The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Kim asks Buster, “What did the house look like?” Buster shows her the foundation stones, half buried in pasture sod and half obscured by weeds. Buster says the house had two stories, of hewed logs, with a T attached to the back containing the kitchen and dining room. This house plan, with living room or parlor in front and bedrooms upstairs, was very old, and can be traced readily not only to Kentucky and Tennessee, but also to North Carolina and Virginia and from there back to medieval England. Probably it was not a double pen, a “pair cottage,” or a dogtrot, because of the T where the breezeway would be. Probably it was no more comfortable or presentable than any other log house; it was merely much larger. It was not a log cabin but a log castle, and few other comparable examples exist in the history of Arkansas architecture: the famous Wolf house of Norfork comes closest. Peter Mankins (the both of them) built it so large not simply because the family was populous but because they wanted to show off, which has been the motive during immemorial time of people who overdevelop their real estate. The Middle Fork valley was filling up with Lewises, Fines, Van Hooses, Dickersons, Carters, Ballards, and Crawfords, most of whom were Mankins kin by blood or marriage, and it was important for the Peters to maintain superiority. Old Peter could never forget the impression of Mount Vernon. Not many years after the Mankins mansion in its valley setting passed into desuetude and fell, some modern people with unlimited money built a castle, a fortress really, on a nearby hilltop, where they can lord it over all creation. Several pages later on, Kim will take a look at “Raheen,” which actually means “fortress” in Gaelic. The intentions of the Mankinses were not at all unlike the intentions of the Alexanders, who built the latter-day castle.

  Most of that $3,750 from the California gold fields went into home improvement, or overdevelopment of the real estate, until there was no question that Peter Mankins was the boss squire of the White River, and it was about this time that people of the valley, which was filling up with people, forgot that the place had ever been designated as New Prospect and began referring to it simply as Mankins, in honor of the boss squire and his sire of the same name. Justifiably, Old and Young (now nearing forty) Pete could refer to their land, their town, their village, as “me.” Throughout the Ozarks, in the mellifluous language endemic to the natives, “me” meant not simply the person in his awareness of himself but the person in his property, his whole habitat, as when he would say something like “That thar rail fence is right on me,” or “The creek come down and throwed gravel all over me.”

  “Aint we a sight?” Boss Squire Pete asked his sire one day, apropos of nothing and without any reference to their physical persons but, rather, in observation of the land, the land itself. This was a rhetorical question, and the Elder Pete answered it with a question: “Aint we, though?”

  Old Pete still plowed, and Young Pete plowed all the money he could find into the improvement of Mankins. During the Mormon War of 1857, when Federal troops were sent to Utah to put down the rebellion of the “state of Deseret,” Peter Mankins sold $34,000 worth of beef cattle to the quartermaster supplying the soldiers’ food, personally delivering the herds. He also drove herds to Chicago and to Westport, Missouri, the latter a small platted village that Mankins helped to transform into a city and rename Kansas City, which became the largest of all American places bearing the “City” name—next, of course, to New York City. The cattle trail from Texas to Kansas City remained known to drovers and insiders for the rest of the century as “the old Mankins trail.” This never got into any history books, however, and there is no monument to Peter Mankins in any park or civic area in Kansas City, an oversight that ought to be remedied by the public officials of those double cities in Kansas and Missouri, perhaps by erecting a statue—which would have to be purely conjectural, since no image of Peter Mankins actually exists.

