Growing Up Southern: December 12, 2017

Life was simpler, and fun a lot less expensive when I was growing up. If you were thinking of things to do, and there were lots of choices, one of the cheapest and most interesting was to go looking for “are-heads” along the bayou.

What were they? They were remnants of the original inhabitants of this spot of earth we now claim belongs to us. They were, mostly, stone artifacts left over from encampments along bayous or rivers. Yeah, yeah, Yankees and schoolteachers called them “arrowheads,” or more acceptably, “artifacts,” I cling to the old ways when I can.

I don’t know how old they were. We used to say those who made them appeared around 10,000 years ago in what is now the U.S. But, scholars have pushed the date back further and further. I have even heard the figure of 30,000 years. At any rate, they are old.

The makers disappeared from around here nearly two centuries ago. My father-in-law, born in 1923, always told us that he knew, as a kid, an old man, born a slave, who claimed to remember the last Indian family that lived along Baker’s Bayou in Lonoke County, Arkansas. He said the family “just disappeared” one day when the old man was a boy. That would have placed the extermination date around 1850, a guess supported by a state archeologist who visited us one day to help classify and locate the artifacts we had collected over the years.

I like to think the family migrated to better life. My wife thinks the Mother Ship picked them up and took them home. I hope she’s right and, with each day’s news, I scan the night sky more hopefully. Who knows? Perhaps those artifacts were part of a guidance system and that is why we, as a country, have lost our way.

Anyway, farther north but still in the county, where our farm is located, there aren’t any signs of settlements. It is interesting to note, though, that the property is located on what came to be known as the “Trail of Tears.” The name derived from the devastating effects of Andrew Jackson's Indian removal policy, whereby the Cherokee nation was forced to give up its lands east of the Mississippi River and to migrate to an area in present-day Oklahoma. Estimates are that 4,000 Cherokee people died of cold, hunger, and disease on their way to the western lands.

Ah, but America was “great” then according to our current leaders. Besides, the Cherokee people were just savages and not a group that civilized people—like us—could abide.

Or were they?

I read something interesting last evening. It seems that, during all the turmoil between white settlers and the Indian nations, there were countless cases in which immigrants to the new lands, either by flight or capture, spent time living among those “savages.” There are few recorded cases where such individuals later chose willingly to rejoin “civilized society.” By comparison, there are practically no recorded cases where native-Americans, once incarcerated among whites, chose to remain if offered the chance to return to their people.

I don’t hunt “are-heads” any more. I’m too old, too capable of enjoying more expensive pastimes, and have developed a brooding belief that those artifacts best remain where they

are.

Let us not, however, forget the tragic stories of the peoples who made them.

Just Thinking.

Growing Up Southern: August 22, 2017

There once was this lonely tombstone in the middle of a cotton field not far from where Brenda’s parents lived. It’s gone now, physically gone. The memory of it disappears as well, nibbled away by the relentless and uncaring apathy of time. Too bad, it makes an interesting story.

It seems there was a stranger that came to the vicinity of Lonoke, Arkansas sometime after the Civil War. People knew very little about him, except for the fact that he evidently “got into a scrape” with someone in town.

They fought a duel with knives, supposedly, at a place still called the “Doc Eagle Bridge,” although the original bridge disappeared years ago. The local man killed the stranger. I don’t know what happened after that except that they buried him a few miles away and erected a tombstone. I’m not even sure it had a name on it.

Over the years, they began raising cotton around the site of the grave, but left a small area around the gravesite unplowed.

When we were first married, Brenda and I, cheap dates were the only ones that fit our budget. A favorite, cheap date that is, involved walking plowed fields looking for Indian artifacts that would rise to the surface after a spring rain. Our first dog, a mutt named Jeremiah would help us look if we promised to buy him an ice-cream cone later. They only cost a dime back then and he was a big help.

Yeah, well, it passed for fun in those days: pre-social media, cell phones, internet and all.

A favorite spot to look was along a wetland called “Baker’s Bayou.” It had apparently provided a popular camping area for the original inhabitants of our country. Later, a state archeologist would point out on a map for us several known encampment sites. Thereafter, we would classify the artifacts we found by the various locations.

One lay near the grave of the unknown duelist. I can still recall the quiet, peaceful spot standing out among the small stalks of cotton like the remnant of some ancient vegetation ritual. But, as each year passed, the unplowed spot marking the gravesite grew smaller. I’m sure it was troubling to have to plow around the grave.

Then one late spring it disappeared completely. The entire site was plowed and the tombstone was gone. I’ve often wondered what happened to it. I like to think that it sits in a corner of some dusty old barn somewhere, and new generations of grandchildren still hear the story about the stranger who came to the area to lose his life, a story perhaps accompanied by a warning concerning the non-efficacy of violence.

I don’t know. It just seems interesting that beneath a stretch of lonely farmland lies a rich history of the earliest inhabitants of the land, and those who came along later. It’s just something to think about.

The Happy Artifact Hunters Three