This meticulously researched work will be particularly interesting to those with Cherokee ancestry. The book creates a personal narrative that allows the reader a first-hand look at the challenges, both personal and political, found in this era. The focus on John Work provides compelling insights into the times. You won’t be disappointed.
~~~
Fayetteville Weekly Democrat, January 11, 1889
“John Work came to the West with John Ross and his party of Cherokee in 1838. He was then in appearance 25 or 30 years old, about six feet in height, weighing 180 or 190 pounds, dark complexion, black hair worn long like the Indians of that day. He was uneducated and unrefined but possessed a strong natural mind. His influence was felt in any crowd or community he associated with or resided amongst. He took up his abode along the line and soon became a frequenter of the gambling and drinking houses then so numerous on the border. He soon became notorious for his fighting and drinking qualities…”[1]
So begins a newspaper article written by Fayetteville attorney and historian James P. Neal (1820-1896). Neal was not alone in his fascination with John Work, a man who to this day remains an enigmatic and compelling figure. Work played an important role in the intertribal conflict of the Cherokee. But according to all reports, he was a white man.
For over 250 years, the Cherokee managed to exist alongside the increasing population of European immigrants before being pushed off their ancestral lands. With the 1836 signing of the Treaty of New Echota, the newly formed United States government sent military troops to force their move west, what became known as the Trail of Tears. Along with the Natives, their slaves, white spouses, and freedmen also made this journey.
John Work was not Cherokee, but he too trekked west on the thousand-mile passage. As he and the others struggled over mountains and rivers toward what is now Oklahoma, their fury grew, so that by the time they had built new homes and licked their wounds, certain selected assassins began killing the treaty signers. This ushered in an era of near civil war among the Cherokee.
One of the most notorious of the anti-treaty assassins was John Work. Little is known of this man whose skill with his Bowie knife became something of legend. Separate from his role in cold blooded murder, his story serves to tell the broader history of those years of vicious violence that spilled over the border into Washington County, Arkansas and helped shape the future of the county.
[1]Fayetteville Weekly Democrat Jan 11, 1889, p. 2. The story continued in the Jan 18 edition, p. 3. Neal never cites sources for his information.
Bought a new wood stove lately? Who knew my longtime desire to buy one would bring me to the brink of despair. Let me tell you, my friend. This is not a step you should take without proper warning.
The old stove, fortunately still in my possession in case I give up this fight, was a Big Box model I inherited when my new husband and I moved into an old cabin. That was in 1974. Local lore claimed an old man named “Ringo” died in that cabin, tired of life, sick, and unable to gather wood. Reportedly, he froze to death.
Fire in the Big Box was simple. Two logs with space enough between them for some crumpled newspaper, a handful of twigs and other flammable bits gathered from the surrounding woods, and then another log across the top, positioned so that when the kindling burned up, the third member would not collapse into the middle but rather perch over the coals to burn freely. Air intake open and the damper open, a match set it off. It was safe to walk away to return a half hour later to shut the air intake and let that baby burn. Whenever fresh wood was needed, simply open the damper to let the smoke escape up the chimney, open the stove door to add wood as needed, and there you go! No smoke pouring into the room.
The problem with the Big Box was that by midnight, fast asleep, one started to sense the cold creeping in. Even the most magnificent fat cut of oak or hickory burned up in only 3-4 hours. That’s because any seal that might once have lined the top edges and front door was long gone and so even with all moveable parts closed, air still moved through the stove. Such things as seals or firebrick probably never existed as part of the stove—at least, in my fifty years with it, no such trace remains. So as my knees got worse with advancing age, trekking up and down the five steps to the living room where the Big Box held pride of place became a more troublesome issue especially at two a.m. when I slept past the life of the fire and only a few coals remained.
I lusted after those fabled wood stoves like Jøtul which held fire overnight. Not only would that solve my overnight heat problem, but it also offered a glass door so I would watch the flames leap and glow. Watching fire can lead to trance-like relaxation effects. These effects have been backed by research that shows that watching an open flame can decrease blood pressure. The longer you sit by the fire, the more relaxed you’ll feel. So when I finally had sufficient funds, I visited the local wood stove store and considered my options.
Admittedly, I failed utterly in the research-before-you-buy department. I’m here to share what I’ve learned.
