The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Surely in his drovings Peter Mankins had helpers other than his trusty horse and his trusty dogs, but he may not have needed human helpers, because he was very strong. His strength should be part of his legend. In his prime he measured six feet four inches, and cleared 275 pounds on the scales! In those days there were no standards such as “bench press,” “snatch,” or “clean and jerk” for weightlifting, but the main test of physical prowess was to stand in a bushel basket with the feet close together (no flexing of the knees) and to reach forward and try to lift a hundred-pound sack of flour or a hundred-pound pig with arm strength alone. Peter Mankins could lift and shoulder a two-hundred-pound pig with eyewitnesses and a three-hundred-pound hog without eyewitnesses.

  Without eyewitnesses Peter Mankins killed a panther by forcing its jaws open and breaking its neck. With eyewitnesses he killed a bear with a bear hug.

  He was an expert marksman with musket, rifle, or knife, but his favorite weapon, because it was most handy, was the rock, especially for deer. Forcing open the jaws of a deer, or giving a deer a bear hug, is not quite seemly or manly, but from a distance of twenty paces or more, with eyewitnesses, Peter Mankins could throw a rock and hit a buck deer, in the side if not the head, stunning if not killing it. There was never any lack of game on the Mankins table, although all of them preferred pork.

  He was never, like Roy Rogers, called “King of the Cowboys,” but at the stations en route to New Orleans where hog drovers congregated, the early equivalent of today’s truck stops, he became the equivalent of what his fellow drovers might have called “King of the Hogboys.” One eyewitnessed story of the early 1840s from a Louisiana drover stop was that, in his haste to get his rig of hogs parked for the night and fed, he carried to them in one load on his back fourteen bushels of corn wrapped in a bed tick, and then, throwing aside the cloth after feeding them, ran and jumped over a five-foot gate. “What’s the hurry, Pete?” he was asked as he settled onto his usual stool at Mrs. Turner’s Tavern. He replied that he had heard there was only one piece left of Mrs. Turner’s persimmon pie.

  The most eyewitnessed event demonstrating his strength occurred in the autumn of 1845 at Marshall’s Prairie, as Elkins was known then, just over the mountain east of New Prospect. One Stephen Enyart, considering himself the strongest man in Arkansas, challenged Mankins on his own turf, as it were. Captain Enyart would later organize and command a company of Arkansas volunteers in the Mexican War; he had worn the belt of the greatest wrestler in Arkansas for several years and could stand in a bushel basket and reach out and lift Antaeus off the earth. On a bitterly cold day, in a snowfall that did not deter hundreds of paid and wagering spectators, Enyart met Mankins in the field of Marshall’s Prairie. They stripped down, not to their shorts, which were not known in those days, but to their long drawers, which were, and they wrestled and scuffled for three hours. For three solid hours, they grappled and tussled, boxing a little but mostly mauling the grass with each other, cracking necks, getting hitches and holds and hanks, body-slamming and backfalling, trading throttles and grunts, bending bones, outgrowling, and rubbing bruises upon each other. The three judges declared it even-Stephen, but since Enyart was Stephen, he took the stakes. He had abundant time to count his money, however: for three days afterward he couldn’t leave his bed, whereas Mankins went about his work as usual and, consulting his calendar, discovered he was scheduled to meet a challenge to run a sixty-yard foot race the next morning with William Fine, champion sprinter. This time Mankins won, although there were hardly any spectators, because nobody watches track meets; the Razorback track team, walking off with the National Championship, is met at the Fayetteville airport by no bands and no fans crying “Wooo-pig, sooie!”

  All this activity did not distract Peter Mankins from observing that the pace of life quickens steadily as civilization progresses, and that it behooved him to give up hog droving and concentrate on cattle droving. But he did not realize that in order to become a successful cowboy he would have to establish an adversary relationship with the Indians. The cowboy-and-Indian difference of opinion was destined to become a central issue in American history and westering imperialism, as well as an essential fund for legends, dime novels, campfire songs, and grade-C Hollywood motion pictures. A cowboy without an Indian was like salt without pepper, or oil without vinegar. Peter Mankins had nothing personal against Indians. He had never seen the Kentucky Indians during his boyhood but had admired their paintings. The Indians he had seen in Arkansas were mostly Cherokee and just as civilized as anybody. He had never seen a savage or hostile Indian. But he had seen hungry Indians, and was destined to see many more of them, and there is something about hunger that puts a person on his very worst behavior.

