Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ol' Boys Defined a State

This Hillbilly State of Mine

country folk. A wanderlust-stricken Indiana native and former resident of Polk and Sevier counties in southwestern Arkansas, Marion Hughes recounted the odd ways and backward lifestyles of his former neighbors in such out-of-the-way places as Horatio, where he “existed . . . for nine months. You see, people in Arkansaw don’t live; they only exist.” Hughes’s Arkansaw was populated with snuff-dipping grannies, slow-witted yokels, lazy farmers, moonshiners, and no fewer than ten different kinds of wild hogs. Shoes were practically unheard of. Much of the booklet consisted of jokes and stories that, like Slow Train’s contents, were circulated widely in the folk humor of the day. Hughes even included his own obvious rip-off of the Arkansas Traveler legend. I stopped in out of the rain one day at a typical Arkansawyer’s home. The old man was sitting in the corner sawing away on an old fiddle, his wife was trying to start a fire with some wet wood, while the barefooted, half-naked children were shivering with cold, but the old man didn’t appear to pay any attention to me, his wife or the freezing children, but kept sawing away on the old fiddle. Finally he said to me, “I am larning to play a new tune called ‘Hell among the yearlings.’ I thought it would be more appropriate if he would call it “Hell in Arkansaw.”32 Hughes’s most valuable contribution to the Arkansaw image was the collection of illustrations scattered throughout Three Years in Arkansaw. With their haggard old women dressed in tatters, lanky, floppy-hatted men, gaunt hounds, and cabins full of children, chickens, and hogs, the Hughes drawings were among the earliest examples of the Arkansaw image in its twentieth-century, visual hillbilly mode. The intrepid author concluded his dissertation on life in Arkansas with a bit of his own poetry: I hav lived in 16 States But of all I ever saw There is no place like living Down in old Arkansaw. They all wear homade clothing Both the men and females While the children with dirty faces All go in their shirt tails. The men drink moonshine whisky The women chew and dip And the big gals go barefooted With tobacco on their lip. 58 ✧ ABOARD THE ARKANSAW TRAIN BLEVINSfinalpages:Layout 1 4/28/10 3:50 PM Page 58 They cook by the fireplace With a skilit and a lid And all liv on black coffee Sow bossom and cornbread. All are free-hearted And respect the moral law Is the reason I love to liv Down in old Arkansaw.33 Hughes’s closing stanza suggests a certain romantic attachment to his simple Arkansas subjects. But lest you grow weary of my jug-half-full interpretation of the Arkansaw image, it should be noted that the sheer volume of mockery and derision blacks out the faint glimmers of romanticism in Three Years in Arkansaw.34 Likewise, the page-upon-page of indecipherable dialect obscures the fundamentally romantic tone of Herb Lewis’s long-forgotten—and largely forgettable—work of fiction, Eb Peechcrap and Wife at the Fair (1906). The fair in question is the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (World’s Fair) in St. Louis, and Lewis’s story is typical of many country-folks-go-to-the-bigcity tales. Told in the words of Elberter Peechcrap from “Possom Ridge, Arkansaw,” Eb Peechcrap consists of a series of shocks and mishaps the Peechcraps experience on their big outing, such as Eb’s recollection of their ABOARD THE ARKANSAW TRAIN ✧ 59 Illustration from Marion Hughes’s Three Years in Arkansaw, 1904. Courtesy of Arkansas History Commission. BLEVINSfinalpages:Layout 1 4/28/10 3:50 PM Page 59 arrival in the city and his first brush with railroad porters: “Wal, by gum! That thar’ city o’ St. Louis war bigger’n Fount’in City, an’ Gait City, an’ Persimmon Center, with Squar’ Hank Austum’s an’ Bill Frazher’s real estate ter boot . . . An’ when we uns lit on the ground more ’an a dozen the dad gumdest iddyots jist cum runnin’ an’ grabbed my poke an’ verleece rite out’n my han’ an’ tried tu steel ’em rite thar’ in daylite.” As one might expect of a book whose title page epigram is “Wal,’ by gum! I reckon,” the hilarity that ensues is more than a little corny and clichéd. Nevertheless, the...