News flash: Woodstoves now must meet new EPA standards, passed sometime in the 1990s, that specify several aspects of the device. Not only did this drive up the prices to absurd levels, but also led to the admonition by my two-man installation team who warned me that the stove would probably smoke. The Jøtul stoves meet EPA requirements with the use of a catalytic device that serves as a kind of filter, but as the EPA guidelines admit, the ‘catalyst’ can burn out within a couple of years.
In catalytic combustion, the smoky exhaust is passed through a coated ceramic honeycomb inside the stove where the smoke gases and particles ignite and burn. Catalytic stoves are capable of producing a long, even heat output.
All catalytic stoves have a lever-operated catalyst bypass damper which is opened for starting and reloading. The catalytic honeycomb degrades over time and must be replaced, but its durability is largely in the hands of the stove user. The catalyst can last more than six seasons if the stove is used properly; but if the stove is over-fired, inappropriate fuel (like garbage and treated wood) is burned, and if regular cleaning and maintenance are not done, the catalyst may break down in as little as 2 years.
Not that I would ever burn garbage or treated wood, but spending $300 every couple of years wasn’t on my list of things to do. And as I approach 80 years of age, I have little patience with machines that require “regular cleaning and maintenance.” So for nearly a month I lost sleep worrying about using the stove. It was still summer, so I had time to fret. Finally, after speaking with the store manager, they agreed to allow me to trade my unused Jøtul for a non-catalyst stove manufactured by Pacific Energy.
Beware! The store staff failed utterly to inform me that in many ways, the non-catalyst stove created more problems than the catalyst version.
But I didn’t know that yet. My decision narrowed to the model that allowed for 18” firewood, of which I already had over four ricks of seasoned wood. This model is Pacific Energy’s Alderlea T6. It’s a handsome stove, although several aspects of its construction are big problems.
One of the Alderlea’s many shortcomings is that while the manual states that maximum wood length is 20 inches, the only way to fit a log that size into the stove is on a diagonal from front corner to back corner. Even the owner’s manual phrase “Ideal Wood Length” of 16 to 18 inches placed “endwise” [does this mean end to end sideways or end to end from door to back of stove? No diagram.] leaves zero clearance between the burning wood and the door/firebrick, which means that the glass door quickly becomes coated with soot. So much for watching the fire. The fire box is exactly 18 inches square.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
After multiple readings of the product manual, I began to break in the stove setting fires meant to burn off the ‘paint’ fumes with house windows open. Right away I noticed what is now a major problem: there is no way to manually vent the stove. Once wood starts burning, if I need to open the stove door to add more wood, or reposition wood, the only option is to open the door and do the task as fast as possible while smoke pours into the room.
Apparently Pacific Energy’s engineers believe the price of making the outside air ‘cleaner’ is to pollute my inside air. The manual fails utterly to address this issue. The instructions for ‘Lighting a Fire’ are:
Adjust air control to “High” position (all the way to the left) and open door.
Place crumpled newspaper in the center of the heater and crisscross with several pieces of dry kindling. Add a few small pieces of dry wood on top.
Ignite the paper and leave the door ajar approximately ½” until the wood kindling is fully engulfed in flame.
After the kindling is fully engulfed, [open the door while smoke pours into the room] add a few small logs. Close door.
Begin normal operation after a good coal base exists and wood has charred. [In other words, spend a half hour watching the stove or make repeated trips to check on it.]
Further instructions follow for Normal Operation:
Set air control to a desired setting. If smoke pours down across the glass, this indicates you have shut the control down too soon or you are using too low a setting. [Wrong. Smoke pours down across the glass with the air control wide open, max setting.]
For extended or overnight burns, unsplit logs are preferred. Remember to char the wood completely on maximum setting before adjusting air control for overnight burn. [“Char” is defined as partially burn wood so that the surface is black.]
Use wood of different shape, diameter and length (up to 18”). Load your wood endwise and try to place the logs so that the air can flow between them [while smoke pours into the room].
Do not load fuel to a height or in such a manner that would be hazardous when opening the door [while smoke pours into the room].
The instructions continue with information about restarting after an overnight or extended burn:
Open door and rake hot embers toward the front of the heater. Add a couple of dry, split logs on top of the embers [This assumes that you need to load wood ONLY when the previous load has burned to embers. What if you want to go to bed and the current load has only burned 75%? Even 90% burned wood smokes. You have to load while smoke pours into the room], close door.
Adjust air control to high and in just a few minutes, logs should begin burning. [If they don’t start burning, open door to add kindling or reposition wood while smoke pours into the room.]
After wood has charred, reset air control to desired setting.
