The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  He cannot check out any of the new books he finds, but he can copy pages on the library’s Xerox machine, and he stands feeding nickels and dimes into it, amassing an armload of pages, all kinds of information about gold, its historical significance, the mining of it, legends, the psychology of gold seeking, etc.

  His last nickel he spends to copy a page from a 1948 issue of Colorado Magazine, an article entitled “Garland City, Railroad Terminus, 1878,” a reprinted letter by Mormon colonizer John Morgan (1842-94). The Garland City of which he writes is not our Garland City, but one in Colorado; still, what he says might serve as an envoi here: “Soon Garland will be a thing of the past and only battered oyster cans, cast-off clothing, old shoes, and debris generally will mark the site of where once stood a flourishing city, with its hotels, its stores, its theatre comique, etc.” All because it was losing to another town farther down the line its status as the railroad terminus. Before the pivotal year of 1886 had even begun, that Garland City was already a ghost town.

  Kim has never conducted so many interviews in one day before and she is exhausted. She notices that the walls and ceiling of her room, a plasterboard module close beside the highway, are covered with a textured paint a shade of excremental brown suggestive of the Red River, which she does not plan to cross again. In South Dakota, it is the Big Sioux River that Harrigan will never cross again.

  Bear City, Arkansas

  I need a place to sing, and dancing-room,

  And I have made a promise to my ears

  I’ll sing and whistle romping with the bears.

  —Roethke, “The Dance,” Four for Sir John Davies, 1953

  Eighteen eighty-six, that special year for hope and event, was the year when gold appeared to have been discovered in the Ouachita (pronounced “Washitaw”) Mountains of western Arkansas, near a mountain called Bear and an already existing furniture-making settlement called Rouse’s. The place became Bear City overnight and was to remain a city as long as the hope of gold remained, several years, and then lapse back into a furniture-making settlement, which it still is today, long after the hope of gold here or elsewhere in Arkansas has faded into an old joke.

  Bears and chairs—these are our true themes, not chimerical gold. When Kim puts the two themes together, she cannot help visualizing the three bears of the tale of Goldilocks, each sitting upright in his or her chair. But by the time the first chairs were made at Bear City, there were no bears left to sit in them.

  More than the mythical razorback, the bear is the animal of Arkansas, which for years, before some promotional boosters wanted its license plates adorned with “The Land of Opportunity,” was known far and wide by the nickname “The Bear State.” This was in no small measure due to the most celebrated anecdote ever published about the state, “The Big Bear of Arkansas,” from the 1840s pen of Thomas Bangs Thorpe, and widely circulated by the Spirit of the Times magazine, a kind of nineteenth-century version of Sports Illustrated. The yarn took its title not from the animal but from the man who told it, a mysterious traveler known as the Big Bear, an Arkansas backwoodsman who, returning from New Orleans aboard a Mississippi steamboat, regales his fellow cabin passengers with the story of his hunt for a huge “unhuntable bar” (as “bear” was, and sometimes still is, pronounced). Big Bear, after many failures to catch the big bear, is surprised by it one morning while in the act of relieving himself in the woods near his house and, having his bear rifle at hand, shoots the big bear.

  Instantly the varmint wheeled, gave a yell, and walked through the fence like a falling tree would through a cobweb. I started after, but was tripped up by my inexpressibles, which either from habit, or the excitement of the moment, were about my heels, and before I had really gathered myself up, I heard the old varmint groaning in a thicket near by, like a thousand sinners, and by the time I reached him he was a corpse. [Thorpe’s italics.]

  Big Bear concluded that the eponymous animal, who had eluded all previous attempts by men and dogs to take him, had decided its time had come and permitted itself to be killed by the Big Bear.

  Shortly after its publication in Spirit of the Times, Thorpe’s story appeared on the front page of the Arkansas Gazette, then (1841) as now the most important newspaper in the state, and this recognition seemed to reflect the pride Arkansawyers took in belonging to “The Bear State.” Even before Thorpe’s story, Spirit of the Times had published several bear-hunting tales by the aforementioned C. F. M. Noland of Batesville, promoting the legend of the state’s excess of bears.

