The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night—We talked between the Rooms—Until the Moss had reached our lips—And covered up—our names—

  wrote Emily in 1862, when the moss had long since covered any trace of Everard’s name. A bachelor as she was a spinster, he was still a comparatively young man of thirty-three, the age at which Christ was crucified, when he realized that he would spend his life as a poor shop clerk in Hartford unless he did something drastic. In 1848, gold had not yet been discovered in California. Horace Greeley had not yet enjoined such shop clerks to “go west.” (Greeley in fact cribbed this quote from one John Soule in the Terre Haute, Indiana, Express of 1851, three years after Everard went west to Arkansas.) Everard left New England in the spring of 1848, determined to escape forever the clerical class that his station and training had predestined for him. It takes a lot of footloose shop clerks to blaze a frontier.

  Everard was industrious but not particularly adventurous, and he wanted to find a relatively “safe” wilderness where he could become a small-business man without being eaten up by bears or scalped by Indians. He chose Arkansas primarily on hearsay: it was a frontier without being an especially dangerous one. Just how he wound up in Buffalo City, which had recently received its hopeful name either from William Hogan or the one other man living there at the time, William Moreland, is not certain. Soon after arrival, he wrote to his parents:

  The roads are bad and there is no stage route to this place and the only way travellers can get along is on horseback. This is a wild, romantic region of country and has been but little known about until within a few years. Although this place is called a city, there are only 4 male inhabitants in it; myself and Mr. Hogan of the firm of Hogan and Tunstall and the old man Wm. Moreland and his son, and their families.

  Italics added: even though the place was “best known by the name of Buffalo Shoals” (one more of its many appellations), the name had already been changed to Buffalo City by one of the two Bills, Hogan or old Moreland, likely the latter, “the proprietor of this city,” with whom Everard and Bill Hogan were boarding. Moreland had settled at the Shoals in 1829, just ten years after the first white settler, Major Jacob Wolf of Kentucky, had come into the area as President Thomas Jefferson’s appointee to serve as Indian agent and maintain peace between the Arkansas Cherokees and Osages.

  Jacob Wolf, about whom a major book remains to be written, built the still-standing, oldest house in Arkansas a few miles downstream, at Norfork (which he called Liberty): a majestic two-story dogtrot (or “saddlebag”) log cabin with four great rooms, each eighteen feet square, one of the upper ones serving for many years as the courthouse. From the porch of this house, Jacob Wolf dealt both with the red residents of Tse-do Ton-won who brought furs and peltry in exchange for weapons and whiskey, and with the white immigrants like Everard Dickinson who came up the river in search of places for settlement. Quite possibly the landscape around Major Wolf’s settlement at Norfork reminded Everard of the hills around his boyhood home at Belchertown, south of Amherst in Massachusetts. The westering pioneer often stops and settles when he finds a visual reminder of home.

  Jake Wolf took a shine to Everard and tried to persuade him to stay, and this friendship remained in the back of Everard’s mind throughout his early experiences at Buffalo City. He wrote to his parents that if he should decide to leave Buffalo City and go back to Norfork,

  I shall board with old Major Jacob Wolf, one of the oldest settlers in this country and bearing the name of a strictly honest and honourable man—he lived here for years when the country was inhabited by Indians and always retained their respect and good will. I have been down to see the old Major and he says if I will come down he will have the house put in good repair and send his ferry boat up after my things—when the water will admit. If I move, I will let you know—and I think now, I shall go there as it is more of a publick place and there are some very good settlements up the North fork and below on White River the trade of which I shall get and here at Buffalo City we are so hemmed in by mountains that the nearest settler to us (out back) is 5 miles off. But I think one day there will be a considerable town here at this very spot. [His italics]

  But his new host, old Mr. Moreland, had taken an even greater liking to him, and offered him free board in exchange for help on his farm and the possibility of getting Everard interested in his eighteen-year-old daughter, Agness, who was illiterate and backward in other ways, including her appearance.