To achieve maximum firing rate, set control to high “H”. Do not use this setting other than for starting or preheating fresh fuel loads.
Nowhere in the manual does one find a drawing showing the “H” and “L” positions. The lever which moves left to right for this function goes a half inch past the H and L lettering, leaving one to wonder if maximum left or maximum right are the correct positions, or if the lever must be positioned exactly under the H or L.
More instructions follow, including how to use the ash clean out system which proposes one use the tiny opening in the bottom of the stove to dump ash into the ash pan that sits underneath the firebox. One is cautioned not to leave the ash dump door open afterwards. One is not shown the location of the ash dump handle, just informed that the handle is located under the ash lip [also not identified in any drawing] on the left hand side. This is a total waste of owner manual space and engineering salary, and a stupid idea to start with. Just shovel it out, for god’s sake.
An entire page of the manual (27 pages in all) is devoted to the door glass. The #1 instruction regards the potential [unavoidable] darkening of the glass:
If glass becomes darkened through slow burning or poor wood, it can readily be cleaned with fireplace glass cleaner when stove is cold. Never scrape with an object that might scratch the glass. The type and amount of deposit on the glass is a good indication of the flue pipe and chimney buildup. A light brown dusty deposit in that is easily wiped off usually indicates good combustion and dry, well-seasoned wood and therefore relatively clean pipes and chimney. On the other hand, a black greasy deposit that is difficult to remove is a result of wet and green wood and too slow burning rate.
WRONG! My wood is well seasoned hardwood (12-18 months) and I don’t adjust the control lever to “L” until the fire is fully engaged, but every morning I must clean the glass, especially the lower side corners where the ‘black greasy deposit’ requires a single-edge razor blade to remove in addition to several applications of glass cleaner. Is this a malfunction of the stove? Queries to the manufacturer are met with advice to contact the dealer! Does this mean that two months into using the stove, I need to have my chimney cleaned?!
Further warnings on that page caution that “excessive ash buildup” should be kept clear of the front of the firebox because it will block air flow. Here’s the problem: Where exactly is this mysterious air intake? It is not shown on any drawing. There are two stair-stepped lips along the front where air might enter, so “excessive” ash remains undefined. Consequently, I keep the fronts of both steps clear. Once again, would a diagram be so hard?
Item #8 on this page is especially informative:
Be aware that the hotter the fire, the less creosote is deposited. Weekly cleaning may be necessary in mild weather, even though monthly cleaning is usually enough in the coldest months when burning rates are higher. When wood is burned slowly, it produces tar and other organic vapours, which combine with expelled…
And there the text ends. But apparently the conclusion is that closing the air intake completely is not recommended even though an overnight burn would seem to call for minimal air flow. If the best fire method for this stove is a ‘hot burn’ in order the keep the glass clear, how is that compatible with overnight heat?
Old Faithful, Big Box
Not that it actually matters. There is an ugly creosote buildup on the glass in both lower corners even with ‘hot’ fires, with any level of air control, and if I want to watch the fire through the glass, I have to ignore the creosote or clean it daily, which doesn’t last until the end of the day.
The next page of the manual is about maintenance. Monthly, I’m supposed to check:
Brick rail tabs and brick rails
Air riser tube in the back of the firebox
Back slide of airwash chamber
Baffle locking pin
Boost tube cover
Not only are there NO DRAWINGS showing the location of these various important maintenance parts, my knees don’t work well enough to crawl around peering inside or under the stove. This would also require that no fire exist in the stove at the time of inspection, meaning my house would have NO HEAT except for little electric heaters in the bathrooms. The last few days have bottomed at sub-zero temps, at no time without fire. That would be a summer job, so I can only hope that the brick rail tabs and airwash chamber are OK for fire throughout the winter.
Genius.
Further, the maintenance instructions continue with “Cleaning the Chimney System”:
Top baffle board/blanket
Baffle
Top heat shield and mountain bolt
Baffle gasket
Brick rails
Manifold
Again, no drawings, diagrams, or other user aid.
I can only hope that I can keep my fires going until warm weather without having something fall apart and/or a chimney fire. Not exactly the peace of mind I had hoped for.
I’m refraining, with difficulty, from speaking of the overall worth of the owner’s manual. After all, I’m a writer and wordsmith dedicated to communicating clearly–not a stove engineer. Somebody apparently did their best with this booklet, sadly. The lack of drawings illustrating the key components of the stove is enough of a failure that the countless other shortcoming hardly bear mention. Pages 11 through 20 detail installation methods. Page 25 is blank. Hint to manual editor: PLENTY OF ROOM FOR DRAWINGS.
