Time Period: Louisiana Purchase through Early Statehood (1803 - 1860)

Crockett, Davy

aka: David Crockett
The legendary frontiersman and congressman David (Davy) Crockett passed through Arkansas on his way from Tennessee to Texas in 1835. While at a Little Rock (Pulaski County) banquet given in his honor, he reportedly stated, “If I could rest anywhere it would be in Arkansas, where the men are of the real half-horse, half-alligator breed such as grow nowhere else on the face of the universal earth but just around the backbone of North America.” Davy Crockett was born in Greene County, Tennessee, on August 17, 1786. His parents were John and Rebecca Hawkins Crockett. He ran away from home at about age thirteen and did not return home for some thirty months. In 1806, Crockett married Mary “Polly” Finley, …

Crowley, Benjamin

Benjamin Crowley and his family were among the early settlers of northeast Arkansas. In 1821, they settled near the present community of Walcott (Greene County) on a ridge that would bear his name. Crowley, one of eleven children of Benjamin and Sarah Strong Crowley, was born in 1758 in Halifax County, Virginia. He married Catherine Annie Wiley of Augusta County, Virginia, on December 15, 1795. They had eight children. Crowley was a surveyor by trade and also raised cattle and dabbled in horse breeding. By 1785, the Crowleys had relocated to Oglethorpe County, Georgia. They moved to Christian County, Kentucky, by 1810 and moved again to Henderson County, Kentucky, by 1821. Crowley had served in the military during the War …

Curran Hall

aka: Little Rock Visitor Information Center
aka: Walters-Curran-Bell House
Curran Hall, sometimes known as the Walters-Curran-Bell House, stands at 615 East Capitol Avenue in the MacArthur Park Historic District and is one of the few remaining antebellum landmark properties in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Dating back to 1842, the house was constructed during the city’s first building boom, which reached its peak around 1842 and faded out with the depression of 1843. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on January 1, 1976. According to widely accepted tradition, Curran Hall was constructed in the Greek Revival style by noted Greek Revival architect Gideon Shryock, who designed the Kentucky State Capitol as well as the Old State House, making this house of particular significance. The original one-story …

Danley, Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus Danley was a soldier, political activist, and newspaperman in the early days of Arkansas statehood. His adroit use of his newspaper, as well as his own political efforts, made him an often formidable opponent of the political dynasty known as “The Family,” a powerful group of Democrats who dominated Arkansas politics in the years between statehood and the Civil War. He also served as state auditor from 1849 to 1855. C. C. Danley was born on June 5, 1818, in the Missouri Territory. His father, James Danley, was an early pioneer in the Missouri and Arkansas territories. While Danley had at least two brothers and a sister, there appears to be no documentation concerning his mother. Danley set …

Defender [Steamboat]

The Defender was a Mississippi River steamboat that sank after hitting a snag near Laconia (Desha County) on April 14, 1860, killing at least three people. The Defender was a 294-ton sternwheel paddleboat built at Brownsville, Pennsylvania, in 1855. In 1860, it was commanded by a Captain Evans and running between New Orleans, Louisiana, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The vessel left New Orleans in April 1860 with a full load of cargo, including a reported “560 hogsheads sugar, 330 barrels molasses, 60 crates, 400 dry hides, 30 tons copper and iron, 300 sacks coffee, and a large amount of miscellaneous freight.” The steamboat also carried forty cabin passengers and thirty deck passengers. The Defender was steaming up the Mississippi River near …

Dehahuit

Dehahuit, hereditary chief of the Kadohadacho Caddo community of Native Americans at the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, is remembered as an effective, respected leader of the Caddo during turbulent times. The Kadohadacho (kado-ha-dach’-o) were the most prominent of several Caddo groups that lived in villages along the Great Bend of the Red River in southwest Arkansas. These Caddo are believed to have lived on the Great Bend for more than 500 years before the Europeans arrived. They remained in this homeland until just before 1800, when disease and Osage raids forced them downstream into northwest Louisiana. Other Caddo viewed the Kadohadacho as descendants of the tribe’s most ancient and prominent ancestral community. Dehahuit was recognized as the …

Der Squire: Ein Bild aus den Hinterwalden Nordamerikas

Der Squire: Ein Bild aus den Hinterwalden Nordamerikas (The Squire: A Picture from the Backwoods of North America) by Albert von Halfern was published in 1857 by Hoffman and Campe of Hamburg, Germany. The novel presents the story of Squire Russel, a squatter (or pioneer) in western Arkansas near the Indian Territory. Von Halfern’s novel was never translated into English and therefore did not achieve the popularity in the United States that fellow German author Friedrich Gerstäcker’s novels did. Nevertheless, his description of western Arkansas in the early 1840s, like Gerstäcker’s work, offers insight into the daily experiences and the social life of Arkansas’s early settlers. Von Halfern, born about 1816, came to America in 1838, landing in New York …

