LITTLE ROCK — Our ancestors were great writers of letters. Every historian and archivist knows the thrill of reading old letters, and recently I had the pleasure of reading two previously unpublished letters from territorial Arkansas. As head of the special collections department at the University of Arkansas Libraries in Fayetteville, I am occasionally pleased to receive an email or telephone call-rarely a letter-asking if we would be interested in receiving some old letters. My most recent instance involved a small packet of letters dating from 1827, only eight years after Arkansas became a territory.
These letters, as are so many of the literate letters from early Arkansas, were written by New England natives-this time a minister named Samuel Newton. Newton was assigned to Dwight Mission, a church and school created in 1820 by the Presbyterian Church to convert and educate the Cherokees then living on a huge reservation in northwest Arkansas. In September 1827, Newton wrote his niece in New Jersey, describing the lazy nature of many Arkansas men: “Now it is one of my prominent objects in this heathen land to enlighten these lazy men and toteach them to treat their wives like companions, not like menial slaves.”
Boston-born Hiram Abiff Whittington came to Arkansas in 1826, and his letters bear the mark of a strong intellect and good descriptive powers. On April 21, 1827, Hiram sent his first letter from Little Rock to his brother Granville Whittington in Boston. Over the next seven years, Hiram took time from his hardscrabble frontier life to write powerfully descriptive letters to his younger brother. These letters are funny, for Hiram had a sense of humor to match his adventurous spirit.
Perhaps betraying his long New England Puritan ancestry, Hiram could be a bit of a prude. Here is how he described the first night in a family’s log cabin: “The first time I slept in the room with the women, I felt foolish enough, you may be sure. The women would not leave the room to give me a chance to get into bed, and I finally had to go to bed before them. I did not take my pantaloons off, however, until I had got between the sheets.”
In 1913, as workmen dismantled Granville’s pioneer home just north of Mount Ida, they found Hiram’s original letters-all neatly bound by Granville who was a professional bookbinder. Not long ago, descendants of GranvilleWhittington donated the letters-still in the original binding-to the University of Arkansas Libraries. I have held those letters, all the while savoring the fulfillment of a career-long goal of ensuring that these classic documents were permanently preserved. We owe a great debt to members of the Whittington family for preserving the letters for more than 175 years, and for sharing them with the public.
Letters written long ago in frontier Arkansas often find their way into libraries and archives well outside the state. I was recently sent typedtranscriptions of three letters written by visitors to Arkansas in 1844-45, all held by the Detroit Public Library. A few days after Christmas, 1844, Emily V. Mason wrote a friend about her journey with her father from their home in Washington, D.C., to Fort Gibson in modern Oklahoma. She told of a boring trip until reaching Arkansas, “the land of adventure . . .and verily do we find novelties at every step.” She told how the party quickly left Montgomery’s Point while a man “was just being cut to pieces with a bowie knife-this being a species of amusement to which the people of Arkansas are much addicted.”
But Emily could be surprised at the beauty and refinement she found in Arkansas. Near Rock Roe in modern Monroe County, Emily had breakfast at the home of a young widow: “There lives that lone woman all alone with only one black woman who helps her cook [and] an Indian to hunt for her. She had been a widow two years and her husband’s grave in the little garden was walled up with bricks and tended with evident care. She had a little flower garden too & some geraniums too on the porch.”
“More extraordinary still,” Emily wrote, “a late number of the Lady’s Book lay on the table.”
Reading letters like these remind me how grateful I am our ancestors did not rely on Facebook or Twitter to tell their stories.
-
———◊-
———
Tom Dillard is head of special collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville. Email him at [email protected].
Editorial, Pages 86 on 10/31/2010