There is, however, a full page breakout drawing of the stove PARTS, as if the manufacturer was more interested in selling parts than in adequately explaining the stove’s functions.
At the moment, I’m not sorry I bought it. It does a better job than the old Big Box in keeping heat all night–with luck and holding my mouth right, coals are left in the morning ready for fresh wood. I do have to live with smoke pouring into the room while I try to load in wood and kindling, at which point I’m reminded that I could have stuck with the Jøtul. At least its Norwegian inventors/manufacturers figured out how to create a more environmentally-friendly wood stove without any need to allow smoke to pour into the room.
Note: Look for future updates on this saga once I try to find a person who can service this stove, the possible need for parts replacements, and the status of creosote buildup in the chimney.
Another note: I failed to mention that I still have the Big Box in use at the back of the house and also have this jewel of an old wood cookstove in my dining room complete with hot water reservoir.
Party leaders failed to see the long term need for younger, more vigorous candidates. The bulk of Biden’s term suffered from his shuffling gait, whispery voice, and apparent mental decline. Not that Trump is so much younger, but his demeanor as a bully conveys a message of strength. Sadly.
Dems also failed to foresee Biden’s inability to win a second term and consequently failed to hold a 2024 primary that would have introduced all best possible candidates. Call it allegiance to a venerable old warrior (Biden) or inability to break out of an established order of candidate precedence, or fear of the unknown, this lack of a so-called ‘fair’ fight in selecting a presidential candidate played a significant role in Harris’ defeat.
Sorry, but Kamala Harris was not popular in the 2020 primaries from which she withdrew for lack of funding. Built-in negatives aside from her mixed race and being female included her speech affectations which make her seem smug. One would think that the defeat of Hillary would have been lesson enough. For now, the fight is still between present day realities which are incomprehensible to conservatives and the “good old days” when men were ‘successful’ if they knew how to saddle a horse.
During Biden’s term, there was no apparent coherent approach to illegal immigration. This played into Harris’ weakness on this issue, which Biden appointed her to address. Whatever policy recommendations she made failed to make news cycles. As noted by the Washington Post, “Harris, in fact, has never been in charge of the border. The Department of Homeland Security manages migration. Her immigration role for the Biden administration has included boosting U.S. aid to Central America, traveling to the region and discouraging potential migrants from making the dangerous journey to the United States.” Be that as it may, if there had been a strong Biden policy on illegal immigration and prominent promotion of those policies, Trump wouldn’t have been able to make that topic a centerpiece of his campaign.
Yes, boosting U.S. aid to Central America is foundational to stemming the tide, as Harris knew. Sadly, the fact is that coherent immigration policies addressing root causes aren’t enough to stop people seeking better opportunities for themselves and their children. If your children are starving and your home and livelihood are daily threatened by violent gangs rampaging through neighborhoods, you too would leave behind everything you’ve ever known and walk to the promised land.
THERE IS NO GOOD SOLUTION to illegal immigration. There is no fence high enough, or military/border guard personnel vast enough to make illegal entry impossible. As climate change advances, more and more populations will face starvation and violent domestic turmoil. The U.S. cannot take them all. No one can. This message must be made clear. Trump’s plan to deport millions WILL NOT SOLVE THE PROBLEM. This is whack-a-mole thinking.
Biden, in the seeming tradition of Democrats and, in the words of Michelle Obama, “went high” when the Republicans “went low.” But we’re dealing with primitive thinking where the hero bashes the villain over the head. With no head bashing, there’s no hero. The villain wins. It’s past time for the Democrats to develop more than one track and start bashing. To greatest possible extent, yes, don’t give up the vision of a better world—peace, love, good vibes. But we also must carry a big stick and when somebody needs to get bashed over the head, bash the son of a bitch. The Biden administration’s justice department took waaaay too long quibbling over how/when/why to prosecute Trump for his shocking illegal acts. He should never have been free to run for re-election.
Not that Biden or the justice department had control over local and state prosecutions, but the failure of appropriate federal action left the door open for Trump to escape from prosecution in lower courts, as is now obvious. It was the first Trump presidency which allowed him to stack the Supreme Court, and that will be the case again. His sponsors are playing the long game, moves that have been feverishly planned since at least the 1950s. The strategy is to whip up fear and hatred to drive conservative voters to the polls, desperate to buy God’s favor by forcing the entire nation into a theocracy. None of this matters to Trump, whose entire plan involves self-enrichment, self-aggrandizement, and eluding justice.