Dickinson, Thomas (Execution of)

Thomas Dickinson was hanged for murder at Arkansas Post (Arkansas County) in 1820 in the first legal public execution in the Arkansas Territory. A man named Thomas Dickinson was charged with rape in 1820 in the first criminal indictment ever returned by a grand jury in Arkansas. Dickinson was tried on January 8, 1820, and after deliberating twenty minutes, a jury convicted him of raping and impregnating a woman named Sally Hall. Judge Andrew Scott ordered that Dickinson “be castrated according to the law in that behalf provided, by a skilful [sic] physician, under the direction of the sheriff of Arkansas county, on the 15th February, 1820, between ten o’clock, A. M., and three o’clock, P. M., of that day.” …

Dickinson, Townsend

Townsend Dickinson was elected to the territorial legislature and served as prosecuting attorney for his territorial district. He was appointed U.S. Land Office Registrar of Batesville (Independence County) in 1833. He served as a delegate to the state constitutional convention in 1836. Following the convention, he was elected to the first Arkansas General Assembly, which soon made him one of three original members of the Arkansas Supreme Court. Little is known about Dickinson’s childhood, but it appears he was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1795. He was said to be a very polished and well-spoken scholar. In 1821, he moved from New York to Lawrence County, Arkansas. He then moved to Batesville, practicing law and dabbling in real estate. …

Dover to Clarksville Road

The Dover to Clarksville Road is an early nineteenth-century road through what is now Pope and Johnson counties. A surviving segment of the road is significant for its connections with routes taken during the Indian Removals of the 1830s. That segment—located on Hickeytown Road east of U.S. Highway 64 near present-day Lamar (Johnson County)—was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on May 26, 2005. In March 1834, Lieutenant Joseph Whipple Harris left the eastern United States with a party of 125 Cherokee and set out for the Indian Territory, picking up hundreds of other emigrant Cherokee before crossing the Mississippi River and entering Arkansas. His detachment numbered more than 500, many of them ill with measles and other …

Dowdy, John (Execution of)

John Dowdy was hanged at Camden (Ouachita County) on April 25, 1847, for murdering a Choctaw man (name unknown) in the first legal execution in Ouachita County. On January 31, 1847, an apparently drunk Choctaw man got into an argument “about a dog” with another man, who knocked him down. Dowdy rushed at the Choctaw man, with whom he “had not exchanged a word,” and stabbed him under the left arm with a clasp knife, “causing almost instant death.” Lawmen arrested Dowdy, who was brought before a justice of the peace and “committed to jail to await his trial before the Circuit Court.” While no accounts of the trial appear to survive, he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced …

Drennen-Scott Historic Site

The Drennen-Scott Historic Site is the former home of pioneer John Drennen (1801–1855) and his descendants, who continuously occupied the Van Buren (Crawford County) house until its purchase by the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith (UAFS) in 2004. The site is significant in both state and national history. Drennen was co-founder of Van Buren, served as the Indian agent responsible for settlement payments to relocated Cherokee in Indian Territory (Drennen Roll), was a delegate from Crawford County during development of the 1836 constitution for Arkansas, and was a staunch supporter of the Whig Party. The site has undergone extensive reconstruction and development to serve the community as a museum and also as a classroom and lab for the Historical …

Drennen, John

John Drennen was a prominent businessman who is called the father of Van Buren (Crawford County). The home he built in Van Buren, now known as the Drennen-Scott House, serves as a museum interpreting local history and Drennen’s legacy. John Drennen was born to Thomas Drennen and Isabelle Moore Drennen on February 5, 1801, in Elizabeth, Pennsylvania. At a young age, he and his family moved to Potosi, Missouri. On March 21, 1826, in Potosi, he married Emily Rosanna Deaderick Stuart, widow of James Stuart; John and Emily Drennen had three daughters, one of whom died in childhood. Later in 1826, he moved to Tennessee and went into business with his brother-in-law David Thompson (the husband of Emily Drennen’s sister, …