  The Great California Gold Rush of 1849 sometimes put Peter Mankins on his worst behavior. He should have stuck to cows, but the get-rich-quick fever was too much for him. A group of “vigorous, enterprising and substantial citizens” who called themselves the Fayetteville Argonauts decided that no expedition could succeed without Peter, and they appointed him second lieutenant, to serve as guide far in advance of the company on its long crossing of the plains. For two thousand miles the wagon train crept westward, and the Mankins legends grew right and left. There was, for instance, the story of his catching buffalo by the tail, throwing them off their feet, and dispatching them with his Bowie knife. The Cherokee were recruited to go along on the expedition, because, according to the advance advertisements, they “are on the most friendly terms with all the Indian tribes of the prairie; consequently there will be no danger of attacks from our red brethren.” But many of our red brethren were not in a brotherly mood.

  The eighty Argonauts had provisioned themselves with 175 pounds of bacon per person, and it required a great prairie schooner drawn by four yoke of oxen to haul such a load of salted side meat. Oxen are not well suited for movement across dry, sandy desert, or for steep mountains, as the Argonauts discovered, and they decided they could not transport so much bacon to California.

  Jettisoning it was easy. A band of eight hundred hungry Plains Indians had been following the expedition, begging for table scraps. Now they could get the trimmings of the bacon, which were mostly rank and salty. Peter Mankins, put in charge of distributing the bacon trimmings, came face to face with mass ravenous hunger for the first time—and, because the meat was so salty, mass unquenchable thirst. The Indians ate all they could hold and drank whatever water they could find, and Peter watched two hundred of them die from the effects of this gorging. It seemed to convince him that life is cheap, especially for an Indian. He wished the six hundred survivors would quit following the Argonauts, but the Indians, like dogs blessed with benefaction from new masters, attached themselves more firmly to the wagon train, and nothing would get rid of them.

  The Argonauts came to a river that required them to build rafts for crossing. Since the Indians had nothing with which to build rafts and could only swim, hundreds more might have drowned trying to follow the wagon train; as a more charitable but rude alternative, Peter Mankins decided to scare them off. He discovered in the ruins of an old fort a still-workable cannon, which he loaded with a charge of a quarter of gunpowder tamped full to the muzzle with dirt and gravel. According to an eyewitness, Mankins trained the cannon “on the dusty tents of the dusky hangers-on, and touched off this ludicrous load. The old thing reared up like a snake-bitten cayuse and belched forth what looked like an avalanche over the camp to the wild consternation of the Indians.” And, no doubt, to the great laughter of everybody else, including Mankins himself, no miser with a guffaw. But after recovering from their fright and stilling the cries of their little ones, the Indians were merely saddened to discover that the man who had touched off the cannon was the same big man who had given them all the bacon trimmings. Their hunger made them follow the train, like seagulls following a ship, but they kept Peter Mankins under surveillance and never trusted him.

  At an oasis, where, according to Indian cu
stom, the braves slaked their thirst before allowing their women and children any water, Mankins was so irritated by the cries of the children that he rashly decided to change Indian custom then and there; he strode to the center of the crowd brandishing his Bowie knife and threatened to hack up any brave who drank another drop before letting the children have their fill. One brave came at him with a tomahawk; he dodged and with one swing of his Bowie knife decapitated the Indian. Years later the same knife was used by child labor for cutting sorghum cane in Sulphur City, and many a boy remembered pretending the cane tops were Indians’ heads as he cut them down. These boys grew up and had children who used wooden play-knives when playing cowboys-and-Indians, a game in which the Indian always lost.