True to their religious belief system, conservatives prefer government which regulates what the population does in their bedrooms and allows the business segment to run wild. The opposite is true for liberals, who believe what people do in their bedrooms is no one’s business and what the business community does can ONLY be regulated by government. Who else can force corporations not to dump industrial waste in our rivers? Ensure clean drinking water and safe food supplies? Mitigate the onslaught of pandemics? Enforce design and construction standards for roadways, bridges, and buildings?
These requirements of government are easily forgotten by a fearful, angry electorate who is not educated to understand these fundamental duties, an electorate even more distracted by a wannabe dictator whose success depends on agitating division with lies and false promises. This can only be effectively countered by an equally vociferous Democrat whose presence and actions meet the pseudo-strength of a candidate like Trump. Potential right-wing demagogues have the advantage of money flowing from a huge array of business interests. Liberals have only the People to carry on the framework for freedom established by the Founding Fathers:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Foundational to this vision was EDUCATION. Public education was not an afterthought of the American Revolution – it was a core ideal of our Founders. They maintained that a well-educated population was the only means of ensuring America’s future. The roots of taxpayer-funded public education in the United States can be traced back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1647. The colony passed a law that required towns to establish schools, made children attend school, and allowed the state to levy taxes to support schools. This traditional determination now stands at risk from religious forces who have managed to divert tax dollars into support for private, religious schools which often slant their programs to fit a religious agenda.[1]
Could Obama have warded off this SCOTUS situation with his nomination of Merrick Garland for the post by steamrolling the Senate?
It is in full accord with traditional notions of waiver to say that the Senate, having been given a reasonable opportunity to provide advice and consent to the president with respect to the [Supreme Court] nomination of [Judge Merrick] Garland, and having failed to do so, can fairly be deemed to have waived its right. Here’s how that would work. The president has nominated Garland and submitted his nomination to the Senate. The president should advise the Senate that he will deem its failure to act by a specified reasonable date in the future to constitute a deliberate waiver of the right to give advice and consent. What date?…90 days is a perfectly reasonable amount of time.
– Excerpt from an op-ed column in The Washington Post on April 10 by Washington, D.C., lawyer Gregory L. Diskant, who is in private practice and also serves as a member of the national governing board of the liberal advocacy group, Common Cause.
“The Appointments Clause [of Article II] clearly implies a power of the Senate to give advice on and, if it chooses to do so, to consent to a nomination, but it says nothing about how the Senate should go about exercising that power. The text of the Constitution thus leaves the Senate free to exercise that power however it sees fit. Throughout American history, the Senate has frequently – surely, thousands of times – exercised its power over nominations by declining to act on them.
– Excerpt from a commentary about the Diskant column by M. Edward Whalen, president of the conservative advocacy group, the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, published April 10 on the National Review Online’s Bench Memo.[2]
Equally appalling was the lack of foresight by none other than Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg who refused to retire during Obama’s presidency, which would have allowed another justice to step in on her coattails. Despite her excellent record and unfailing support for liberal causes, a bit of hubris caused her to cheat the future of a suitable replacement.
Democrats need to wake up! Making nice is not always the best course of action when we’re dealing with not only ignorant tyrants like Trump but also foreign bad actors with their thumbs on the scales.
[1] In June 2022, in Carson v. Makin, the high court held that when governments choose to subsidize private schools, they must allow such funds to pay for religious schools. A majority of current justices appear to believe that excluding religious groups from government programs is a violation of the First Amendment’s free exercise clause. Although court precedents prohibit direct funding of religion under the establishment clause, the current court could decide that if the state funds secular public charter schools, religious public charter schools cannot be excluded from such funding. See https://www.freedomforum.org/government-fund-religious-schools/
Progress came too fast for the evolutionary capabilities of humans. Suddenly, within one hundred years, men were expected to accept women as equals after millennia of their submission. Men were expected to adjust to working with their minds instead of their hands, their bodies eager and waiting for the first throw of the spear, the first clubbing of an enemy. The majority of men needed those physical triumphs to feel like man, and they still do.
A significant percentage of women still believe men are their superiors, the representative of their male god who tells them how to live in submission. It’s too much to expect that suddenly after only 100 years of having the right to vote and the right to contraception, women would universally embrace the responsibility of citizenship, of bodily autonomy.