Drew, Thomas Stevenson

Thomas Stevenson Drew was a peddler, schoolteacher, farmer, railroad speculator, and governor of Arkansas. He was the first person to be elected governor by a plurality instead of a majority and the only governor to resign his office because of personal financial difficulties. Thomas Drew was born in Wilson County, Tennessee, on August 25, 1802. He was the second of ten children born to Newton Drew and Sarah Maxwell Drew. He was raised on a farm and educated in a Tennessee common school. Drew moved to Arkansas in 1817, where he worked as an itinerant peddler and occasionally taught school. In October 1823, he was appointed clerk of the Clark County Court and, three months later, became justice of the peace of …

Duwali

aka: Bowl
aka: Bowles
Duwali, also known as The Bowl or Bowles due to the Quapaw meaning of his name, was leader of a group of Cherokee who lived briefly in Arkansas early in the territorial period, from about 1812 to 1818. His life story illustrates the fate of thousands of Native Americans from tribes and nations east of the Mississippi River who moved west to get away from economic and political turmoil long before the official Indian Removal events of the 1830s. These early groups had a significant impact on early territorial residents and on the Caddo, the Osage, and the Quapaw who lived, hunted, and claimed territorial rights in Arkansas when Euro-American settlers first arrived. Duwali was born about 1756 in the …

Dwight Mission

Dwight Mission near Russellville (Pope County) was the first formal Protestant effort directed at the education and conversion of Native Americans in Arkansas and was one of the first Protestant missions established west of the Mississippi. The mission was established in 1820 and operated in Arkansas until 1829. The mission had been requested by Western Cherokee Principal Chief Tahlonteskee in 1818, when he visited Brainerd Mission in Georgia, sponsored by the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions (ABCFM), a Presbyterian organization. The Western Cherokee was a diverse group whose previous generation had migrated into Arkansas while fleeing troubles in the Cherokee homeland at the southern end of the Appalachians, and some of the members thought it useful for their …

Eagle [Steamboat]

The Eagle was a 118-ton steamboat that was the first steamer to navigate up the Arkansas River to Little Rock (Pulaski County), stopping at the capital on its way to deliver supplies to Dwight Mission near modern-day Russellville (Pope County). The Eagle, which was built in 1818 and commanded by a Captain Morris, reached Little Rock on March 16, 1822, having left New Orleans, Louisiana, seventeen days earlier and taken fifty-one hours to reach the territorial capital from the mouth of the Arkansas River—a journey that would have taken up to a month by keelboat. The Arkansas Gazette reported that Little Rock’s citizens were “very agreeably surprised” by the vessel’s arrival, which “reflects much credit on Capt. Morris for his …

Elizabeth (Jackson County)

Elizabeth (sometimes called Elizabethtown) thrived as a port on the White River and became the seat of Jackson County in 1839. However, the river later shifted course and eroded away what remained of the community. Native Americans were the first to take advantage of the Black and White rivers for transportation and trade, followed by French hunters, trappers, and fur traders, many of them from Canada, who plied the area’s rivers during the eighteenth century and continued after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 until about 1815. Keelboats were an early mode of transportation for the early settlers, who could use them on the upper White River to maneuver the sharp bends, rapids, and low water levels along the river during …

Elm Springs Cemetery, Historic Section

The Elm Springs Cemetery, Historic Section, is located in the community of Elm Springs (Washington and Benton counties). The date of the first marked burial is 1852. The site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on November 5, 2020. A Methodist church was founded in Elm Springs in 1832, and many of the founding church members are buried in the Historic Section. The first Methodist church building was built in 1850, adjacent to the cemetery’s location. Therefore, many unmarked burials or burials simply marked with fieldstones may be earlier than 1852. The Elm Springs Cemetery, Historic Section, is approximately 3.75 acres. The entrance of the cemetery is marked with a large sign with the name of the …

Eskridge, Thomas P.

Thomas P. Eskridge was a judge on the Superior Court of Arkansas Territory, which eventually became the Arkansas Supreme Court. Though he left the spotlight to others, he played a substantive role in the development of the Arkansas court system. While there is little documentation on his early life, it appears that Thomas Eskridge was born around 1797 to William Eskridge and Elizabeth Scott Eskridge in Staunton, Virginia. He came from a large family with possibly as many as ten children. It is believed that he received his legal training serving as a clerk for a Virginia lawyer. He moved to Arkansas in 1820 or 1821, just as the Arkansas Territory was developing and its judiciary was taking shape. Eskridge …

