stretch is still navigable by canoe, in season, in the familiar pattern of a fast-flowing stream: shoal water followed by a pool followed by a shoal. For some reason, however, it has not caught on well with recreational floaters, slaves of fashion that they are. On a warm day in late spring, with plenty of water running, when there must have been war parties of canoes colliding at every bend of the Buffalo River, I saw not a single floater on the Ouachita between Ink and Oden, nor a bank fisherman nor a swimmer.
The parks and campgrounds were spruced up for the summer season. The state road ways were clean, too. Where was all the litter that people complain about in letters to newspapers? Also, where was the old rural shabbiness?
The farmhouses on Highways 270 and 88 were well-kept, in fine trim, the mobile homes neatly skirted. Around them were shade trees, ornamental shrubs, flower beds and well-tended lawns. Not what we used to call landscaping in the Arkansas countryside, when the custom was to level every living thing around your house for about a 50-yard radius. We were the original clear-cutters, and this dead-zone tradition lives on in east Arkansas, where you can see a new brick house plopped down in the middle of a muddy soybean field, without so much as a crabapple tree or a petunia out front—as though people who farm in a big way couldn’t be bothered with mere horticulture.
The new attention to lawn care can be attributed, I think, to the invention and spread of the riding mower. Cutting the grass is no longer seen as a chore, as men don’t outgrow their boyhood love for dodging about in midget cars with tiny steering wheels. I believe this also accounts for the popularity of golf. Take away the little motorized carts and the links would be largely deserted.
It may be that outlanders have brought in new ideas about some of these things, along with their comfortable retirement incomes. You hear a lot of non-Arkansas voices these days in the Ouachitas. At Lum and Abner’s Jot-em-Down Store in Pine Ridge, I was greeted by a nice lady from some northern clime who never in her life said, “Well, I swan!” much less, “Ay grannies!” At an other store, in neighboring Polk County, there were flat white wicks for sale, for kerosene lamps, but I found no country store so humble or remote that it didn’t offer a selection of video cassettes. In the towns there are signs of a modest prosperity, such as new police cars (big Chevrolet Caprices, mostly) and new Masonic halls, Moose lodges, and American Legion huts. All these brotherhoods seem to have hired the same architect, a grim man, who likes to build on defensive, bunker principles. His signature is the blank wall. The new clubhouses, with few exceptions, are long, low buff-brick structures with no windows.
There is no longer much agriculture in this country, in the strict sense of field crops. The old straggling hillside corn patches are now pastures where polled Hereford and Angus cattle graze. A lot of fat healthy saddle horses are running about too. The long metal chicken sheds appear to be mostly abandoned, or in use for storage of those big cylindrical rolls of hay. The vegetable gardens are still deadly serious, with rows of pole beans and squash 90 feet long.
Mount Ida is where the hexagonal quartz crystals are found, with their radiant powers. Just north of town the mountain stream loses its “rolling impetuosity” as Dunbar would put it, and begins to spread and go still and blue as it is penned up by the hand of man. Here, for some 50 miles, the river loses its identity in a chain of dams and lakes—Ouachita, with a shoreline of almost a thousand miles, and the older and smaller Hamilton and Catherine. All are associated with Hot Springs, though the city itself is not on the river.
For William Dunbar and his expedition up the Ouachita, from October, 1804, to January, 1805, it was a nine-mile hike from the river bank to the valley of “the boiling springs,” which is now Central Avenue downtown. Dunbar was an immigrant from Scotland who had done well in America. He owned a plantation near Natchez and had a good education. He knew how to do things, which made him a man after President Thomas Jefferson’s heart. Jefferson and the U.S. Congress had just paid Napoleon $15 mil lion for the entire western drainage of the Mississippi River—the Louisiana Purchase—and exploring parties were being organized to look over the new territory. Dunbar was sent up the Ouachita. He went in an unwieldy barge 50 feet long, with a Dr. George Hunter of Philadelphia, a guide, three of Dunbar’s slaves, and a rowing party of 14 soldiers from the New Orleans garrison. It was a small, regional version of the Lewis and Clark expedition up the Missouri, and on to the Pacific.