Sadly, an official return to policies constructed of old fears and prejudices destroys people, most of whom have worked for decades—lifetimes—to ensure that Americans are able to pursue our personal needs and dreams, to become who we want and need to be despite centuries of repression and exploitation. Progress means making the world a better place where people don’t suffer from old hatreds and fears. Now women are losing the right to control what happens to their own bodies. Men and women risk losing their right to live and love as they are—gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and more. Anyone who isn’t white need not exist.
While attempting to fling us backwards to a time without electricity, running water, or air conditioning, not to mention television, cell phones, and antibiotics, conservatives seem to think society could obtain all those things WITHOUT concurrent changes in social norms. That’s not how it works. Advances in technologies and sciences go hand in hand with social change. In a democratic society, education sufficient to produce people who invent cell phones also produces realization of our innate value as individuals—no matter what gender, skin color, or ethnic background.
Back in the ‘good ole days’ women made the cloth. “Heagerty family members demonstrating the steps needed to spin cotton, Cave Springs (Benton County), about 1900. From right: removing the seeds, carding the fibers, spinning the thread, and winding it on a reel.” Jerry Ritter Collection (S-2004-20-6)
Irony is when people vote for policies that are oppositional to their personal needs. Irony occurs when those voters cherish their cell phones while remaining ignorant of the high levels of education required for their invention or the vast technological network that serves them. Irony occurs when those voters flock to doctors to deal with cancer and other life-threatening conditions whose increasingly successful treatments come about at the hands of highly educated scientists who understand the cellular function of DNA and RNA, terms about which those voters are utterly ignorant. Undoubtedly, key figures in those fields are women and/or LBGTQ+.
Today, mail seems almost quaint, often referred to as “snail mail” as we become more dependent on the easy flow of electronic email, texts, and messages. But in earlier times, as recently as 1900, communication beyond the in-person conversation or perhaps a written message sent across town by courier, mail was the only means of contact. The faithful transit of mail from place to place became an almost sacred duty for the people who established post offices.
Rural delivery to homes was not made available by the U.S. Postal Service until 1890. Even then, in the rugged landscape of parts of Washington County, mail delivery came by horse or mule to remote post offices into the early years of the 20th century. These post offices were gathering places, usually housed in small stores where a person might pick up mail and trade eggs for a fresh batch of crackers while catching up on news. As such, post offices served more than mail, also forging interpersonal connections and a sense of community.
A total of 104 post offices were established in Washington County, of which only fifteen survive today. The other 85 came and then vanished along with the community they served. The men (and a few women) who took the responsibility to provide mail service often became leaders in the county, holding the public trust, letter by letter, at their station at a dusty crossroads.
Most folks who live around these parts know the story of Winslow, Arkansas, a tiny village perched in the highest elevations of the Boston Mountains. They know about the railroad tunnel built back in 1881 that blasted through 1,700 feet of stubborn rock and shale. They know about the all-female city council, the so-called Petticoat Government, back in 1925. And most of them know about the pre-air conditioning turn-of-the-century influx of wealthy summer visitors eager to live in the cooler air found at that elevation.
But what most folks don’t know is what came before the railroad. And what came after the boom years ended in the 1930s. Winslow today is, in many ways, just as interesting and vital as it was in those boom years between 1881 and 1930. Its population remains steady at around 365 people, not counting the hundreds residing in the rugged hills and hollers surrounding the place, both groups peppered with eccentrics, artists, and others typical of the Arkansas Ozarks reputation. Sit a spell and visit.
Great companion read to the new WINFEST book! Check it out at Amazon!
I am grateful for this award from the Arkansas Historical Association, and for the many helpers and sources of information for this article about an amazing woman, Forrestina Bradley Campbell (no kin), otherwise known as White River Red. May she rest in peace. This article may be found in my book, “Around the County,” (available at https://www.amazon.com/Around-County…/dp/B0C126KF23) or in the Spring 2023 issue of “Flashback,” the quarterly journal of the Washington County Historical Society.
We need to stop thinking like peasants. We no longer live under the rule of a king or an aristocratic lineage of dukes, earls, and what not. We citizens of the United States (and most modern democracies) hold equal shares of power over ourselves, each of us with the right to assemble, speak our mind, and vote in order to maintain a government that protects us from any force threatening to bar our path to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Apparently some among us have forgotten, or more likely never learned, that this is our gift as Americans. They are the 21st century serfs who plod along ignoring their rights—and their duties—as American citizens. Observers most often label these new age serfs as ignorant, but that’s not entirely the reality. These modern serfs are willfully ignorant, a choice they have made in order to avoid thinking.
