What a Preacher Saw Through a Key-Hole in Arkansas

Published in 1925 as a response to humorous and negative writings about Arkansas, Louis Sharpe Dunaway’s What a Preacher Saw Through a Key-Hole in Arkansas is most noteworthy for its account of the 1919 Elaine Massacre in eastern Arkansas.

Sharpe Dunaway was born in Beryl (Faulkner County) on January 10, 1870, to John and Emma Dunaway. Educated in Faulkner County, where he briefly edited a newspaper in Conway (Faulkner County), he later became circulation manager of the Arkansas Gazette and became renowned as perhaps the most famous traveling salesman in the state’s history.

What a Preacher Saw Through a Key-Hole in Arkansas was his second book (the first was Jeff Davis, Governor and United States Senator, His Life and Speeches, published in 1913) and was intended to rehabilitate Arkansas’s reputation in response to Thomas W. Jackson’s 1903 book On a Slow Train Through Arkansaw and Opie Read’s humorous stories in the Arkansaw Traveler.

Using the device of a preacher’s observations as he traveled throughout the state, Dunaway shamelessly touted the state’s attractions, writing that “in Hot Springs are located some of the greatest hotels on the North American continent,” and in eastern Arkansas “the Preacher stopped and stood spellbound in the midst of fields as fertile as ever bordered the River Nile.” He also spotlighted the “Majestic Ozarks” and the Diamond Cave in Newton County while also noting some of the state’s more unique resources, such as Pocahontas (Randolph County), “the home of a taxidermist whose skill is recognized by the world’s greatest artists,” and Alma (Crawford County), which “raises more hound dogs for the Northern markets than any town of its size in America.”

The fictional tour left the preacher “doubly disgusted with the slanderous stories of Opie Read and ‘Slow Train’ Jackson.”

The preacher’s journey, though, covers only the first seventeen pages of the over 140-page volume, much of the rest of which discusses statistics, organizations, railroads, politicians (including Governor Jeff Davis, with whom Dunaway was close), and other subjects pertaining to Arkansas.

It is Dunaway’s description of what he describes as “The Blackest Page in State History” that makes What a Preacher Saw Through a Key-Hole in Arkansas significant—a sixteen-page section that covers the “Elaine trouble in October 1919” and blames “meddlers” for the violence that convulsed Phillips County.

Ignoring the fact that an attempt by white officials to break up a meeting seeking to unionize Black farmers led to the initial exchange of gunfire, Dunaway places much of the blame for the widespread killings on U.S. soldiers dispatched from Camp Pike through the efforts of Governor Charles Brough, writing “the thing that stumps us…is by what authority did a coterie of Federal soldiers, aided and abetted by a collection of low-lived creatures who call themselves WHITE MEN, march down among the ramshackle homes of good old innocent, hard-working Darkeys, and then and there unlimber their guns on those poor old servants of the rebellion, finally snuffing out their lives before passing on to the next house, where the same cruel scene was enacted.”

Without citing his sources, Dunaway wrote that it was “charged and not denied that 856 negroes were killed during the few days immediately following the first trouble of Elaine” and that “certain Federal soldiers were sent over to the scene of trouble for the purpose of ‘quelling a riot’ and ended up by starting a crusade of death that claimed the lives of nearly a thousand innocent victims of their uncontrollable wrath.”

The book contains a detailed description of the trials and death sentences of twelve Black men, defended by attorney Scipio A. Jones, and the subsequent exoneration of six and ultimate pardon of the others by Governor Thomas McRae, who Dunaway later said told him he “was the only one who dug up the facts about the Elaine riot.” (In his book, Dunaway scoffed at the reporting by other contemporary journalists.)

The volume also included “My Views on the Elaine Riot,” written by Arkansas Baptist College president Joseph A. Booker. Of the riots, Dunaway concluded that “the record is written and must live on history’s page…but the stigma stands out plain.”

What a Preacher Saw Through a Key-Hole in Arkansas received little notice when it was published, with Dunaway himself calling it “a disconnected array of reminiscences, eulogies, tributes, political prognostications and personal experiences” and a later historian describing it as an “eccentric book.”

The most detailed analysis of the book is included in Grif Stockley’s 2001 book Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919. He notes that Dunaway, “a loyal Arkansan,…went out of the way to exonerate the local power structure in Phillips County” and thought the “deepest regret” of the incident was the loss of the handful of white people who died during the Elaine incident. He also writes that Dunaway’s documentation of the violence is “sparce,” citing only two local informants for accounts of the violence.

However, Stockley found credence in Dunaway’s account because of his “serious, unusually competent, and detailed summary of the complex legal proceedings that followed the massacres,” while chiding the author for ignoring Brough’s role in calling up the troops. He wrote that Dunaway’s Elaine chapter “is not a hit-and-run operation by an embittered cynic with a grudge against the United States military, and it is certainly not the work of a man sympathetic to blacks: Dunaway clearly shared the sentiments of Arkansas whites of his time. Rather, his diatribe seems prompted by the simple outrage that innocent people were murdered.”

In 2002, historian Jeannie Whayne, noting that What a Preacher Saw Through a Key-Hole in Arkansas was intended to rehabilitate the state’s image, opined: “Why would Dunaway mention the Elaine race riot in such a book?…Perhaps because he knew just how much that event had hurt the state’s reputation and saw it as necessary to address the issue. But he’s careful to blame it on worthless whites and a bunch of Yankee troops.”

For additional information:
Dunaway, L. S. What a Preacher Saw Through a Key-Hole in Arkansas. Little Rock: Parke-Harper Publishing Company, 1925. Online here at the Arkansas Studies Research Portal (accessed October 4, 2025).

Stockley, Grif. Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2001.

Stockley, Grif, and Jeannie M. Whayne. “Federal Troops and the Elaine Massacres: A Colloquy.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 61 (Autumn 2002): 272–283.

Whayne, Jeannie M. “Low Villains and Wickedness in High Places: Race and Class in the Elaine Riots.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 58 (Autumn 1999): 285–313.