  The Indians always lost to Peter Mankins. Having killed one of them with his Bowie knife, he decided it would be just as easy to kill more of them. When the Indians realized that they would get no more handouts from the Fayetteville Argonauts, they began stealing and eating the remaining oxen. Mankins and the Argonauts shot or knifed these thieves, and the survivors decided to wait for the next passing wagon train and hope for better luck or charity.

  Once arrived in California, Mankins saw his first city, which was called Sacramento City, a crowded, thoroughly platted city of ten thousand, which would retain “City” in its name long after it became the capital of California. From there, he and his fellow Fayettevillians fanned out into the gold fields, where they discovered that each man had a claim of only fifteen feet to dig in and it was every man for himself. There is nothing romantic about gold mining: the work is grueling and often futile.

  Back home in New Prospect, Peter’s family and friends could only wonder what he was doing and what luck he was having. One of Peter’s friends, Hiram Davis, writing home to his wife at Fayetteville, reported that all of the Argonauts had been very sick and that Mankins was near death, and described further problems with the Indians, who were killing small parties of the Argonauts: “The large influx of whites has driven the Indians to the verge of perpetual snow where they can neither get game of any kind, nor can they with safety approach the rivers to fish, so they are quite in a starving condition and consequently desperate.” Davis described the rugged country, the deep snows, the floods of the melting snows, and the grueling work, then grew eloquent: “This whole country is swarming with human beings. Every ravine and mountain is crowded and wherever level ground enough can be found it’s certain to be covered with tents. And I learn there are still more coming from all points of the Union. In the name of heaven let no person that you can influence even come to this wretched country.”

  Some of the best Arkansawyers would come home poorer than they had left. One leading Fayettevillian, Isaac Murphy, a future governor of Arkansas, came home flat broke. According to Buster and Margaret Price, California is where most of the erstwhile residents of Sulphur City now live. Indeed, more of the former citizens of the lost cities of Arkansas live in California than in all other locations put together.

  After recovering from the near death mentioned above, Peter Mankins, perhaps through dint of more elbow grease than any of the other Argonauts used, came home from California with, according to the best accounts, $3,750. The figure varies with the reporter. His descendant and chronicler, Louisa Personkins, insists that it was over $6,000; other stories put it at $4,500; whatever, it was more than most, better than average. He could afford to take the long but easy way home, a two-month sea voyage down to Panama and a crossing of the Isthmus, followed by another voyage across the Gulf to his old familiar stomping grounds at New Orleans; from there he went by steamboat to Ozark and thence home, where in a timeworn gesture he upended a bag and dumped all of his gold in a cascade of yellow by the glittering yellow light on the kitchen table, for everyone to see. Everyone except his mother, Rachel, who had died.

  “During the nights, yellow was the prevailing color in my dreams,” Peter told Narcissa, and he continued to dream yellow in other forms for the rest of his life, especially in autumns, when the trails of the Middle Fork would be lined with yellow weed flowers—black-eyed Susans, tickseeds and sneezeweed—and then again in the spring.

  In the springtime yellow is the first to appear: jonquils and daffodils, crocuses and yellow tulips, forsythia and dandelion. Yellow is the easiest of all colors to detect from afar, and these early buds get the bee: the wakening worker bee herself, dressed in yellow pinafore, spots the yellow pollen and carries out the symbiotic flower-bee sex stroke, getting and giving, and going home to the hive with yellow buskins to make nectar into honey (yellow) and wax (yellow) and to feed the yellow queen.

  One of the only colors of late evening and darkening night is yellow: the lightning bug’s light. The peep of dawn is yellow, and so are the peeping canary, the goldfinch, and the school bus. Yellow says, “It’s coming!” Yellow warns that the red light is coming, the school bus is coming, the spring is coming. Yellow in the rainbow says fair weather is coming. Yellow is the middle, central color band of the rainbow’s colors. Yellow is a coming color.

