Arkansas: A Different State Essay -- American History Essays

argon A Different State For many people the genuinely mention of the word argon conjures up images that are unflattering and certainly not very complimentary. To suggest that Arkansas is a different submit is to guarantee almost immediate agreement from any given audience, besides such agreement is usually rough the contradict aspects of the state instead of the one and only(a)s making for actual difference. Those negative aspects extend back to the early age of the territory. When Cephas Washburn was on his way to Arkansas in 1819 to serve as a missionary to the Cherokees, he stopped at the present site of Vicksburg, Mississippi, to defy specific directions to the territory, only to be told that the way to get there was wnknown.1 Other remarks pertaining to Arkansas are even less positive it was state that Arkansas is not part of the world for which Jesus Christ died,2 and as late as 1989 one writer was still capable to describe Arkansas as the least known of the fifty s tates.3 One of the most famous publications that helped to give Arkansas a negative image was Thomas W. capital of Mississippis On A slack Train Through Arkansas. Published in 1903, this book contained many descriptions about life in the state, including a pitiful account about a traveler who stopped at a place where there was one doctor, two shoe makers, and a blacksmith. The doctor killed a man. They didnt sine qua non to be without a doctor, so they hung one of the shoe makers.4 Jacksons book helped to convince many readers that people in Arkansas wore no shoes.5 Of the well known national writers to comment about Arkansas, surely H.L. Mencken of the Baltimore Sun was most memorable. In August, 1921, his acid-tipped pen described the state of Arkansas as track... ...kansas, Arkansas Historical Quarterly, XXXVIII (Spring 1979), 63. 7 Ibid., 68. 8 get at S. Ashmore, Arkansas A Bicentennial History ( refreshful York W.W. Norton, 1978), xvii. 9 Daniel Pool, What Jane Austen Ate and Charles daimon Knew From Fox Hunting to Whist the Facts of Daily Life in nineteenth Century England (New York Simon and Schuster, 1993), 75. 10 Imogene Wolcott, ed., The New England Yankee Cook Book (New York Coward-McCann, Inc., 1939), 161. 11 Ibid., xiii. 12 Williams, et al., 9. 13 Francis Parkman, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (New York The New Library of American Literature, 1963), 223. 14 Ibid., 228-229. 15 Ibid., 333. 16 Helen McCully and Eleanor Noderer, eds., The American hereditary pattern Cookbook and Illustrated History of American Eating and Drinking, II (n.p. American inheritance Publishing, 1964), 537.