The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  The man to see, Smith told her, if you could find him, was a Baxter Hurst. “He’s about the only one left in Old Buffalo City.”

  Expecting to find a hermit living in a shack (when in fact Buffalo City is the only one of these lost cities that never, as far as anyone remembers or the record can show, ever had a resident hermit), Kim goes off in search of Baxter Hurst.

  Eastward from upper Newton County and Marble City, Marion County (named after the old Swamp Fox of the Revolutionary War, Francis Marion) is not so ruggedly mountainous as Newton but is thoroughly hilled and rolling, even the 628 square miles of it that lie beneath the waters of Bull Shoals Lake, the greatest impoundment of the White River. Kim keeps to the byroads of the southern part of the county, detouring, for the fun of it, through the hamlet of Eros, one of Arkansas’s numerous four-letter towns. Who named Eros, and why, beggars both history and imagination. But Ozarkers are grandly euphemistic, and “love” was an indelicate word to the old-time Ozarker. Eros is only a winding wide place in the road, with no hint of eroticism or even cupidity, but as Kim lifts her foot from Zephyra’s gas pedal and lets her coast over the summit beyond the village, there, stretching off immeasurably into the distance, are range beyond range of hills, and in her ear, range beyond range of tones, and themes, and instruments: evocations of a kind of heroic loneliness, with human voices choiring distantly in languages unknown.

  As she pulls over beside the road to listen, she cannot remember whether she has passed through pale Eros or has yet to discover it, whether it is already history, a place passed and not again to be seen, or imagination, a place dreamed and yet to be. She is lost in music as these towns are lost in time, and decides at last that the sound comes from within her, the Theme of the Faraway Hills that invents itself inside anyone alone and tugged by distances.

  How right and fitting, therefore, Kim thinks as she reaches beyond one of those hills into Yellville, the county seat, and discovers that the county newspaper is called The Mountain Echo, and that, further, this little newspaper was founded in the special year of 1886. Yellville? This “yell” is not from the same root as “yellow,” and “golden,” but from a cousin root akin to “call” and “calling,” exulting and yelping. One cannot help thinking of Spillville, which is in Iowa, the lost town where homesick Antonin Dvorak, drunk as usual one Sunday afternoon, first caught an ear’s glimpse of the Theme of the Faraway Hills (of which there are none in prairie Spillville), captured the notes before they could spill away from him, and changed and used parts of the Theme in a symphony (From the New World). This Yellville took its name from one Archibald Yell of Fayetteville, governor and congressman during the 1840s, who resigned his seat in Congress during the Mexican War to enlist with much publicity as a private, was quickly promoted to colonel, and just as quickly annihilated with his cavalry at the Battle of Buena Vista in 1847. His troops, guilty of atrocities against civilians, were poorly trained and overconfident, as was Yell himself. Yellville had been—like most villages, including Buffalo City itself—an Indian village, named Shawneetown; during his heated campaign for Congress, Archibald Yell visited the place and paid the residents $50 to re-christen it Yellville. Yell also had a county named for him without having to pay for it, but Yellville is the seat of Marion County, whereas Marion is the seat of Crittenden County. In Arkansas towns are rarely located in their eponymous counties: Conway isn’t in Conway County; Hot Springs is not in Hot Spring County but in Garland County, while Garland City is in Miller County, while Miller is in Greene County…. It is very easy to get lost in Arkansas.

  Kim’s first stop in Yellville is the courthouse in the center of the town’s square, a building of rough native ashlar stone in a World War II styleless style built to replace a lovelier one that burned after replacing a still lovelier one…. All over Arkansas the courthouses burn, and with them their records, making the historian’s job difficult. Kim finds that the plat books in the county clerk’s office have not burned, but the county clerk’s clerk has only a vague notion of what Kim is looking for, and at first tries to get rid of her with an assertion that there aren’t any old plat maps of Buffalo—City, did you say? But, sure enough, on page one of Plat Book Two is the dramatic map, Grand Avenue and all, Commerce Street with its railroad tracks that were never built, Maywood Park with Laffoon Creek meandering through it, the riverfront with steamboat landings (steamboats in the Ozark Mountains!), ore docks, a cotton gin, and a no-longer-existent or never-existent “U.S. Monument.” A Lion Hill Road rises to the heights west of the city, and such fanciful addresses as Markham Terrace and Windermere Place await homebuilders who never built. So confident, even cocksure, were the planners of this city, on paper, that Kim almost begins to believe that there might be some trace of all this grand envisagement still remaining.

  At the small office of The Mountain Echo, Kim makes the lucky acquaintance of Barbara “Corky” Craig, the Echo’s occasional folklore columnist, born in Marion County forty-some years ago, descendant on two sides of old journeymen sawmillers who once worked in Buffalo City. Like Faubus, Corky Craig did not realize until she was grown up that her whole life had been “folklore” and was thus worthy of interest; she now satisfies that interest with her column in the Echo. She knows Baxter Hurst and will be glad to introduce Kim to him.

  Zephyra, that saucy Nissan Datsun 280-zx, has a disinclination to traverse gravelly, pocked, chuckholed, or wrinkled roads. She is meant for city streets, and not would-be cities, either. Talk about “Blue Highways”: some of the byroads that Zephyra must peregrinate in the course of this quest for the lost cities of Arkansas are olive-drab, or dun, or sepia, or positively taupe. Much of the road that Corky Craig directs Kim and Zephyra to is sort of henna, a strong reddish brown. The last few miles of this red dirt road, Kim slows Zephyra to a creep. More than once she asks Corky, “How much farther?”, until the road drops down out of the hills into the broad plain of a great river meadow surrounded by bluffs, and Corky says “Just right up yonder.” The road comes to an end approximately where the intersection of Markham Terrace and Windermere Place was meant to be, at a classic contemporary compote ranch-style house, seen so universally in suburbs across America that it seems almost out of place on an actual ranch, which this appears to be. “What’s this?” Kim asks, seeing no sign of ruin or vestige of town. The Hurst place, Corky tells her, and, gesturing toward the sweeping, cliff-ringed, bare meadow, “Buffalo City.”

  Baxter Hurst, age sixty-four, is the baron and sole proprietor of Old, or West, Buffalo City. He lives in this spacious ranch-style with his wife, Geneva; his sister Ruby (Mrs. Fred Bearden) lives in an older house nearby, and they, along with one other family in a house built from the remains of the old Buffalo City Hotel, make up the entire population of Old Buffalo City. There are Hursts all over Marion and Baxter counties (Baxter got his name not from the adjacent county but from an uncle who may or may not have been named, like the county, after Governor Elisha Baxter). There is a famous Hurst Fishing Service on the White River and a Hurst Liquor Store, distant relations whom Baxter does not patronize. He is an elder in the Church of Christ, and he looks exactly like Kim’s conception of what a Church of Christ elder would be: mild-mannered, unassuming, almost scholarly, equally at home behind the communion table and in the fields of his cattle ranch. Although the house itself is thoroughly recent compote, the interior furnishings and paraphernalia are unassertive and make a modest distinction between the more casual family room and the more formal living room, in which hangs an ancestral portrait: Baxter has traced his forebears to Thomas Hurst of the 1066 Domesday Book. The name Hurst means “one who lives near a small wood.” Baxter lives near a very large wood. This is a hinterland peopled with Clinkingbeards, Bodenhammers, and Deatherages, with Derryberrys and Blankenships, families whose histories are traceable not just to the Domesday Book but to the first weddings of Angles and Saxons, in the fifth century. There are no great heroes; these yeomen and yeo-women overflowed from Tennessee, Kent
ucky, and Alabama, where they had overflowed from Virginia and North Carolina, and most of them settled in and did their jobs in clearing the land and starting towns; some flowed on to Texas and other points west. Of those who stayed to sink roots and start families, no large tales are told. Marion and Baxter counties are without mythopoeic heritage, without novelists, without troubadours except those who warble by rote the old ballads from across the sea.