True, thinking is a troublesome exercise. Thinking requires the gathering of all pertinent facts on any particular issue. Such fact gathering requires not only the time and effort of the exercise, but also possession of skills in such areas as rationality and research. These skills are taught to children in their school years, but the teaching is clearly inadequate. This inadequacy is not necessarily the fault of the teacher or the school system or the curriculum, although all three can be at fault to some degree. More likely the inadequacy is due to parents not practicing thinking at home.
This kind of generational non-thinking used to be the norm, back when most of us were serfs. Those were the days when a few traditional skills sufficed in meeting life goals. A serf served his/her lord—the duke, earl, or even the king—who made his expectations clear. A woodsman was to cut and haul wood. A farmer was to plant, cultivate, and harvest crops.
As explained in Wikipedia:
Serfdom is the forced labor of serfs in a feudal society. In medieval Europe, serfs were peasant farmers who worked without pay for a lord. In exchange, they got to live and work on the lord’s manor. They also got the lord’s protection. Serfs had more rights than slaves (for example, serfs could own property). However, they were not completely free. They could not move, marry, or leave the manor without the lord’s permission. In most serfdoms, serfs were legally part of the land. If the land was sold, they were sold with it. Serfs worked in their lord’s fields. They sometimes did other things related to agriculture, like forestry and transportation (by both land and river). Some also worked in craft and manufacturing … like the village blacksmith, miller or innkeeper. Serfdom developed from agricultural slavery in the Roman Empire. It spread through Europe around the 10th century. During the Middle Ages, most European people lived in serfdoms.
Serf children grew up learning about life from their parents, a life that followed the rules set down by their lord’s demands. The sawyer’s sons were sawyers. The tanner’s sons were tanners. Owned by their fathers as girls, females were handed over to their husbands to serve as wives and mothers, subject to his absolute control.
Those rules made it easy to decide what to do without having to think about it.
Ah, those were the days. There were established rules about not only what work to do each day, but what to wear (same homespun garments as the day before), what to eat (same basic gruel and bread as the day before), what to believe (acceptance of one’s humble place in life because the Bible said so), and so forth. Even a free man could become a serf if he owed a large debt. He would make an agreement with the lord of the land. The lord would keep him safe, give money to pay his debt, and give him land to work on. In return, he would work for the lord. All his children would become serfs.
So while our early ancestors arrived in the American colonies fresh from their peasantry, only a few of them brought with them the practice of thinking. This is the resistant strain of human nature, to do what the parents did, to blindly accept a set of rules to follow, to spend our days laboring to satisfy our lord and master. The goal has shifted only slightly in that we labor in the belief that if we work hard enough, we too can be a lord. This is the fantasy that controls so many, that someday when we’re lords, we won’t want the government to tax us. This is the thinking that allows the rich to pay taxes at the same rate as the rest of us, when their incomes surpass by billions the amounts we earn. Meanwhile, we bow down (at least mentally) to the lords who have achieved ‘greatness’ through wealth or power.
After all, peasants believe, how could lowly persons such as ourselves manage to decipher the intricacies of big business or political process much less discern the many aspects of personality and manipulation employed by the lords? How are we supposed to know what is true? We must believe what our chosen leaders tells us. Never mind what news source may or may not employ actual journalists, or who provide ‘news’ instead of ‘entertainment.’ It’s all a lie anyway, they say, throwing up their hands, disheartened.
Well, yes, these are difficult mental tasks for people who never learned how to research or reason. Besides, we’re busy trying to keep a roof over our head and food on the table.
A full 34% of the voting-eligible population did not vote in 2020, which saw the highest voter turnout since 1914. Even more concerning is the popularity of wannabe dictators like Donald Trump whose supporters openly ridicule education, basking in the praise of a man who “loves the poorly educated.” It should be no surprise that Democrats control 77% of the U.S.’s most highly educated Congressional districts (107 districts) while Republicans control 64% of districts where the fewest people went to college (107 districts).[1]
There is no controlling force that coerces individuals into peasant thinking. Such a role is heavily influenced by tradition and hardly mitigated by many educational opportunities. Community plays a role as well, either offering role models who use thought and action to move beyond peasantry, or by warning of negative results for those who try to move beyond their family traditions of non-thinking. It is often easier to remain in the trenches than to climb out, especially when one has failed to grasp the tools which make climbing possible. Plus, who wants the responsibility of stepping up to the plate? I might swing and miss.
