The Gentlemen and the Deerslayer: Contrasting Portraits of Pioneer Arkansas

the uniquely positive tone of Friedrich Gerstacker's portrait of Arkansas life is highlighted when his account is compared with other early travel- er's reports. The earliest considered here were produced by two Scots- men, William Dunbar and George Hunter, who in 1804-1805 ascended the Ouachita River through Louisiana and south Arkansas as far as pres- ent-day Hot Springs. Each man kept a journal. Almost fifteen years later, in the winter of 1818, New Yorker Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and a travel- ing companion named Levi Pettibone explored the White River country of north central Arkansas in search of lead deposits, at almost the same time as English botanist Thomas Nuttall traveled up the Arkansas River from Arkansas Post to Fort Smith. Another fifteen years passed before geolo- gist George William Featherstonhaugh, another Englishman, crossed the state from northeast to southwest in 1834. Gerstacker was the last of this crew. First arriving in January 1838, he didn't leave for good until July 1842.This adds up to six journal-keeping travelers, who traversed every quadrant of Arkansas over a nearly forty-year span of territorial and early statehood times. Read as a group, they divide sharply into two camps, with Gerstacker constituting an outlier party of one and the others so wholly in agreement their accounts could in many places be freely substituted one for another. A closer look at their contrasting portraits reveals Gerstack- er's attitudes and perspectives more clearly.From the earliest accounts, the majority party, gentleman scientists all, was conspicuously unimpressed by the pioneer settlers they encountered. Hunter's journal entry for November 6, 1804, chastises the "old settlers, cheifly Canadian French," of the Ouachita River country for the "want of forethought & industry" that "leaves them in want of almost every com- fort, except what is absolutely necessary for subsistance."1 Dunbar, five days later, observed that "in the summer these people content themselves with making corn barely sufficient for bread during the year; in this man- ner they always remain extremely poor; some few who have conquered their habits of indolence (which are always a consequence of the indian mode of life) and addicted themselves to agriculture, . . . taste a little the sweets of civilized life."2 On November 13, from a point close to the Arkansas/Louisiana border, Hunter described the rudimentary "Bark cab- in" of a "Spaniard" and his family: "It was one story high, about 15 feet square, an earthen floor, the chimney composed of mud and grass mixed; The furniture were, one bed for the whole family which consisted of the man & his wife[,] four Children, the eldest girl of about 16." After their five years in residence, Hunter went on to report, "there was no appear- ance of any crop or any store of any kind of vegetable produce, altho he had the winter before him already commenced." His summary judgment is succinct: "Thus are indolence & poverty allied."3Nuttall and Schoolcraft visited a more settled region a little more than a decade later, but their reports are remarkably similar. Nuttall's assess- ment, written from Arkansas Post on February 3, 1819, was as hostile to French settlers as Hunter's, judging "the sum of general industry" as "totally insufficient for the support of any thing like a town," even as "the love of amusements, here, as in most of the French colonies, is carried to extravagance, particularly gambling, and dancing parties or balls."4 Schoolcraft's report, echoing Dunbar, offers a retrograde preference for hunting over agriculture as a primary impediment to the development of civilized society: "Gardens are unknown," he wrote on December 9, 1818, from the White River country on the Missouri border north of Lead Hill. "Corn and wild meats, chiefly bear's meat, are the staple articles of food. In manners, morals, customs, dress, contempt of labor and hospitality, the state of society is not essentially different from that which exists among the savages. …