Factory System

aka: Indian Trading Posts
aka: Indian Factory System
The Indian factory system was a system of trading posts created by an act of Congress in 1795 with the express intention of developing and maintaining Native American friendship and allegiance through government control of trade on the frontiers of the new nation. Within the present borders of the state of Arkansas, three factories were established for this purpose: Arkansas Post (1805–1810), Spadra Bayou (1817–1822), and Sulphur Fork (1818–1822). The United States took formal possession of Arkansas Post (Arkansas County) from Spanish authorities on March 23, 1804. An Indian factory (or trading post) was established in October 1805 with James B. Treat as factor (or chief trader). Most of the trade was directed to the local Quapaw. However, prior to the establishment …

Fairchild, Hulbert Fellows

Hulbert F. Fairchild was a New York–born lawyer who moved to northeastern Arkansas to open a practice in the 1840s and found himself playing a precarious role as a trial judge and justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court during the calamitous days before and during the Civil War. Although Fairchild was put on the court by the secessionist governor, Elias N. Conway, and the court’s three justices had to flee Little Rock (Pulaski County) to the Confederate capital of Washington (Hempstead County) when Union forces controlled much of the state, Fairchild was privately uncomfortable with secession. While he capitulated to the secessionists and foes of emancipation on slavery matters before the court, his decisions resisted the curtailment of some civil …

Family, The [Political Dynasty]

“The Family”—or “The Dynasty”—was the name given to a powerful group of Democrats who dominated Arkansas politics in the years between statehood and the Civil War. The roots of the Family stretched back into the territorial period, when it coalesced around territorial delegate Henry Conway, the scion of a wealthy Tennessee family. In 1827, Conway was mortally wounded while dueling with Territorial Secretary Robert Crittenden, his former patron and the most powerful political figure in Arkansas in the territorial era. The killing of Conway in the duel exacerbated the schism in Arkansas politics between Crittenden and his supporters, who became the basis for the Whig Party in Arkansas, and the followers of the slain Conway, staunch Democrats and supporters of Andrew …

Far West Seminary

In the mid-1840s, the Far West Seminary, a planned collegiate-level educational institution in northwest Arkansas, failed due to political and religious factionalism, economic hard times, and a major fire. However, the effort proved to be a seedbed for other northwest Arkansas educational endeavors prior to the Civil War that helped Fayetteville (Washington County) earn the nickname “the Athens of Arkansas.” After the state failed to use its federal seminary grant to create a state university, northwest Arkansas educators and promoters in 1840 began discussing the need for a facility for higher education. On August 12, 1843, a group of interested citizens gathered at the Mount Comfort Meeting House, located three miles northwest of Fayetteville. This meeting resulted in the creation …

Faulkner, Sandford C. “Sandy”

Sandford C. (Sandy) Faulkner is an iconic individual from Arkansas’s early statehood. Although he never held elective office, his political and economic activity made a significant contribution to the development of the young state. Moreover, Faulkner is largely responsible for the story of the “Arkansas Traveler,” which has shaped the image of Arkansas since the 1840s. Sandy Faulkner was born on March 3, most likely in 1803, in Scott County, Kentucky, to Nicholas Faulkner and Sally Fletcher Faulkner. Much confusion surrounds Faulkner’s early history; many sources spell his first name “Sanford,” and one researcher even suggests that at birth he was given the name “Sanderson.” The 1850 census appears to record his age as forty-four, suggesting that he was born …

Fayetteville Female Seminary

One of the most influential institutions in early Arkansas was the Fayetteville Female Seminary in Fayetteville (Washington County), which provided a quality education for girls throughout the region in a time when most women received little, if any, schooling. It also accepted both Cherokee and white students in an era when the “mixing of the races” was discouraged. Though it was only in existence from 1839 through 1862, the Fayetteville Female Seminary is often cited as one of the factors leading to the location of the state’s land-grant university, the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville. The Fayetteville Female Seminary was created by Sophia Sawyer of Rindge, New Hampshire. She went to Georgia 1823 as a missionary to the Cherokee through …

Fayetteville Polka

“The Fayetteville Polka” was written by Austrian immigrant Ferdinand Zellner in honor of his adopted hometown of Fayetteville (Washington County). It was accepted for publication in 1856, becoming what is said to be the first published piece of sheet music by an Arkansan. Ferdinand Zellner came to the United States in 1850, when the showman P. T. Barnum brought Swedish soprano Jenny Lind from Europe to the United States on a concert tour that ran through 1852. Called the “Swedish Nightingale,” she was one of the greatest coloratura sopranos of the nineteenth century, possessing a voice of outstanding range and quality. Zellner, a young Austrian violinist, accompanied her on her prestigious U.S. tour. At the end of Lind’s U.S. tour …