As a particularly dramatic gesture, he throws wide his arms and whacks the side of the barn with the heavy cane he uses to stab at... contesting bidders. With more vehemence than grammatical elegance, he calls upon the great god Caveat Emptor to witness with what niggardly stinginess these flinty sons of Scotland make cautious offers for what is beyond any question the finest animal ever beheld.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One story recounts that a Tennessean, after a single day in the then almost impenetrable tangle of cypress, briars, and canebreaks..., pestered by myriads of mosquitoes, and bogged in the heavy gumbo mud, declared: "Arkansas is not part of the world for which Jesus Christ died--I want none of it."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The man who would change the name of Arkansas is the original, iron-jawed, brass-mouthed, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wil...ds of the Ozarks! He is the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the smallpox on his mother's side!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Across Parker Avenue from the fort is the Site of the Old Gallows, where 83 men "stood on nothin', a-lookin' up a rope." The platf...orm had a trap wide enought to "accommodate" 12 men, but half that number was the highest ever reached. On two occasions six miscreants were executed. There were several groups of five, some quartets and trios.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
According to fiction, the hillman is a seven-foot combination of malnutrition and hookworm, asleep on his front porch with the dog...s. His great bare feet, dangling off the porch, flap from time to time when the flies get too pesky, but nothing awakens him except a hound's salute to a stranger. Then he shoots up his astounding neck to its full length, ogles the visitor, and on his hunting horn blows a series of long and short blasts that means, "Hide yore stills and oil yore guns; they air a stranger h'yar."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Farmers in overalls and wide-brimmed straw hats lounge about the store on hot summer days, when the most common sound is the thump...-thump-thump of a hound's leg on the floor as he scratches contentedly. Oldtime hunters say that fleas are a hound's salvation: his constant twisting and clawing in pursuit of the tormentors keeps his joints supple.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
D--n me, stranger, ef you can't stay as long as you please, and I'll give you plenty to eat and drink. Play away, stranger, you ki...n sleep on the dry spot tonight!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The self-consciousness of Pine Ridge manifests itself at the village's edge in such signs as "Drive Keerful," "Don't Hit Our Young... 'uns," and "You-all Hurry Back"Mlocutions which nearly all Arkansas hill people use daily but would never dream of putting in print.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The hill farmer ... always seems to make out somehow with his corn patch, his few vegetables, his rifle, and fishing rod. This sel...f-contained economy creates in the hillman a comparative disinterest in the world's affairs, along with a disdain of lowland ways. "I don't go to question the good Lord in his wisdom," runs the phrasing attributed to a typical mountaineer, "but I jest cain't see why He put valleys in between the hills."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »