LITTLE ROCK — Nothing piques my interest more than an old travel diary. There is something exciting about reading other people’s diaries, even if they are centuries old. Of course, not all diarists are equal, so it is a particular pleasure to come across an account that has good information and is interestingly told. A friend recently referred me to a document titled “Diary of a Journey in Arkansas in 1856,” by a prominent Mississippi frontiersman, planter, historian, geologist and naturalist, B.L.C. Wailes.
Benjamin Leonard Covington Wailes was born in 1797 to a land surveyor in Georgia who later moved the family to the tiny settlement of Washington, Miss., just east of Natchez. Young Ben was well educated by tutors and later at Jefferson College, a new college near his home. Wailes worked hard, married well, and quickly became a political and intellectual leader of the thriving Natchez district. He served in the legislature, was a colonel in the militia, and was a prominent member of the Mississippi Society for the Acquirement and Dissemination of Knowledge. His deep interests in geology and paleontology won Wailes the contract to conduct the first geological survey of Mississippi, completed in 1854.
In the autumn of 1856 Wailes left on
a protracted trip, the purpose being to inspect plantations owned by his wife in Mississippi and see about his own lands in Arkansas. Like many people of the era, Wailes speculated in land. Wailes also hoped to use the trip to Little Rock to secure the appointment to compile a state geological summary for Arkansas.
Like most visitors to Arkansas before the Civil War, Wailes came by steamboat, though he often had to resort to slow and crowded stagecoaches. After traveling by steamer from Natchez, Wailes debarked at the town of Napoleon, a village at the confluence of the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers. Though begotten with hopes of rivaling St. Louis, Napoleon was generally viewed as a backwater settlement. Wailes found no room on the departing stagecoach, so he stayed overnight.
Staying overnight in an Arkansas hotel was almost invariably a challenging experience. Wailes, for example, found two inns in Napoleon, which he described in his diary as “two very inferior taverns.” Low water further detained Wailes in Napoleon, leaving him resigned but unhappy: “Dirty filthy quarters . . . coarse dirty fare & surly landlord makes my detention here very unpleasant.” Once a steamboat did depart for Little Rock, Wailes found himself confined in “a dirty little craft which was provided with but twelve berths and sleeping shelves, furnished with scanty and dirty bedding.”
The dirty little steamer made its way slowly up the Arkansas River, stopping often to drop off passengers or freight, or take on bales of cotton. Wailes was impressed with Pine Bluff, where he paid some land taxes and investigated other property. “The town of Pine Bluff has a fresh and growing business aspect[;] a number of stores etc.[,]a very large & handsome designed Brick Court-House,” Wailes noted in his diary. He was not pleased, though, that a single sheet of writing paper cost 25 cents.
Wailes got stuck in Pine Bluff when he found the stage “full of passengers & five more on the top, so that I could not have gone on.” He used the extra time to stock up on cigars and investigate buying 1,400 acres of land along Bayou Bartholomew “for $8000 half cash, unimproved.”
When he finally got a stage to Little Rock, Wailes found himself traveling most of the night, his fellow passengers being mostly legislators on their way to the state Capitol. He liked the legislators better than “a young and rather dressey Baptist Clergyman [who] was not very learned but very familiar and chatty.”
Putting up at the major hotel in Little Rock, the Anthony House, Wailes was pleased to find “a pretty good room & bed but no fire [and] only one room mate.” Wailes was unable to secure the appointment as state geologist, but he did use his time in Little Rock to make several geological notes in his diary. He was fascinated to find a large pile of the mineral novaculite in Little Rock where it had been shipped from “inexhaustible quarries” near Hot Springs.
After paying $8.50 for five nights lodging at the Anthony House, Wailes boarded the steamboat Umpire bound for home. Not surprisingly, he found “the fare coarse and badly cooked and berths intolerable.” The entire trip cost $96.
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Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living in Farmington, Ark. Email him at [email protected].
Editorial, Pages 74 on 01/13/2013