Our society and especially our educational systems are failing to penetrate the mental laziness of lingering peasantry enticing us to depend on lists of rules handed down by lords. Curriculum for all schools, public, private or religious, should provide the methods of rational thinking in order to protect malingering peasants from their self-destructive (and democracy-destroying) behavior. Curriculum requirements should include debate where fact-based points are presented on a chosen topic. A thorough understanding of civics and history should form the core of classes that also teach language arts and mathematics/logic. At strategic points in those school years, there should be lessons in conflict resolution as well as introduction to introspection.
The answer is stepping up to our human potential, NOT to install a wannabe king.
What will happen to them, these lovers of Trump, the men and women who act as if he is the next risen Christ, or at least the best man possible to lead the United States of America? What will happen when the inexorable turn of the wheels of justice finally finally grind him into the ground?
Will they weep? Yes. Will their anger grow exponentially to the point of ignition? Yes.
When the inevitable happens, and yes, I believe in the Constitution and our system of laws that have steered this nation through war and despair for over 200 years. I believe that Trump will finally be held accountable for all his lies and frauds and empty promises that continue to spill from his deteriorating mind, mouthed in nonsensical phrases and welcomed with open arms into the aisles of churches and the homes of the True Believers. I believe that the witnesses and the attorneys and the juries and judges will do their duty, that he will be convicted of his crimes against the people and the nation, that he will at some point have to face the truth about himself.
Nothing could be more terrifying for a man like Trump than to face the truth about himself, that his life was wasted in harming his fellow man, that he was a thief and an adulterer and a rapist, that he could produce nothing of value in this world. That he had every material advantage given to him by emotionally-vacant parents, and he squandered that gift in his ignorance, in his greed and desperation for his life to hold some meaning but never did.
What will these people do who hold him up before themselves and now will find him cast down into the filth of human failure, deceit, corruption? When the revelation of his amoral guilt opens their eyes with blinding light, will they refuse to believe the truth? Will they take up arms and storm the courthouses and prison, crying out for his release, demanding a new day still grasping for that promise, that fable of his greatness?
They believed. They tied their lifeboats to his ship, that great phantasm of belief that he was the strong man, the savior of our times, that their lives could be made meaningful and fruitful under his leadership. As the seas heave and roll, tossing his ship into wreckage, will their boats also capsize, splinter into driftwood to drift back to the littered beaches over the coming weeks and months?
Somewhere deep inside, most of the True Believers sense the truth, that Trump is a fool, an emperor without clothes. They know in that secret room of themselves that they have followed a lie. But for many of them, the truth is too painful, too terrifying, and their solution is to speak of war, that they will take up arms to defend their savior, that they will emerge triumphant in a new America led by God Almighty with Trump seated on His right hand.
These are the fantasies of those who have never seen war, who know nothing of the price we paid in the last civil war when 620,000 men died fighting their neighbors and even their kinsmen over a belief that had long since lost any claim to righteousness. In their glorious imaginings of redeeming the nation, the radical right imagine the fight as taking down the Bidens and the Clintons and Nancy Pelosi and other figureheads of ‘liberal’ democracy without realizing that the fatalities they wish to bestow will instead be their neighbors and their kinsmen.
Will justice for Trump open the door to insight, even epiphany, for his True Believers? Will they be able to accept the truth of his malfeasance or the rectitude of the courts’ judgement? Some will. Some already have. But some will not, and for them we probably should feel compassion for their loss of a dream, of a self-made parody of a god, a feeble man who misled them, made promises he couldn’t keep, presented himself in a fictional persona simply to aggrandize himself no matter the price to be paid.
The private, personal cost will be great for those True Believers unable to let go of the fantasy, that they alone stood by a true hero. They will not be treated kindly by history.
The holiday season is a time when families gather and stories are told. This year I’m happy to see Facebook posts by a cousin who has gone to the trouble to scan his 104-year-old mother’s photos and record the stories behind them. Such a wonderful project!
Here’s the photo and story he posted today.
Grandpa Tom Morrow sitting in the field with Uncle Graydon, teaching Uncles Durward and Douglas how to plow. This past weekend, Mom told me that the mule’s name was Toby. Toby evenutally got loose and was killed by a train as they lived near train tracks at the time. Mom said that she and her siblings convinced themselves afterwards that the chugging sound made by trains coming by were actually the train saying “I killed Toby, I killed Toby”. Circa 1925, Texas