Surprisingly little was known at that late date of the country between the Mississippi and the Shining Mountains, or the Stony Mountains, as the Rockies were then called. Jefferson, perhaps the best-informed man of the country, thought there still might be mastodons or mammoths grazing to the west. They would be much bigger than the tropical elephants. Jefferson wanted our New World animals to be the biggest. In the same spirit, Robert Livingston, negotiating in Paris for the purchase of La Louisiane, told the treasury minister that, anyway, the French would never be able to sell their goods here, such as Cognac, because Americans preferred Kentucky peach brandy, “which, with age, is superior to the best brandy of France.” It was truly morning in America.
The cynical Napoleon, 33-year-old First Consul, may or may not have believed it. On first meeting Livingston, at a reception, he took a playful line with the presumptions of the new nation.
“You have been in Europe before, Monsieur Livingston?”
“No, my General.”
“You have come to a very corrupt world.” Then, to Talleyrand, “Explain to Monsieur Livingston that the old world is very corrupt. You know something about that, don’t you, Monsieur Talleyrand?”
The Anglo-Americans were slow to learn from the Indians and the French that canoes were the thing. Dunbar’s monster barge, designed by Dr. Hunter, drew two feet of water and had an external keel. Over and over again the soldiers had to jump into the cold water with a rope and drag the thing off snags and over sandbars and shoals. At Fort Miro, or the Washita Post (Monroe, La.), they changed to a lighter boat and the going was faster, but they still had to manhandle it over the rougher shoals. One, north of the Caddo, had a straight vertical drop of four-and-a-half feet.
Dunbar remarks on the beauty of the river and how it was clear and drinkable along the entire course, unlike the Red and the “Arcansa,” which were always muddy, “being charged with red terrene matter.” The trees on the banks—willow, black oak, packawn [pecan], hickory, and elm—were not so grand or lofty as those along the Mississippi, but had their own charm and “appear to bear a kind of proportion to the magnitude of their own river.”
The Ouachita wasn’t completely un known. It was late fall and the bears were fat with oil and their furs were prime. Dunbar met hunters along the way “who count much of their profits from the oil drawn from the Bear’s fat, which at New Orleans is always of ready sale, and is much esteemed for its wholesomeness in cooking, being preferred to butter or hog’s lard; it is found to keep longer than any other oil of the same nature, without turning ran cid…”
He comments on the indolence of the white settlers—“always a consequence of the Indian mode of life”—and tells us that the young army officer in command at Fort Miro, a Lieutenant Bowmar, while capable enough, lacked “the polite manners of a gentleman.” At another point he suddenly seems to remember that he is writing this report for Jefferson, the great democrat, and he praises the industry and sturdy independence of a man and his wife who had cleared a little two-acre farm stead in the woods. They had corn for bread, plenty of venison, bear oil, fish and fowl for the taking, and there
were hides and wild honey to sell for cash. Their prospects were indeed bright, and he stops just short of having them reading a bit of John Locke or Rousseau by firelight, before turning in.
“How happy the contrast, when we compare the fortune of the new settler in the U.S. with the misery of the half-starving, op pressed, and degraded Peasant of Europe!!” Dunbar is not a man for exclamation marks, and when he gives us two of them here, we feel his discomfort with this kind of talk—however genuine the sentiment.
They found two abandoned log huts at the base of Hot Springs Mountain, where the smoking waters poured forth to form a creek. The sick from Natchez were already coming here to soak their bones. Dunbar examined the rocks and vegetation. Dr. Hunter, of whom Dunbar speaks in a guarded way as “a professed chemist,” conducted experiments with his pans and beakers. Dunbar determined the latitude with his sextant. (Is there anyone today living between Natchez and Hot Springs who could do that—go off into the forest and calculate the angular distance of his position in degrees and minutes from the equator?) He measured the temperature of the springs and pools, and his readings of 132 to 150 degrees F. tally pretty well with the current reading at the source of 145.8 degrees. So we can’t blame a badly defective thermometer when he tells us that the air temperature fell to 6 degrees on January 2, 1805, as they were camped on the river bank in 13 inches of snow. They ate well, bagging turkeys and deer at will. They shot one young bear. But, as with DeSoto’s men, they had no luck with the buffalo. On two occasions in south Arkansas these beasts were “shot at and grievously wounded, with blood streaming from their sides.” The soldiers couldn’t bring them down, however, and couldn’t or wouldn’t track them down. Soldiers perhaps lack the patience to be good hunters.