  Year after year Peter Mankins was gone from Mankins for long stretches of time on these far-flung cowboying expeditions, which always resulted in a pouch of gold emptied and pyramided on the family dining table. When in due course he grew tired of cows and their dumb, questioning faces, he became interested in human chattels, whose faces might be dumb but never questioning, only compliant. There were a number of wealthy townspeople in Fayetteville who owned these pitchy-skinned persons for the purpose of toil, and some of the well-to-do Cherokee had taken slaves with them to the California gold fields, where nearly all of them died from shit work, but Peter Mankins knew only a few farmers hereabouts who used niggers in the field. Farther south, in flatland Arkansas, however, they were in great demand, in greater demand than the supply available, and Peter discovered after his cattle drives to Kansas City and Chicago that there was a surplus supply of these dark folks running around with nothing to do and on the market dirt cheap; he began buying them up in droves and driving them South. Dark-complexioned drudge-type people were a lot easier to drive than cows or hogs, and thus Peter Mankins, after years as a hogboy and many years as a cowboy, became a blackboy. Never questioning the philosophy of slavery, he thrived and prospered, and stocked the plantations of the South with all the blacks they could hold, although many were sold on a time-payment plan. There is a book waiting to be written about Peter Mankins in his most profitable career, which terminated one day when, stopping in Fayetteville with a wagonload of slaves, he discovered his little city occupied by dozens of United States soldiers. Some of these men were the same ones who had been sent to Utah to put down the rebellion of Mormons who wanted to be independent. Now they were putting down the rebellion of Arkansawyers who wanted to secede from the Union. Mankins couldn’t unload his cargo of chattels, so he turned them loose in a wooded hollow just east of the town square, where they stayed and thrived and multiplied. They called their hollow Tin Cup, which it remains today, the only black ghetto in northwest Arkansas.

  Northwest Arkansas was overwhelmingly pro-Union, and the nine thousand Arkansawyers who fought as Federals in the Civil War were all from this part of the state, but Peter Mankins knew that if the North won the war he could never hope to collect what was owed him for the slaves he had sold on credit to plantation owners. His kinsmen of the Middle Fork were indifferent and neutral but spoiling for excitement, and when he offered to outfit them for battle at his own expense, nearly a hundred of them agreed to wear the Confederate gray and follow Boss Reb Mankins into the carnival atmosphere of the summer of 1861.

  Just why Captain P. M. Mankins, CSA, resigned his commission almost immediately is a great mystery. The various histories of the Civil War in Arkansas merely report that he “turned his company over to Colonel W. H. Brooks.” His reasons must remain speculative, and the death in 1861 of his favorite daughter, Millie, at the age of fifteen had nothing to do with it; more probably Narcissa, pure Yankee by birth, was, despite his extensive involvement in the slave trade (which quite likely he kept secret from her), a staunch abolitionist and a loyal Unionist and was outraged by her husband’s spending money to outfit a band of Rebels. Few women had any influence on their husbands in the Civil War, but somehow Narcissa may have swayed Pete. He could not stay in the background for long, however; probably all unbeknown to Narcissa, he sneaked off and raised a band of guerrillas—or bushwhackers, as they were called—who eschewed all standards of military conduct to harass and kill not only the Union troops but also the Union sympathizers in the civilian population of northwest Arkansas. In time, this population generally knew of Pete’s involvement, and in their attempts to find him and stop him the Federals arrested his father and tortured the ninety-one-year-old Pete for three days in an attempt to get him to confess his son’s whereabouts. “They would never’ve got a thing out of me,” Old Pete told Narcissa, who nursed him back to a semblance of health, but then took sick herself and began dying. Of Young Pete’s actual wartime activities, the usually invaluable mass publicist Goodspeed (1891) says only, “In 1863 he swam the Arkansas River with 300 soldiers shooting at him all the time.” This has been fleshed out by various imaginations, including P
eter’s own, but let the Goodspeed line stand as it is, unembellished.

  When Peter escaped and returned home, Narcissa was dead. He buried her in Reese Cemetery and was never quite the same man again.

  The rest is not very exciting. The South lost the war. Peter lost almost all his money. Peter’s only subsequent office was a stint as county coroner in 1866-68, to which he was elected without further qualification than his lack of squeamishness in the presence of dead bodies. Though he resumed raising sulphur-drinking cattle and hogs, he never drove them anywhere any more. He had nothing further to do with Negroes, and never stopped when he passed through Tin Cup on his way up to downtown Fayetteville. He took a second wife, a pretty woman eleven years his junior named Easter (or Esther) Hanna Gilliland, a widow. (Old Peter had also taken a widow as a second wife, and when she died he took another widow as his third wife, and when some customary reporter interviewing him customarily on his hundredth birthday asked him why he had married three widows, he was unable to give any satisfactory reason. He did, however, answer the customary question about how he had achieved such longevity: every morning he took a “tonic” of a dram of good whiskey mixed with yellow-root bitters and administered the same tonic to each member of his family.)