  Whether Everard had ever had a crush on his cousin Emily (not likely) or (more likely) remained stuck on another cousin, the flirtatious Clarissa Stebbins of Northampton, Massachusetts, his “sweet-pretty” for whom he had long had a hankering but was too poor to propose, his dream of a new life in the frontier wilderness, where there was no poverty because everyone was equally poor, must have included fantasies of an exquisite, primitive pioneer daughter who would homespin his clothes and cook his venison and warm his shuck mattress. Agness Moreland did in fact cut and sew a pair of homespun pants for Everard, for which she charged him only 50¢, and she did his laundry for $1.50 a month, but the food she served him consisted of two items, which he was not able to distinguish, and their conversation was severely limited, not because she was shy but because she knew of nothing to talk about. “That’s cornbread,” she explained, “and that’s hawg meat,” she added, and had nothing whatever else to say.

  “I see you’ve met Agness,” Bill Hogan said to him, when first they met, and merely pointed to the pants Everard was wearing. Perhaps Hogan recognized the fabric, or the style, or the cut. The two men—Everard was six years older—hit it off splendidly from the beginning, although Hogan was clearly going to be competition for whatever mercantile operations Dickinson had in mind. Hogan boarded with the Morelands and, like them and so many other new Arkansawyers, had come from Tennessee. He bought supplies from Major Wolf and resold them to settlers in remote parts of the White River country. Occasionally he made purchasing trips to Memphis, and offered to take Everard along on his next one.

  Business at Buffalo City was slow—one customer a week was considered heavy trade—and Hogan spent most of his time hunting and fishing, two activities he began to share with Everard. They hiked for miles together over “the foot of the spurs of the Ozark mountains,” as Everard called them in his letters home.

  I believe I had rather live out in these mountains and enjoy the free mountain air and be an independent man—with a buckskin hunting shirt on and leather breeches—than wear a ruffle shirt and silk stockings and be a hireling and a slave, as all poor people are in those old thick settled countries.

  He explained that gold and silver were the only “circulation” and that money was scarce; a man couldn’t do a large business for cash and it wouldn’t do to give credit. “I never intend to sell goods on a credit any more.” He traded directly for peltry, bear skins, otter skins, “and etc., and took in about 40 fur skins yesterday.” The reader of his letters to his parents surmises that he had gotten himself into real trouble in his job back home in Hartford by giving credit, and more recently gotten himself into trouble in Memphis by overextending his own credit with a “Mr. Candee,” who had supplied him for the wilderness. William Moreland offered to help him out of debt to Mr. Candee in return for a vague pledge that Everard might settle permanently in Buffalo City and perhaps take Agness off the old man’s hands.

  Credit is both the bane and the boon of aspiring cities, and citizens. Forty years before, Goethe had observed, “Let us live in as small a circle as we will, we are either debtors or creditors before we have had time to look around.” Buffalo City was a very small circle, and Everard had scarcely had time to look around before he was in debt to both Moreland and Hogan. Without mentioning Agness, he told his parents of the little problems he faced: winter was coming on, and his log store had no chimney; to have one built would cost him $25, which he did not have; he needed a well dug, which would cost him another $25; he could draw water from the river, but
the banks were too steep and slippery, especially after a rain. For all his frontiersman spirit, Everard was apparently too much a weak man-about-town to build his own chimney, dig his own well, or clamber up and down the bank for water. Is not a “city,” after all, a place where one can pay to have others do these things?

  He was full of the future. In one letter he suggested his parents might want to come and join him (as Peter Mankins had done). His brother William had recently died at home; the other brother, Henry, had gone to far-off Wisconsin (perhaps to found the town called Buffalo City there); Everard was guiltstricken at the thought of his now childless parents at home. “If you choose to come here and live with me, I will try and make a living for us all,” he wrote to them, although “this is entirely too new and wild a country to suit you.” Mr. Moreland invited him to try his hand at farming during the September harvest: “I have been out binding oats and gathering corn once or twice. I begin to think I should like farming very well…. You can buy a good cow for six or seven dollars and hogs are a dollar a head.”