  Baxter Hurst is an amateur historian himself, with a deep and abiding interest in the fragments and traces of man’s tenancy of this land. He offers to take Kim out in his pickup truck for a tour of the vast pasture that is all that remains of Old Buffalo City. She is reminded of Buster Price and the ride to the Mankins pasture, but that was only sixty acres; this one is four hundred acres. Instantly Kim visualizes the large city that could have been built in that pasture and on the heights and palisades around it…and, of course, across the river, where New Buffalo City also has a pasture, though not quite so vast, and heights, and a similar dearth of man-built remains.

  Baxter shows Kim the foundation of the old hotel, which looks simply like a long stone wall, with the upper boulders spilled in the sun; something there is that doesn’t love it. True stone walls are rare in Arkansas. Baxter tells her that this was the last building standing in Old Buffalo. He does not remember the name of it. (It was called simply Buffalo City Hotel in its last years; in its early years it was Shoal House.) “I think it was ’34, might’ve been ’35,” Baxter says, “when my dad and my uncle took it down. It was built of pine lumber, and they built two good rent houses out of it.”

  A “rent house”—though the name suggests a ruin, a house ripped or torn—is a kind of country tenement. The vacant one in our illustration is just to the west of Baxter’s house. It is a classic example of the two-door bigeminal board-and-batten shack, universal in its homeliness. All the junk on the porch of Baxter’s rent house—part of an old school desk, a child’s crib, etc.—is just a spillover from the interior of the shack, used strictly for storage and perhaps as a reminder to Baxter, who used to live there, of his less prosperous days. Was there an interior connecting door between the two rooms of the bigeminal shack? Yes, Baxter tells Kim, there is.

  A mere trail running between the hotel foundation and the river, with a cowpath branch of it dropping down to the river, was once a county road, the beginning of a major freight-hauler’s road that went all the way to Old Carrollton in Carroll County and was a primary lifeline to the first settlers of the whole region. Here at Buffalo Landing was the head of navigation on the White River, beyond which the boats could not go because of the shallow shoals (a redundancy) upstream. The freight unloaded here (“freight” in those days always meant the lightweight basic essentials that could not be homegrown or homemade: salt, pepper, coffee, etc.) would be transported by ox wagon over the most primitive one-lane trail to Carrollton, which was the chief trading point until it failed to get an expected railroad and faded into forsakenness.

  The trees now along the river are weed trees, puny saplings, some losing their footings and falling into the rushing stream of the White River—which, however, sticks to the same basic course, unlike larger rivers, which meander all over the landscape. The White River sometimes floods these fields, but not nearly so often or so damagingly as in the days before the Bull Shoals dam was built. In modern times, the field has been less disturbed by the river than by the plow, which put all of these acres into cotton in the twenties, when Baxter’s father bought the whole four hundred acres for $24,000. The plow also uncovered not only Indian artifacts but also Indian burials.

  Kim asks Baxter how he feels about plowing up old Indian cemeteries. “You’d rather not be plowin up a human being,” Baxter says. “You’d rather not be runnin your plows through their graves. It doesn’t seem quite right. But it happens, all up and down this river—once, after a big flood, there must’ve been fifty or a hundred burials revealed, just washed up out of the ground. The Indians probably didn’t bury their dead too deep. They had a poor way of diggin graves.”

  There was once a large Osage village here, which, for want of knowing what they called it, we might call Tse-do Ton-won, which means “Buffalo City” in Osage. Tse-do Ton-won was here for a longer time than the Buffalo City of the white man has been here so far. At one time, along the mile of shoals in the river, there was a crossing for vast herds of buffalo (although a popular misconception about the buffalo, in addition to the misconception that he is slow and stupid, is that he joins herds numbering in the hundreds of thousands, whereas in fact each individual herd may have only from five to fifty, averaging fifteen; lump all these “villages” of buffalo together and you appear to have a “city” of buffalo). The shoals not only attracted an endless supply of mobile meat to the Indians, but also furnished an abundance of shoaling fish and the very popular freshwater mussels. These tasty bivalves, whose shells literally pave sections of Old Buffalo City, furnished the Indians with mother-of-pearl for inlays and decorative objects, and furnished the white man, particularly during the Depression years, with a whole industry for mother-of-pearl buttons. Among other artifacts excavated or washed up in the vicinity are stone hoes and digging tools, grinding bowls, and other objects indicating a thoroughly agriculturized society. The Osage, according to one theory, were once an extremely intellectual breed of people, living simply in their little cities, working hard to satisfy their few wants, cultivating their own gardens. Along came the buffalo and turned the Osage brave into a passionate, bloodthirsty hunter. He left his garden to his woman and went out on expeditions. His character became brutal, his feet became restless, and he forgot his intellect. He also substituted the ferocity of the hunt for the ardor of sex, and did not procreate enough to keep his population stable. No wonder he was a pushover for the white man.