  How does a legend live out his years? The one-time football hero, the fading movie star, the former president, the one-shot best-selling novelist—how do they face the endless empty denouement of their later lives? How does a once-flourishing town aspiring to call itself “City” endure the long days of its decline?

  In 1876 the United States designated Mankins Post Office, and the Baptist Reverend Johnson Crawford in the same year established the first general-merchandise store. There were three churches in the village. Peter Mankins, always nominally a Baptist like his father, began to attend worship services at the church where his father was a deacon (despite his daily dose of whiskey, even on Sunday mornings), and read the Bible sometimes or suffered it to be read to him; he also took a great interest in politics, in which he was a Democrat. Devotion to the church had no more effect on his consumption of whiskey than it did on his father’s, and his righteousness gave him no regret for his earlier treatment of Indians and Negroes. He had a few close friends, with whom he sat many hours on the porch of the general store, swapping yarns and wartime reminiscences and speculating about what the world was coming to. He resisted invitations to join the newly formed Masons, a dull, stodgy collection of brethren, and he resisted efforts to borrow his name for the membership rolls of the more rambunctious IOOF, or Odd Fellows (whose name, contrary to popular belief, comes not from their peculiarities or eccentricities but simply from their status as exceptions to the ordinary conventions of fraternalism). He was still boss squire of the Middle Fork valley, despite having lost most of his fortune in the war; in fact, because he was just as poor as everyone else, he seemed to be more popular than when he had been a rich man. James Mitchell, an editor of the Arkansas Gazette of Little Rock, then as now one of the most distinguished, literate, and intelligent newspapers in the country, and “the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi,” visited “the oldest man in Arkansas” as Peter Senior’s 107th birthday was approaching, and sat on the porch and interviewed him, although he was quite deaf and the younger Pete had to serve more or less as an interpreter. “His memory, as would naturally be expected,” Mitchell wrote, “is very defective, except as to the events of his early life, which he says are all clear and complete.” Actually, nothing had happened to him since the war, so he had nothing to report. The editor stayed around for both dinner and supper and an all-afternoon interview in between, and reported that Old Pete had an excellent appetite, had never had a decayed tooth in his life, ate heartily of boiled cabbage and bacon at dinner, but had only bread and milk at supper. Of the son Mitchell wrote, “Pete is not satisfied with Arkansas, but says he feels it to be his duty to remain and take care of his father as long as he lives.”

  His father lived for several more years; Old Pete’s only disappointment in his very last years was that he had outlived all of his enemies and had no one to argue with. Three months after his 111th birthday, at the end of 1881, he took sick, and Peter Junior attended him in his last hours, gave him his last cup of water, and listened to his last breath. All of the dining tables of Middle Fork were brought to the Great Meadow and set up, reaching from the house all the way to the river, and covered with new white cloths; seven hundred pounds of beef, mutton, and pork were barbecued, along with hundreds of chickens. Nobody attempted to count the people who attended the funeral feast, but of these, half a thousand attempted to crowd into Reese Cemetery for the burial. Peter Senior lies buried beneath tall stately cedars (parenthesis: he was born beneath cedars at Cedar Point, Maryland) and one of those curious coffin-shaped cenotaphs, which is inscribed merely with his name and his astonishing age at death.

  There is an identical cenotaph adjoining it but without inscription. City and family historians, among them the opinionated Louisa Personkins, insist that this unmarked cenotaph covers the grave of Peter Junior, but Young Pete was not that devoted to the old man, who probably contrived to have the remains of his second and favorite widow/wife, Sabra, interred on his right side. The male cedar tree blooms in January, Kim notices: when it blooms, masses of yellow pollen produced in the small catkins appear to turn the tree a golden-yellow color, emblematic of the males buried beneath it (yes, Young Peter is in there somewhere).