  In 1844, the young German novelist-to-be Friedrich Gerstäcker published his Streif- und Jagdzüge durch die Vereinigten Staaten Nordamerikas, a “travel” book that is essentially his story of exciting bear hunts in the wilderness of Arkansas. Although it would not be translated into English for another ten years, when it did appear as Wild Sports in the Far West (Arkansas then was about as far west as one could go without being in Indian territory) it gave Arkansas an international reputation as a sportsman’s paradise in which the bears outnumbered people. Gerstäcker’s first novel, Die Regulatoren in Arkansas, was published two years after his travel book, establishing his reputation as a romantic novelist of adventure in faraway places. The Arkansas “regulator” was a self-appointed law-keeper of a breed later called “vigilante.” If Peter Mankins was the first American cowboy, Gerstäcker was the first writer of “Westerns.” But his fascination with outlaws and frontier justice always took a secondary position to his love of the hunt, particularly the bear hunt, in which he himself had thrilling and hazardous experiences all over Arkansas, though never in the vicinity of Bear City-to-be.

  Arkansas’s reputation as a shooting gallery for bears made life miserable for the animal: by the end of the nineteenth century the bear was nearly extinct. Bear hides, which sold for a dollar in the days of Gerstäcker, Thorpe, and Noland, were no longer used as carpets in every cabin. Bear oil, which once had fueled the lamps of all the settlers, gave way to kerosene, but in its day had been so plentiful that one of Arkansas’s quaintly named villages, Oil Trough, on the White River near Batesville, took its name from the hollowed-out tree trunks that had been packed with huge quantities of bear oil and rafted down to New Orleans. The oil was also used for cooking, grooming the hair, and dressing leather.

  The prevalence of bears in Arkansas, either in reality or imagination, is reflected in the naming of places: though there is only one town called Bear City, there are seven Bear Mountains and a Bear Head Mountain, thirteen Bear Hollows as well as a Bear Spring Hollow, a Little Bear Cave Hollow, a Bear Water Hollow, a Bear Pen Hollow, a Bear Hole Hollow, and a Bear Wallow Hollow; five Bear Bayous, two Bear Branches, four Little Bear Creeks, six Bear Sloughs, four Bear Lakes, a Big Bear Lake and a Little Bear Lake, and a Bear Pond, not to mention a Bear Brake (swamp), Bear Pen Falls, Bear Waller Spring, Little Bear Cave, Bear Spring Gap, Bear Wallow Prong, Bear Wallow Slough, and Bear Island.

  In modern times the State Game and Fish Commission has attempted to restock the woods with bears, and after years of laws forbidding the shooting of any bear, a limited hunting season has been tried, with a “legal kill” averaging only thirty a year. Bears adore honey, and landowners who fear for their beehives have been illegally killing on sight any bears who wander onto their property. Poachers stuff their freezers with illicit cuts of bear carcass. The $1,000 fine for this misdemeanor rarely gets paid. If caught, some hunters claim that they shot in self-defense, but there is no verified record of a bear attacking a human in recent Arkansas history. The state’s present population of bears is fewer than two thousand.

  The human population of Bear City reached two thousand in 1886 but is fewer than fifty now. No bears inhabit the township or the surrounding forests, although the oldest resident, eighty-five-year-old Clarence Jewell, claims that bears have been spotted in modern times. As in Garland City and a few other lost cities, some of the residents drop the “City” and call the place simply “Bear.” Indeed, on the official state highway
map, Bear City appears only as “Bear.” Its identity problems have been further compounded by having for most of its life been in Montgomery County, with little Mount Ida as the county seat, but being de-gerrymandered in modern times eastwardly into Garland County, of which Garland City is no part, and of which Hot Springs is the seat.

  Hot Springs, the sixth-largest city in Arkansas, is perhaps the best-known city outside of the state, after Little Rock, because it contains Hot Springs National Park, which contains the famous hot springs, the federal spa, America’s Baden-Baden, Aix-les-Bains, and Bath. It is a mere eleven miles east of Bear City (sixteen miles before the roads were paved). In 1541 de Soto took a month off from his mad quest for gold to rest and recuperate at these thermal waters. The springs remained the private preserve of Indians until the federal government established a reservation there in 1832, four years before Arkansas became a state. The Indians told de Soto nothing about the gold in them thar hills to the west of town, around Bear City, for the simple reason that there was no gold, then or ever. In the resort year of 1886, Hot Springs was already overcrowded with out-of-state tourists—the Elegant Eighties’ equivalent of today’s trendy jet set, frequenting its shoulder-to-shoulder hotels, bathhouses, saloons, and casinos—when the jammed accommodations were further strained by an influx of prospectors seeking overnight lodging and a quick dip at the Free Bath House on their way to the supposed gold fields at Bear City.