Elvas puts it this way: “The Indians want no fleshmeat; for they kill with their arrowes many deere, hennes, conies and other wild fowle: for they are very cunning at it: which skills the Christians [Spaniards] had not: and though they had it, they had no leasure to use it: for most of the time they spent in travel, and durst not presume to straggle aside…”
Dunbar doesn’t identify his weapons, other than to call them “rifles,” which suggests they weren’t smoothbore muskets. It is possible his party was fitted out, as were Lewis and Clark, with the army’s new 1803 model rifle, a flintlock of .54 caliber. DeSoto’s troops had a few firearms, of a kind known as the arquebus, a primitive matchlock shoulder weapon firing a .65 to .75 caliber ball, and using a smoldering wick called a match or matchcord to ignite the powder charge. These pieces were cumbersome, inaccurate, with a much shorter range than the crossbow, which was DeSoto’s primary weapon, together with swords and lances. The thundersticks weren’t even of much help in terrifying the natives, who, as one account has it, “not only had held no fear of the arquebuses but had scorned and ridiculed them…” In the end the survivors of the expedition melted down the useless guns to make nails for their escape boats.
Was DeSoto at Hot Springs? Here is the brief passage, again from Elvas, that is the basis of this belief: “The Governor [DeSoto] rested a moneth more in the Province of Cayas. In which time the horses fattened more than in other places in a longer time, with the great plentie of Maiz [corn, planted by the Indians] and the leaves thereof, which I think the best that hath been seene, and they drank of a lake of very hot water, and somewhat brackish, and they drank so much, that it swelled in their bellies when they brought them from the watering.”
There are three accounts of the expedition written by participants. The one from Elvas is the longest, at 179 pages, and there are short, brisk, official reports from Hernandez de Biedma, the king’s factor, and Rodrigo Ranjel, DeSoto’s private secretary. Some 50 years after the event, one Garcilaso de la Vega completed a fourth account, a long, literary book, which he claimed was based on interviews with a knight and two soldiers who accompanied DeSoto. This work is held to be the least reliable.
In only one of the four—Elvas—can I find mention of geothermal water, warm or hot, and his water is somewhat brackish. The Hot Springs water is not at all brackish, and contains no particular belly-swelling agents. The “lake” comes from the Portuguese word “lagoa,” which can mean anything from a small lake to a puddle.
The U.S. DeSoto Expedition Commission cites a mention of “hot streams” from Ranjel—“from the missing parts of his diary.” It is still missing from the only published Ranjel account I could find. This commission, a blue ribbon government panel, of which Col. John R. Fordyce of Arkansas was vice chairman, delivered its report in 1939, on the 400th anniversary of DeSoto’s landing at Tampa Bay. Colonel Fordyce and his colleagues made an exhaustive effort to map out DeSoto’s wanderings, from vague topographical clues and the rough estimates of distances and directions given by Elvas and the others. (Coronado, then exploring to the west, was better organized; he had a man designated to count off the paces of each day’s march.)
The DeSoto distances are given as so many days’ journey, or so many leagues, when given at all. But what was a day’s march? What league were they using? With eight to choose from, the commission members finally settled on the Spanish judicial league of 2.634 miles, not to be confused with the ordinary Spanish league of 4.214 miles or the Portuguese league of 3.84 miles. The report is an impressive work of scholar ship, conjecture, and divination.