  But he had to make the ultimate choice between being a countryman and a townsman. Land was his for the asking; he explained to his parents the phenomenon of “preemption,” whereby he could pick out a parcel of land, build a cabin on it, raise corn, and pay no taxes for the rest of his life—but he couldn’t build his own chimney, let alone a cabin. Daily he felt that he had stepped too far into the back country without any training for it. A century and a quarter later he would be followed by hordes of “back-to-the-land,” counterculture young people, who would meet similar obstacles and face similar difficult choices…and give up.

  Everard Dickinson gave up, or retreated a bit, back down the river to Major Wolf’s settlement at Norfork, the “more of a publick place” where he would not have to worry about chimneys and wells and Agness. There were more girls in Norfork; he wrote his parents that he kept on the lookout for a chance “to hug and kiss the gals a little” and expected to marry soon. But his dream of a mate seems to have been as airy as the dream of gold that in the year of 1849 began to infect all the settlers and draw half of them to California.

  His very last letter to his parents, in June 1850, ends with a postscript: “I may go to California (but do not say I even think of it).” On this page of the letter, ten years later, his mother wrote in her own hand, “read over by his Mother alone in her house.” What happened to him? Quite possibly he went on to California, or tried to, and joined the hundreds who perished there or on the way.

  “But do not say I even think of it.” That ambivalence, that conflict between his will to change his luck and his fear of the unknown, lost him to this story even as it made him this story’s classic example of faded ambition, of the futility of aspiration or mere anticipation, of the vanity of dreams. Everard personifies Buffalo City itself: divided, irresolute, and temporary.

  The town went on without him, though. Maybe William Hogan married Agness, for want of anyone better, but there is no further record of him except the lone tombstone marking his death a few years later, at the age of thirty-five. If he sired a child who lived to become Kim’s ancestor, there is no proof at all.

  The Ozark mountaineer, fiercely independent and almost reclusive by nature, traditionally avoided the city, even the would-be city, as a sink of corruption and iniquity, and he looked upon city dwellers as contemptible wastrels of a different race. Everard Dickinson could not have defined it for his parents, but his expedition into Arkansas was doomed in advance by the rural population’s distaste for the epithet “city.” Never mind that Buffalo City would not amount even to a hamlet for some years to come; its name repelled countless backwoodsmen who wanted nothing to do with any urban manifestation.

  Everard had gone on to try his fortune elsewhere when the first steamboat arrived at Buffalo City, in the 1850s. The steamboat is a kind of floating city, and some of them were even christened as such: Queen City, Delta City, Mound City, Empire City. These very names frightened off the hill folk who had not already been frightened by the roar of the engines, the whistles, the sight of black people on deck. Even today, the popular imagination refuses to associate the steamboat with the backwoods mountains and sees it instead chugging down the broad, level expanses of the Mississippi. Flat delta country is the abode of the big boat, just as the flat plain is the abode of the buffalo, and flat land is the “natural” habitat of the black man.

  Indeed, Buffalo City was as far as the steamboat could ever penetrate upstream into the hills. The shoals at Buffalo City were too shallow. Some accounts of the fragile history of the place indicate that Buffalo City came into existence because it was there that the steamboats had to dock before or after turning around. In fact, the keelboat and the barge had antedated the steamboat by years, and there was a landing waiting for the first steamboat when it came.

  The steamboat was responsible for splitting Buffalo City, amoebalike, into two cells. The only advantage that the other Buffalo City, the second one, had over the older, western location is that it was just a bit closer downstream to the steamboat, which did not have to approach the shoals to turn around there, on the east side of the river. In the bustling days of the late 1850s, just before the Civil War broke out, this division of the city into two halves created in equal parts a spirit of competition and a sense of confusion. On the western bank, at the older location, Captain John Quisenbury began to develop the Port of Buffalo City, surveying the town into lots, marketing choice riverfront lots ($150 each), and building a hotel and tavern called Shoal House, which would be a stagecoach stop to take the steamboat passengers and freight into the interior of the remote Ozarks.

