Year: 1872

| That a great Southwestern State of the
Union, comprising over fifty-two thousand
square miles of land, mostly well wooded,
well watered and fertile, and with a carbon
ferrous wealth of untold millions below the
soil, should be in this present day pandemo-
mum on earth is o sad acknowledgment
Yet this is true of Arkansas. From the
date of its admission to the Union, 1886, 1t
certainly has been the typical mauvais s,yet
among the brotherhood of Commonwealths,
and the story of its latest achievements in the
line of rufianism, as graphically told in
another part of to-day's HERALD, will show
that it ably preserves its reputation for law
lessness that begins anywhere in the line of
derelction, and enacts murder without an
afterthought wherever human life happens to
stand in its way. It has been unfortu-
nate in its neighbors. The proximity
of the Indian Territory. with its
chronic temptations to desperadoes, who
carried their lives in their hands, SO that they
could rob and cheat the Indians on one side
of the State line and the settlers on the other,
was a constant source of demoralization.
From Texas, too. itreceived whatever spare row.
dyism was within it. and only gained its valu-
able accessions of wealth and population from
the slave States, which, scattered their
capital and servile colonies wherever the land
was favorable to cotton. Thus the ''border
rufian' became household word Of terror and
it owned the place of priority to no section of
the globe in it's sudden and deadly recourse
to the pistol and bowie-knife as an appeal in
all cases of grave discussion. The infection
of murder was not confined to the floating
population 1t fastened its fangs in the
wealthier, and held its fascination over them
until judge, legislator and parson alike seemed
to have the mania hopelessly mingled in their
blood. When the avalanche of secession came
it did not fail to overwhelm Arkansas among its
other areas of devastation. But its effect
there capriciously differed from It's manifesto
tions in other directions Like others it
carried away o constituency divided between
adherents of the Union and the rebel cause;
but the Union element as well as the rebel was
composed therein of bitter, desperate men, and
the scourge of the war itself, which asserted
itself in the State left at it's close elsewhere,
long list of feuds of older standing embittered
by the fight still raging in desultory
conflict In 1868 it received the full benefit
and peculiar blessings of the reconstruction
laws, and the carpet-bagism which the close
of the war had let loose became consecrated
to dictatorship in the State by the new consti-
tuition, with its plenary powers to disfranchise
where it listed Still the demoralization con-
tinued. The overbearing, reckless population
which had made the cause of the Confederacy
their cause, felt themselves more than ever
in the hands Of the grim power which had
made them feel their defeat through OH iron
heel planted firmly on their necks.


With this state of things reaching down
from disreputable past to present of malevo-
lence, distrust and ready hostility on
either side it is not wonderful that murder
and wrong Of every kind enter so freely into
the picture of the Arkansas of to-day. We
have promised thus far, because the informa-
ton of trouble in Pope county, Arkansas,
which has reached the public heretofore could
only convey few startling facts, without
opening up the causes which led to them, and
which may stain the history of every county
in the State at any moment with similar
record of lawlessness and bloodshed.


Pope county, where the present alarming
condition of things prevails, is situated to-
wards the northwest portion of the State and
has its capital at Dover. The Arkansas River
forms its southern boundary, and one Of its
tributaries, the Illinois Bayou, flows past this
county town. lowering around the eminences
along this stream the Pope County Sheriff,
Dodson, with his Superintendent of Schools,
Stuart and two hundred and forty militia,
holds what remains of the rens of local
authority, while the majority of the young
men Of the white population have armed them
selves and take all possible means known to
guerilla warfare by which to compass the dis
comfture of this Sheriff and his militiamen
The origin Of the ''war," as it has grown to
be called, when stripped of local pickering
and private feud, lies in the difference between
carpet bagism and nativism The carpet
bagger, tenacious of power once obtained
holds tightly in the leading strings all around
him party supporters and political enemies
alike. One of this class named Hickox, an
able, domineering man, stood thus with his
constituency by the throat, when one day
bullet put an end to his existence. The great
liberal movement, which produced division in
a milder shape around the roll of States, cast
deadly apple of discord into Pope county. 1t is
not necessary to know on what basis the re-
publicans divided there, whether it was the
saving beauties of the Cincinnati platform or
the chance which old factionists within the
party saw of defeating their opponents, or
both; but Pope county divided, and the
struggle of opinion soon, according to the
usage du pays, became "war to
| tha In;