Ozark Country
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2. For a discussion of singing schools (past and present), see Brooks Blevins, “Where Everything New Is Old Again: Southern Gospel Singing Schools,” Southern Cultures 22 (Winter 2016): 135–149.
CHAPTER X
1. For a comprehensive look at death and burial customs in the Ozarks, see Abby Burnett, Gone to the Grave: Burial Customs of the Arkansas Ozarks, 1850–1950 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014).
CHAPTER XI
1. “Thrash” or “thresh” was the common Ozarks pronunciation of the infant infection known as thrush.
CHAPTER XIII
1. It may have been said “that he would not commit murder to accomplish a robbery,” but Henry Starr was apparently willing to take a life to avoid being captured, killing a deputy marshal who attempted to detain him in 1892. Jon D. May, “Starr, Henry,” Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc.php?entry=ST060.
CHAPTER XIV
1. Rayburn was often on shaky ground when attempting to write straight history, and nowhere was this more evident than in this section on Native Americans. Furthermore, his mixture of heroic idealization and demeaning language (“redmen,” “mixed-breeds”) reflected the ambiguous and othered status of natives in popular narratives of the era. For a recent examination of the roles of various American Indian nations in Ozarks history, see the second and third chapters of Brooks Blevins, A History of the Ozarks, Volume 1: The Old Ozarks (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018).
2. The most commonly accepted etymology for the word Quapaw is that it is a derivation of the Illini word “Arcansas,” which French explorers adopted and applied to the natives who occupied the area around the mouth of the Arkansas River. Joseph Key, “Quapaw,” Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture, www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/.
3. It may have been more accurate had Rayburn claimed that Sam A. Leath created “more Indian lore than any other person living today.” A longtime Eureka Springs tourism promoter and director of chambers of commerce in Eureka Springs, Harrison, and Paragould, Arkansas, Leath (1877–1966) was among a stable of early twentieth-century whites who created and perpetuated romantic tales of heroic, noble, and usually doomed Native Americans. Leath likely concocted such stories to entertain trail-riding tourists in Eureka Springs. His penchant for storytelling seems to have impacted his own legacy. A 1955 Arkansas Historical Quarterly piece on Leath (which he coauthored) also contains apparent errors and exaggerations of his life. For instance, he claims that his father, a noted Baptist evangelist, died in a blizzard in Washington state in 1888, though Rev. D. W. Leath actually died in Alabama in 1912. Not surprisingly, heroic and noble American Indians figure prominently in Leath’s version of his own life story. F. P. Rose and Sam A. Leath, “The Story of Sam A. Leath,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 14 (Summer 1955): 120–127; “Rev. D. W. Leath,” Sabbath Recorder, December 30, 1912, 891.
CHAPTER XV
1. According to his autobiography, Rayburn’s life as a “thoroughgoing individualist” in the immediate postwar years was limited to the summer months, as he made his living by teaching school in Kansas during the academic year. Rayburn, Forty Years in the Ozarks: An Autobiography (Eureka Springs, AR: Ozark Guide Press, 1957), 19.
2. In the late nineteenth century, Marvel Cave would have still been known as Marble Cave. It was renamed Marvel Cave in the 1920s.
3. Today Harvey’s unfinished pyramid and most of the remnants of Monte Ne lie submerged beneath the waters of Beaver Lake, created in the 1960s when the Army Corps of Engineers built a final dam on the White River. Gaye Bland, “‘Coin’ Harvey,” Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture, www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/.
4. The grand Kingston Church was eventually converted into a health clinic before being dismantled in the early 1950s. Abby Burnett, When the Presbyterians Came to Kingston: Kingston Community Church, 1917–1951 (Kingston, AR: Bradshaw Mountain Publishers, 2000).
5. For more information on Pike, see Walter L. Brown, A Life of Albert Pike (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997).