  Kim’s initial plan is to follow in the footsteps of these Argonauts by stopping overnight in Hot Springs en route to Bear City, or, since it is doubtful she will find any trace remaining of Bear City’s three-story hotel, or even its several two- and one-story hotels, she will just establish her bivouac here in the comfort of the spa. But the annual thoroughbred-racing season at Oaklawn Park, which brings more visitors to Hot Springs during March and April than the baths, has just ended; the city has the look of still recuperating from the bettors’ sojourn and the overstay of jockeys, grooms, dockers, tipsters, bookies, and hanger-on whores. The place looks tired. Bath House Row is not overworked but déclassé, most of its palatial dip joints now shuttered for good. The whole city has the air of a once-overconfident resort that didn’t know when to stop putting up one more tacky motel, whose prices have not fallen with the popularity. Kim decides not to continue trying to decide among the dozens of them whose signs whine “Vacant” as a self-indictment of vacuity. A few of the motels follow her out of town, like beggars trying a last pitch for her notice. Surely she can find something less blatantly touristic closer to Bear City.

  But as U.S. 270 carries her closer to her destination—the same highway that will later take her on to her destiny at the final lost city, called Y, where it, the highway, ends, or becomes two other roads diverging into a wood—the commercial billboards of Hot Springs give way to vernacular advertising: “Tree Dogs for Sale,” “Bates’ Bait Shop,” “Arktiques,” “Rocky’s Rock Shop,” “Free Crystals.” As she nears the turnoff to Bear City, two miles north of the highway, even these cease, and there are no more signs, no letters anywhere, as if she had entered a private realm of illiteracy. Of all these lost cities, Bear City alone has no identifying markers, signs, mileposts, words of any character. It is a semiotic barren. The refrain A traveler passing through will never know a town was there does not exactly apply: there is clear evidence of once-populous habitation, a variety of buildings still scattered about, some dwellings still occupied, but no sign whatever to announce “Bear City” or to indicate “Former Post Office” or “One-Time Doctor’s Office” or “Erstwhile Uncle Jep Smith’s General Store,” or even—and this is the important one, Kim’s present objective—“Still Functioning Bump Furniture Factory.” The latter could so easily be mistaken for an old unused barn, and Kim drives past it twice without realizing that it never held a cow.

  She is back in the hills now. After all those days in flatland eastern and southern Arkansas, she has returned to the uplands; even if she will not quite yet catch another snatch of the Theme of the Faraway Hills, she is embraced again by highland slopes. Rising ground surrounds her, though not spectacularly: Bear City is in a little holler between knobs not more than three hundred feet higher than the village; the summit of Bear Mountain itself, 1,368 feet above sea level, is only seven hundred feet higher than the village, and not visible from it.

  But the sense of fastnesses, both of the forest and the hills, enwraps and enraptures her. In her notebook she writes, “Bear City is like a fairy-tale town, something in a child’s memory.” Bear City is the coziest of all our lost towns. Snug. Forsaken by men (most of them), it is redeemed by nature, who is doing a really nice and neat job of reclaiming it, covering it over with thick up-sprouting trees and creeping vines and lush dense undergrowth, of which even the pernicious wakefield crud is not too oppressive. By comparison with other lost places she has seen, Bear City is a jungle. Nature is returning it to the condition it was in when men first found it and one of them described it: “situated in a lovely and romantic dell, surrounded by verdured mountains and skirted north and south by two crystal brooks whose dancing waters join in the east suburbs and flow onward to the Ouachita.”