  What question editor Mitchell asked Young Pete that made the editor conclude in public print that Young Pete was not satisfied with Arkansas cannot be imagined; in any case, Old Pete, as Young Pete was now known, showed no inclination to leave Arkansas after his father’s death. Rather, he became more and more interested in the woolgatherings and castle buildings of the townsmen who wanted to turn the place into a booming resort or spa. The individual, like the nation as a whole, goes through periodic cycles of obsession and indifference toward health, and the gilded age of the 1880s saw a mass mania over magic water, or ablutomania, a bathing craze. Whereas our own gilded eighties, a hundred years later, are witnessing the apogee of the jogging craze, the people of a century ago, who wouldn’t jog their way out of a burning building, eagerly subjected themselves to long hours of submersion in any water that looked, smelled, tasted, or felt funny. The entrepreneurs of the town of Mankins sought to capitalize upon the poorly kept secret that the town had four springs: a sulphur spring, a warm spring, an alkali or soda spring, and a limestone spring. None of these springs amounted to more than a trickle or percolation from the permeable rock strata of the village slopes, and there was only one sulphur spring, whose flow was scarcely enough to keep a few cows happy and the citizens without tooth decay, but the entrepreneurs, with or without permission from Peter, changed the town’s name from Mankins to Sulphur Springs, in the plural, and began widely advertising the curative and restorative powers of their water, good for the treatment of rheumatism, gout, liver trouble, blood ailments, dyspepsia, and even cancer. They mailed a formal request to the Post Office Department concerning the name change. They painted signs pointing to Sulphur Springs and planted them all over the county. A bright yellow carriage inscribed “Sulphur Springs Transportation Company” was set up to bring passengers from the new train station at Elkins. A jerry-built bathhouse with adjoining guest cottages, ancestor of the motel, was erected over the sulphur spring, although there was scarcely enough flow of water to cover the whole body and the baths were limited to footbaths at one foot per half-hour. A third blacksmith shop opened to handle the traffic. Dr. John C. Carter (who deserves a whole book to himself) of the nearby community of Carter’s Store, where he had his own post office, general store (still standing but fast falling; see illustration) and clinic (ditto, but not pictured), geared up the clinic to handle patients who needed not merely a bath but also blood-letting, leeching, or other medical attention. In due course, the Post Office Department replied with the information that there was already a Sul
phur Springs post office in Benton County, to the north. Most of the Sulphurites were in favor of restoring the name Mankins, but Peter himself pointed out that such a name would draw no health seekers, and he proposed the name Sulphur City, which the Post Office Department accepted and designated. (Both the actual Sulphur Springs and especially Eureka Springs, founded in the magic year of 1886, were well on their way to becoming thriving resorts, and cities of sorts.)

  Business at the Sulphur City springs was never brisk, and the bathhouse was used more frequently as a kind of community center or polling place for school elections, gubernatorial elections, the elections of Grover Cleveland (twice), and the defeats of William Jennings Bryan (twice). Since it took the one small bathtub, carved from rock, nearly an hour to fill with five gallons of sulphur water, only the cows seemed to have the patience to wait that long; for hour upon hour they would stand and sip the water as it came out.

  A city founded upon such little expectation cannot flourish, but Peter Mankins remembered enough of the work of his youth to survey the place into twenty-four city blocks of twelve lots each, just as he had done to Fayetteville a half-century before, but this time hollering “Stick!” and letting others holler “Stuck!” (Years hence, movies will be made about the life of Peter Mankins, when the genre of the “Western” has died of atrophied realism and been replaced by a new genre called “Ozarkern”; climactic scenes will show Old Pete standing in the pastures above the village, peering through a surveyor’s transit and waving his arms overhead.) Peter Mankins is not in any wise to be blamed for it, but there is something offensive and unnatural about the plat plan for Sulphur City, with its perfectly ordered rows of lots like barracks or tombstones in a military cemetery. All organic sense is lost, replaced by whatever sense of power the platter-planner feels. Fortunately, perhaps, there were no takers, no buyers of the lots. The city died in its cage of even streets and alleys. Even Cherokee City, of our next chapter, which met a similar fate, at least had three hotels of sorts. Sulphur City never got its expected hotel. Year after year, the town’s local correspondent to the Fayetteville newspaper, George Van Hoose, a Mankins nephew and as good a country reporter as ever mailed in his weekly observations of crop failures, funerals, visits, and permanent departures, would declare, “We haven’t got our hotel built yet,” and “The hotel has not yet been built,” and “Our hotel remains built only in the air,” and “The timbers of the hotel remain growing in the forest.”