During the same years writers and social commentators were beginning to write about the land and people of southern Appalachia, adventurers, out-doorsmen, and humorists were also discovering the other primary locus from which the hillbilly image would grow: the hill country of Missouri and Ar-kansas. Because of its limited population and relative isolation from the rest of the nation even well after the Civil War, Arkansas rapidly acquired a reputa-tion as the home of violent and primitive squatters living in near-wilderness conditions. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, a geologist and student of Indian cul-ture who traveled through the mountains of Missouri and Arkansas in 1818–
1819, was one of the first visitors to report on the state at length. Schoolcraft described how “[t]he inhabitants . . . pursue a similar course of life with the savages, having embraced their love of ease, and their contempt for agricul-tural pursuits . . . [and] their mode of dressing in skins.” He also lamented that, when hunting season came, the men abandoned their household and farming duties to the women. Mirroring the critique of William Byrd and others, he thus defined frontier Arkansans as an uncivilized people, who in-verted “proper” race and gender hierarchies.21
Later visitors reinforced the idea of Arkansas as a violent and primitive land. English geologist George Featherstonhaugh called parts of the state a
“sinkhole of crime and infamy,” while German sportsman Frederick Ger-staecker presented a land populated by hard-drinking and lazy backwoods-men, who were prone to violence and thrilled by the rugged sport of bear hunting. Humorous writings such as Charles Fenton Noland’s columns on
“Col. Pete Whetstone” and Thomas Bangs Thorpe’s famous “The Big Bear
of Arkansas,” both widely circulated in Spirit of the Times in the 1840s, so-lidified the backwoods conception of the state. Not all of these travelogues, adventure stories, or tall tales were based on the mountainous region of the state, nor were they absolutely unique to Arkansas or even the old Southwest.
Collectively, however, they laid the groundwork for the notion that lazy, po-tentially dangerous, and impoverished people populated Arkansas and the South more generally.22
Perhaps the most direct link between southwestern popular culture and the coming hillbilly image is “The Arkansas Traveller,” a written tale, humor-ous oration, instrumental and lyrical song, and pictorial image that has ap-peared continuously since the mid-nineteenth century.23Most likely the cre-ation of Colonel Sandford Faulkner, an elite Arkansas politician during its first years of statehood, the well-known tale is an ostensibly humorous retelling of an encounter between a party of Arkansas politicians, who have lost their way in the mountains during an 1840 campaign tour, and a poor squatter continuously sawing away at the same tune on his fiddle in front of a primitive log cabin.24The squatter responds to each of the visitors’ requests for assistance with verbal puns, negative replies, and indifference. A sam-pling:
Traveller: “As I’m so bold, then, what might your name be?
Squatter: “It might be Dick, and it might be Tom; but it lacks right smart uv it.”
Traveller: “Sir! will you tell me where this road goes to?”
Squatter: “It’s never gone any whar since I’ve lived here; It’s always thar when I git up in the mornin’.”
Finally, the traveler (representing Colonel Faulkner himself) achieves his ends by seizing the fiddle and playing the end of the tune that the squatter has forgotten. The grateful homesteader, joyful that he finally recalls the clos-ing melody, invites the travelers in for food and drink.25
Published as music in 1847, and with accompanying dialogue in 1862 or 1863, “The Arkansas Traveller” appeared in various forms throughout the next century and a half. It was also depicted in pictorial form, first as a painting by Edward Washbourne (c. 1855) and then as engravings based on the painting, most famously in two Currier and Ives prints of 1870. These drawings depict many of the elements that make up the twentieth-century image of the hill-billy lifestyle: a ragged man with a long beard wearing a coonskin cap; animal pelts on the walls of a dilapidated log cabin; an impoverished family consist-ing of a woman smokconsist-ing a corncob pipe and six slovenly children; dogs lazconsist-ing in the dirt; a sign for “whisky” over the doorway with an inverted “ ” denot-ing backwoods ignorance; and the mountains loomdenot-ing in the background (fig.
s
1.6). The ambiguity of the cabin man’s actions and attitudes would also later be replicated in the hillbilly persona. At first wary of outsiders and surly, the squatter later shows excessive hospitality. He is depicted as impoverished and ignorant but at the same time as living in total comfort in the wilderness. Like-wise, the squatter symbolizes frontier laziness and idleness, as he sits and plays the fiddle while neglecting his crops and household duties. This indolence is juxtaposed against the purposefulness and urgency of the traveler. Yet it is the squatter who holds all the cards, and both participants know it. Like hillbilly characters to come, the squatter simultaneously “plays the fool” and takes ad-vantage of the traveler, his social and economic “better.”
As the audience for the “Arkansas Traveller” in its various forms grew from an Arkansas political elite to a statewide audience to a national reader-ship of humor magazines and sheet music, the characters’ significance changed. In the earliest extant printed version of the text from 1876, the open-ing scene introduces “A lost and bewildered Arkansas Traveler [who] ap-proaches the cabin of a Squatter, about forty years ago, in search of lodgings.”26 Figure 1.6
The Arkansas Traveler.
Leopold Grozelier engraving of Edward Washbourne painting, 1859.
Arkansas History Commission. All rights reserved. G4543-18.
Radically transforming its original meaning, the version published in the Arkansas Traveler’s Song Book, in New York in 1864, represented “an Eastern man’s experience among the inhabitants of Arkansas.” The introduction fur-ther noted that the traveler’s encounter with this backwoodsman was so up-setting he “has never had the courage to visit Arkansas since!”27Like Sut Lovingood’s early illustrators, the New York artist had no idea what an Arkansan squatter should look like and drew a gypsy-like figure, barefoot, in loose fitting clothes, and with a bandanna tied around his head akin to pictions of impoverished transients (fig. 1.7). When writer H. C. Mercer de-scribed the tale in 1896, its meaning had changed yet again. In this version, both the squatter and the traveler were portrayed as products of the wilder-ness, one a rugged pioneer, the other a degraded squatter, and the message of the juxtaposition of class between the two was largely eliminated. Because both figures were now attired and described as frontiersmen, the story im-plied that all Arkansans fit into this category.28
The transformations in meaning of this song-story reveal the national-ization of a regional stereotype—“Arkansas” was becoming instantly recog-nizable shorthand for the half-comic, half-savage backwoodsman, a popular
Figure 1.7 A New Yorker’s conception of the Arkansas Traveler frontiersman as European gypsy.
Cover drawing by unknown illustrator, Arkansas Traveler’s Song Book (New York:
Dick and Fitzgerald, 1864).
cultural icon growing as familiar to Americans as the noble Indian Chief in full headdress or the lazy plantation slave. Superimposing the shiftlessness and degeneracy of the symbolic poor white upon the frontiersman and hunter of earlier accounts of Arkansas woodsmen, this musical tale reflects the slow conflation of these two images from which the hillbilly would emerge in the following decades.