September 10, 2011

In 1835, on his journey to Texas, former Tennessee congressman and famous frontiersman Davy Crockett made a stop at Little Rock (Pulaski County). Wined and dined by the locals, Crockett delivered a speech at a banquet in his honor in which he referred to Arkansas men as the “real half-horse, half-alligator breed as grown nowhere else.” After leaving Little Rock, he passed through Washington (Hempstead County), where he once again was honored. Crockett is shown here in this somewhat stylized engraving produced in the late 1830s.