  Suppose that there were two Tse-do Ton-wons, even then, on opposite sides of the river. Those in West Tse-do Ton-won, with more access to the buffalo fording the shoals, became more aggressive and feral, while those in East Tse-do Ton-won, with fewer acres to cultivate, practiced “intensive gardening” and allowed no weed to sprout, and, in all the hours available to them between routing weeds, meditated or procreated, or both. Only the swift river separating East Tse-do Ton-won from West Tse-do Ton-won kept the two cities from warring with each other, but each was consciously aware of the other, and perhaps constantly afraid of the other. Thus do twin cities coexist, or two halves of the same city…or person.

  In this same meadow, farther along, is a white man’s burial ground, not very well cared for, and subject to the next great flood, should the Bull Shoals dam give way. This little city of the dead (the cemetery, not the lost village) isn’t shown on the U.S. topographic survey map, probably because it is so easily overlooked, or so obscured by the masses of thick cane that grow in it. This cane, Arundinaria gigantea, cousin of Oriental bamboo but thrice as tall, is an evergreen grass that provided emergency fodder in early times but also tended to form impenetrable brakes and make clearing the land difficult. The only canebrake remaining in Old Buffalo City is right in the confines of the Old Buffalo cemetery. Baxter Hurst’s kid brother Marlon is buried here, and Baxter shows Kim the grave, a headstone surmounted by a sculptured lamb. Several less artistic tombstones are lost among the cane and masses of wakefield crud, a pernicious viny weed that loves to choke anything made by man.

  Kim moves gingerly through the cane, trying to step over the wakefield crud. “Do people come here?” she asks.

  “Yes,” Baxter says, “usually during the summer a few people will come, like maybe they live in Oklahoma or Texas and don’t know much about their descendants that are buried here.” Kim assumes it is just a slip: by “descendants” he means “ancestors.”

  “They like to come and put flowers on the graves and trim ’em up, but there’s not a lot of people who come back.”

  Almost by accident, although surely not, Kim parts some vines of wakefield crud and stands face to f
ace with the oldest headstone in the cemetery, “Sacred to the Memory of WILLIAM KENDALL HOGAN, 1820-1855.” She asks, since the grave is so cluttered with the crud vines, “Has anyone ever visited this grave?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” Baxter says. “He was the man, we think, who was in business here with the old man Moreland in the 1850s.”

  “My grandfather was a Hogan,” Kim remarks, “and his father came from this part of the country.” Her great-grandfather’s name was not William Kendall Hogan, she doesn’t think, but his grandfather’s name might have been that.

  “Is that a fact?” Baxter Hurst says. “It’s sure a small world.” Apparently deciding that Kim would like to be alone with the spirit of her ancestor, he starts walking back toward his house, not far.

  Graveyards do not frighten Kim. She is growing more and more accustomed to them.

  William Kendall Hogan may or may not have been her ancestor, but he was the best friend of Everard Dickinson, who must serve as the theme hero for Old Buffalo City. The unusual first name, which undoubtedly was shortened to “Every” by those who knew him, means literally “strong as a razorback boar” in German, but Everard Dickinson was a spindly dude, a city slicker: in today’s argot he might be called a wimp. Before coming to Buffalo City, he lived in Hartford, Connecticut, a poor relation of the “Upstream Dickinsons” of Amherst, Massachusetts. His second cousin was a shy poetess named Emily, whom he met only a couple of times, conversed at length with, and possibly corresponded with, although none of his letters to her survive. Several of his letters to his parents, written after he left home and plunged into the Arkansas wilderness, are preserved in the files of the Arkansas Gazette.