  (Parenthesis: yellow is not only the color of the first light of sunrise, but also the color of dusk. One of the loveliest words of English, from Old English, is “gloaming,” which comes from the same root, ghel, as yellow, and means literally “yellowtime.” “Daybreak” is another lovely word, and a yellow one. As a word, “corn” looks like corn, and is yellow, like corn on the cob, and produces an abundance of good yellow things: bourbon whiskey, corn-bread, cereal, syrup, tamales and tacos, cob pipes and feed for hogs and chickens, waffles with yellow butter, salad oil, and corn-starch. Many edibles are yellow: squash, lemons, grapefruit, bananas. Peter Mankins père et fils never had any of the latter three items; indeed, it is told of a hillman having his very first banana and asked what he thought of it that he replied: “Wal, when I got it shucked and threw away the cob, there weren’t much left.”)

  According to Jungian psychology, among the various functions of the mind, yellow represents the function of intuition, the function that grasps as in a flash of illumination the origins and tendencies of happenings, hence also the intellect and magnanimity—Apollonian qualities, not by coincidence. Yellow is bright but also dignified and serene. This book is the story of communities that aspired to dignity and achieved serenity; thus this digression on the color yellow is necessary if prolix. It is leading up to something, or someone.

  Sulphur is yellow. So, if Sulphur City had its own banner, a heraldic pennant to wave perhaps from the mast of the Prices’ TV antenna, or from the tallest cedar in Reese Cemetery, the tinctures of the escutcheon’s field would be yellow. All the blazonry would be yellow (or or, gold). All emblazoned and bespangled with timeless radiance, the flag would furl and billow over this little city that sought dignity and found serenity.

  Something or someone led up to: blonde is yellow hair. See her riding in Buster Price’s pickup truck, on a very cold winter’s day, riding down to the Great Meadow where the Mankins house once stood, and the chimney stood longer, until Buster took it down and stacked it in his back yard. Buster is a stout man in both senses, strong and bulky; or in all three: add-determined, bold, or brave. Buster has shown her the pile of stones he hopes to use for a patio one day. Now he intends to show her the lone tree in the big pasture where his cows graze, the tree beneath which lies buried the pet deer (according to some, merely a pet goat) of Rachel, Old Pete’s first wife, buried with Rachel, who against all custom and reason was buried beside the house. Throughout this book of lost cities, we will find that the graveyards were usually established a considerable distance from the town, as if, far from memento mori, the citizens wanted to forget death, or at least have no daily reminders of it. Reese Cemetery, where so many of the Mankinses and their kin have moldered, is a good country mile as the vulture flies from downtown Sulphur City. Yet Rachel and her pet deer/goat turned to dust in a grave excavated practically in the back yard of her home. Why? See the girl with yellow hair looking down at the roots
of the tree that is the only, belated memorial or marker for Rachel’s grave. She is thinking about Rachel and wondering simply if it was a goat or a deer, or perhaps wondering why Rachel was buried here so close beside the site of the house.

  The girl with yellow hair, to whom all this something has led, is named Kim, who additionally has blue eyes and is very tall and is a teacher of ninth-grade civics and tenth-grade English in Beebe, Arkansas. She was married to a farmer eight years her senior, and the civics textbook she is required to teach is so dull that she would do anything to escape it. They have to study cities, of course, because “civics” means pertaining to cities. They have to study city government and city planning and the grid system and all that. Beebe isn’t much of a city, and some of the kids haven’t even seen Little Rock, thirty miles away. Kim once thought of asking the kids to draw their ideal concept of a city, to plan one on paper, an assignment not in the teachers’ resource book. The results were predictable. Kim knows enough of cities, Little Rock and Memphis, to know what is ideal and what isn’t. She is urbane, in the sense of civil, polite, even elegant in her manners. But she speaks the language of Buster and Margaret Price, and is very good at asking them questions about Sulphur City.

  When Peter Mankins was very old—Old Pete the Younger, Peter Junior the First American Cowboy, the Gold Rusher, and, as we shall see, the Civil War Hero—when, as the century ended, he was old and in the grip of grippe and dying, he sold all his land to Buster’s grandfather, fellow native of Paintsville, Kentucky, who farmed it and then left it to Buster’s mother, who farmed it and left it to Buster’s brother, who left it to Buster, who farms it still.