  Those two crystal brooks, north and south, were named by the two founders of the town, each for himself. It takes two to make a town, and keep it. One came from North Carolina by way of Georgia and Alabama in 1866, Wiley Rouse, stopping all along the route to make and sell chairs. He claimed the southern brook and called it Rouse Creek. A year later he was joined by another man coming from Tennessee, Larkin Melson, who claimed the northern brook and called it Melson Creek. The two brooks meet at a triangle on the southern edge of the village and together form Bear Creek, which flows into the Ouachita River.

  Both men were primarily subsistence farmers, but Wiley Rouse was by trade a chairmaker and Larkin Melson a surveyor and blacksmith. Both had wives, Elizzabeth Rouse and Martha Melson, who would bear the first daughters of Bear. Before they could plant the land, Wiley and Lark had to clear it of its virgin hardwood timber. Lark Melson burned the trees he cut to clear his pastures. Wiley Rouse took the red oaks he cut and carved them into spindles and slats to make furniture, while the chairs were seated with strips of white oak shaved into splints and woven together. Thus began the one true “industry” that Bear City has ever had, one that is still continuing today.

  Wiley Rouse’s daughter Julia somewhere found a handsome French Canadian named Philander La Bumph, responded to his wooing, and agreed to his proposal of marriage on condition that he leave wherever it was she found him and come home with her to Bear. He also left his French name, Anglicizing it to “Bump” despite Julia’s attempts to explain to him the English meanings of “bump,” as in “a bump on the head,” “a bump on a log,” and the many meanings as verbs—“to kill,” “to impregnate,” “to discharge or fire,” and “to thrust the pelvis forward.” No one ever called him Philander, even if they had known it meant a loving man, which is what he was. Nor did they call him Phil. The mountain folk of Bear called him Phi, pronounced “fie,” as in the twenty-first letter of the Greek alphabet.

  Phi Bump joined his father-in-law, Wiley Rouse, in the operation of his sawmill and furniture factory, and later, when the town became a city filled with prospectors and stockbrokers, and everybody was trying to get rich from the central hoax of gold, Phi went on lathing his chair parts and getting Julia to bottom them, and teaching their children how to lathe and bottom a fine, sturdy, nononsense Shaker-style dining chair and rocker, which Phi Bump’s great-grandchildren are today still trying to escape the responsibility of having to learn how to do. It paid well in those days, 50¢ a chair. Even at $50 a chair today, it is not paying work.

  The first person Kim meets in Bear City is a chairmaker. After driving around to reconnoiter the village and see that there are still traces of all the crisscrossed platted streets—First to Seventh running north, and Broadway, Main, West Main, Walnut, High, etc., running west—she pulls Zephyra up on Water St
reet, alongside the most picturesque of Bear City’s ruins. From the board-and-battened, vine-clung “shack” shown here, the western side of it shaved away, there once rose a stepped false front that did bear a fine, big sign, “U.S. Post Office, Bear City, Arkansas.” But this was taken down sadly over fifty years ago, on Halloween of 1933, by the last postmaster, Clarence Jewell, who lived in the wing to the right, or east, festooned with the junglish vines of kudzu and the tentative tendrils of wakefield crud. Indeed, all of the surrounding yard, where once the wagons and horses and mules stood while their owners sorted through their mail, is swallowed up by these vines. Kudzu, a Japanese vine, Pueraria thunbergiana, was once imported as a fast-growing succulent fodder and forage for livestock, but is so prolific and determined that it is doing a better job than any native plant in helping nature reclaim the entire Southland from man’s mowings. Without the kudzu, this old post office would be just one more firetrap tumbledown derelict, but with all those climbing, creeping, snaking tendrils and twining vines, even without the lavish foliage that will appear later in the spring to turn all this gray to overwhelming green, the building becomes enchanted, and if nature is a female she is here a witch.

  Though Kim gets out of the car to look, she cannot step through the thick mat of wakefield-crud creepers. The building is obviously abandoned, one side plastered with roofing tin and one window shaded by the same corrugated, rusting metal. She will not learn until later that it was the post office, and also a home for Clarence Jewell and, for thirty years before him, the dwelling of Peter Huber, a strange bachelor German who came out of nowhere to be a genuine postmaster for the town, albeit a drunken, harmonica-playing, crippled one. Even learning all about Peter Huber will not change Kim’s first impression of this building as the most compelling ruin she has encountered.