  At almost the same time, across the river, another immigrant from Tennessee, young Jonathan Cunningham, bought and cleared five hundred acres of land and established a rival steamboat landing, as well as the indispensable gristmill, which the west bank did not have. It would be too pat to say that if Everard Dickinson personifies one Buffalo City, in its older days, then Jonathan Cunningham personifies the other, newer one; but the separate identities of the two Buffalo Cities do reflect the differences between the two men. Cunningham, who was only twenty-two when he left Tennessee, refusing his mother’s offer of sixteen slaves to accompany him because he had come to Arkansas to escape the institution of slavery, was a strong person, in both body and spirit, and he endured. Sickly as a child, he was nursed into strength by slaves, who would carry him out into the shade of a tree to cool his fevers until after dark, when he would lie studying the stars, learning their names and movements in order to prepare for his dream of becoming a steamboat pilot and navigating by the direction of the stars. It is a romantic image. Though Jonathan never became a steamboat pilot, he did become a harbormaster at his landing in the new Buffalo City, and remained so opposed to slavery that he would not permit the steamboats carrying slaves to land at his side of the river.

  Thus the split between the cities reflected in microcosm the split between the sides in the Civil War, and Jonathan Cunningham’s own part in that war symbolizes the North’s opposition to the South. East Buffalo City is not only east but also north of West Buffalo City. Back home in Tennessee, two of Cunningham’s brothers joined the Confederate Army. He, like the majority of Ozarkers, walked to Springfield, Missouri, and joined the Union Army.

  Though one major skirmish of the Civil War occurred in Buffalo City (West), there is no evidence that the participants were from opposite sides of the river in the same town; that would carry the microcosm idea too far. Just as many of the ablebodied men in Baxter County on the eastern side of the river fought for the South, and just as many of those on the western side fought for the North, and they were fighting not because any of them supported or opposed slavery but because of clan loyalties and misplaced chauvinism and simply an urge to fight.

  When the fighting was all over, Jonathan Cunningham returned to Buffalo City to discover that his home and businesses had been destroyed and that the worst part of the war
was just beginning: the looting and pillaging by bushwhackers, jayhawkers, and other freelance guerrillas. For the Ozarks at large, this was the ugliest aspect of the entire conflict. As if the war itself had not satisfied the urge of men to kill and torture, the former soldiers—called “bushwhackers” if they had worn gray and “jayhawkers” if they had worn blue, but otherwise not distinguishable one from another—turned their aggressions away from the ordered battlefield and focused them on the innocent, neutral, and helpless citizens. The old, the sick, the female, and the young were the victims of this strange episode of sadism. The horror stories Jonathan Cunningham heard from his wife when he returned home were worse than anything he had seen in the war.

  After restoring his farm to life, rebuilding his landing and its warehouse, and putting the gristmill back into operation, he established a whiskey distillery, as if to satisfy a most urgent need for elixir against the memories of the war. To make his product available to his crossriver neighbors in Old Buffalo City, he established a ferryboat, which continued to operate until modern times. But even with this link between the two sides of the community (there was never a literal bridge, not even a pontoon), the rivalry and enmity between them only continued.

  All over America, “sister” cities grew up despising one another. The residents of Kansas City, Missouri, have no use for their neighbors in Kansas City, Kansas; in St. Louis they make terrible jokes about the people in East St. Louis, Illinois. Minneapolis and St. Paul, together at the head of Mississippi navigation, are not only hostile but of different religions, the one Protestant, the other Catholic. San Francisco and Oakland hate each other. When the cities are separated by a national boundary, the problem is worse: El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico, have a real problem in their interpersonal relationships, while Nogales, Mexico, and Nogales, Arizona, are scarcely on speaking terms, in Spanish or English. Children in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, are told that if they are bad they will go not to hell but to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.