But if not Hot Springs, where was this Province of Cayas? It is pretty well established that the Spaniards were in the central part of the country at that time, and nowhere else in the region (except at nearby Caddo Gap) are there springs of warm water coming from the earth, fresh or brackish. Any how, I like to think that DeSoto was here in 1541, and I like to think that Shakespeare, still working in London in 1609, picked up the little Elvas-Hakluyt book and read about the hot lake, and about Camden and Calion, and the earlier crossing of the Great River near Helena. It is just the kind of chronicle he quarried for his plots and characters, and DeSoto, a brutal, devout, heroic man brought low, is certainly of Shakespearean stature. But, bad luck, there is no play, with a scene at the Camden winter quarters, and, in an other part of the forest, at Smackover Creek, where willows still grow aslant the brook.
(A note here on Hakluyt’s English: Those earnest enunciators who say “bean” for “been” should know that Hakluyt, the Ox ford scholar, spelled it “bin,” as did, off and on, the poet John Donne.)
Below Lake Catherine the Ouachita runs free again, for a while. The momentum is less, the river having already dropped from 1,600 feet to 315 feet at Malvern, and the rate of fall is leveling off fast. But there is still shoaling, as you can see from the Interstate 30 bridge near the Malvern exit. Above and below the bridge the water breaks on shelving rock, and we can imagine the trouble Dunbar had in dragging a heavy boat over it.
Sturdy bricks are made at Malvern, 200 million of them each year, and in the adjoining and older community of Rockport, there is a white frame church, the Rockport United Methodist Church, with a sign proclaiming it to be the “Oldest Church West of the Mississippi/ Est. 1809/ Elmo A. Thomason, Pastor.” Oldest Protestant church, I gather, is the meaning, but on the day I stopped, the Rev. Mr. Thomason was not around to clarify the point. Yellow ribbons girdled the shade trees around the church—none of your latter-day Wesleyan revisionists at Rockport. Little Rock did well enough in welcoming home the troops from Desert Storm, but I noticed that the small towns in Arkansas and Louisiana, more directly affected by the call-up of Reserve and National Guard units, did much better. They were more exuberant, more lavish with their ribbons and banners.
At Arkadelphia (Blakleytown, until 1838) we know we are out of the hills when we see the statue of a Confederate soldier on the court-house lawn, and an African Methodist Episcopal Church, and a snarling yellow Ag-Cat cropduster dipping low over a rice field—irrigated from the Ouachita. The Ag-Cat is an excellent workhorse, but the bulging cockpit canopy is ugly and the plane just doesn’t have the pleasing lines of the old Stearman.
The Caddo enters
the Ouachita here, and at one time you could freely drive to a bluff overlooking the confluence. No more; you are now confronted by a locked gate. Arkadelphia had irregular steamboat ser vice from 1825 until the 1870s, when the Iron Mountain Railroad came through, and even after that a few boats came up from time to time. One, in 1912, reportedly took on a load of 2,000 bales of cotton. But commercial navigation this high on the river was always seasonal and chancy.
Highway 7 south of town becomes a shady corridor of tall, skinny pines. Below Sparkman (“Welcome to Sparkman/ A Good Town/ Raiders are Winners”) there is a turn-off to Tate’s Bluff, where the Little Missouri joins the Ouachita. A low concrete bridge, which washes out now and then, spans the river. I ran into my first floaters here, two young men in a canoe, who had made their way some 30 miles down the Little Missouri. “We only had to drag once.” Did they ever float the Ouachita? “Not this far down. There’s just not enough current. Too much paddling.” Did they know of any songs about the Ouachita? Well, no. They tried hard, too, to think of a song. Every body was very obliging.
Camden, head of navigation, has the feel of a river town, though you can no longer get a catfish lunch downtown, or any kind of plate lunch. Along the bar pits middle-aged black women are fishing with cane poles. They stand very still watching their corks. They are all bundled up against the heat and the mosquitoes, and their broad-brimmed straw hats are well cinched down with colorful sashes.
Between the railroad track and the river there is a big metal building with the hopeful words, “Port of Camden,” painted on it. But where are the tugs and barges? It seems there are none. According to Mrs. Eunice Platt, there hasn’t been a commercial run up this far since December 1989, when four barges, pushed two at a time, came from Monroe to get a load of gravel for rockless Louisiana. Mrs. Platt, of Camden, is the executive director of the Ouachita River Valley Association, and a tireless worker in promoting navigation improvements on the upper Ouachita.