Arkansas: A Different State Essay -- American History Essays

atomic number 18 A Different State For some(prenominal) quite a little the very mention of the word Arkansas conjures up images that argon unflattering and certainly not very complimentary. To suggest that Arkansas is a different state is to guarantee almost immediate agreement from some(prenominal) given audience, but such agreement is usually about the cast out aspects of the state instead of the ones making for actual difference. Those negative aspects extend buttocks to the early days of the territory. When Cephas Washburn was on his way to Arkansas in 1819 to help oneself as a missionary to the Cherokees, he stopped at the puzzle site of Vicksburg, Mississippi, to obtain specific directions to the territory, only to be told that the way to involve there was wn cognise.1 Other remarks pertaining to Arkansas are even less(prenominal) positive it was stated that Arkansas is not part of the world for which deliverer Christ died,2 and as late as 1989 one source was still a ble to describe Arkansas as the least known of the fifty states.3 One of the most famous publications that helped to give Arkansas a negative image was Thomas W. Jacksons On A Slow Train Through Arkansas. Published in 1903, this leger contained many descriptions about life in the state, including a pitiful visor about a traveler who stopped at a emplacement where there was one doctor, two brake shoe makers, and a blacksmith. The doctor killed a man. They didnt want to be without a doctor, so they hung one of the shoe makers.4 Jacksons book helped to convince many readers that people in Arkansas wore no shoes.5 Of the well known national writers to causerie about Arkansas, surely H.L. Mencken of the Baltimore Sun was most memorable. In August, 1921, his acid-tipped pen expound the state of Arkansas as track... ...kansas, Arkansas Historical Quarterly, XXXVIII (Spring 1979), 63. 7 Ibid., 68. 8 Harry S. Ashmore, Arkansas A Bicentennial History (New York W.W. Norton, 1978), xvii. 9 Daniel Pool, What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew From Fox Hunting to Whist the Facts of Daily flavour in 19th Century England (New York Simon and Schuster, 1993), 75. 10 Imogene Wolcott, ed., The New England Yankee make Book (New York Coward-McCann, Inc., 1939), 161. 11 Ibid., xiii. 12 Williams, et al., 9. 13 Francis Parkman, La Salle and the Discovery of the colossal West (New York The New Library of American Literature, 1963), 223. 14 Ibid., 228-229. 15 Ibid., 333. 16 Helen McCully and Eleanor Noderer, eds., The American Heritage Cookbook and Illustrated History of American Eating and Drinking, II (n.p. American Heritage Publishing, 1964), 537.