[ArkansasSlim]

I'm baaaak! You would never know it but there was a pioneer home here about 1850. My archeologist friend had gotten a lead that it was in this vicinity, so we went-a-lookin', found it, and validated it by the pieces of broken china we found at the site. This is in the wilderness of central Clark County. The trail you see is a very old road that is now used by hunters.

[ArkansasSlim]

The air strip I wrote about earlier; I finally got around to finding it on Google Earth and it is exactly 1/2 mile long, not the 1/4 I guesstimated when we came up on it. It is in the middle of several thousand acres of International Paper Company Timberlands pine plantations and we have now decided it was built for the I.P. contract planes that were spraying defoliants.

This photo is several miles from the airstrip but still in the central Clark County wilderness. It is a small mountain stream and I suspect this hole of water is full of bream, rock bass, - - - and cotton mouths We don't have time to take fishing gear and test such places.

[Dr. Foosball]

That does look like a cottonmouth haven. I hate those damn things, and I have killed my fair share.

[ArkansasSlim]

Originally Posted by Dr. Foosball

That does look like a cottonmouth haven. I hate those damn things, and I have killed my fair share.

A local came up on a 4wheeler while we were at the old house place and told us the rattlers were crawling. He was ready, he had a 9mm on his hip.

[ArkansasSlim]

This memorial sign is located near the Abner Hignight Monument that Dr. Foosball posted on March 20, 2010. Oral history states that while this skirmish was going the horses knocked over a farmers bee hives and the bees attacked the men and horses and broke up the fight, so it is also referred to as "The Battle of the Bees".

[ArkansasSlim]

I may have posted this in the past, and if I did I apologize for repeating, but I think it is worth repeating and is a special Site I have been watching for over a year. It's another way to "Explore Arkansas". It is; Useewildlife.com and it has real time cameras focused on specific areas of the Ozarks (probably) showing wildlife. On it I have seen rattle snakes, bear, coon, fox, many, many deer, and birds of all kinds. It has been a subscription Site but now is free. Try it and if you have even a minimum interest in nature I'm sure you will enjoy it. The Home Page explains it all. Enjoy

[ArkansasSlim]

This is still in the wilderness of central Clark County. This trail I'm on, in the first photo, is a 4wheeler trail that goes to the deer stand you can see in the distance, on the right. The second photo is a close-up of the ground the deer stand is on. The shade is so deep you cannot see detail, but about 1400 A.D. a Caddo Indian house stood there, and about 1820/1850 A.D. a pioneer house stood in the same place. It is not unusual to find a pioneer house site and also find Indian artifacts, because, I guess, if the Indians thought it was a good house place the pioneers recognized it too. Again, because of he deep shade, you cannot see that the site (about 8 X 8 meters) looks like an artillery impact zone because of the digging by looters looking for Indian artifacts. Some of the holes are a couple feet deep.

How did we come up with those dates? There is no way to know what the looters carried away, but they left behind Indian pot sherds that we recognized to go with that date. They also left behind nutting stones (rocks the Indians used as an anvil to crack hickory nuts), a hammer stone (used to make their stone tools), and fire cracked rock from their cooking/heating fire hearth. There is no market value for those things is why the looters didn't bother with them. We know the pioneer approximate date because our research showed the property was granted as a Homestead in 1820, and broken dishes we found date to about 1850.

[ArkansasSlim]

This is a "lost" pioneer cemetery in east Clark County which we had documented in the past and today brought a descendant of one of the pioneers to see it. After looking around we realized we had missed this small rock grave marker when we were here before. We are using reflected sunlight to read the faint, scratched, engraving. Using this method, otherwise unreadable markings show up almost in 3-D. You don't do this in "tick season".

[ArkansasSlim]

Well I've been AWOL for a while but now you are going to have to travel with me again. I have written a lot about "lost" and abandoned graves and cemeteries but I was told recently that they are not "lost", they are only forgotten. I think this grave was truly "lost". We had parked the truck on a remote mountain log road in west Clark County to check out a potential Indian Site. On the way back to the truck I stepped into a leaf covered depression and looking down I realized I had stepped into a grave depression. It was the only one we saw and was really, really out in the middle of no-where. The next time we were in the area we took a leaf rake, raked back the leaves, and took these photos.

[RogMar]

Slim, on the note of 'lost' cemeteries, I will add this.......

We have a lot of woods around my neighborhood. Literally miles of them. You know the routine.

The area my house sits in, and neighboring farms, was a large homestead settlement in the early 1800's, and a Native American settlement. There is a pioneer cemetery close by with everything from pieces of rock marking graves, to stones barely readable marking the civil war dead to rows of infants.

Hiking through the surrounding woods, there are several places where there are piles of rocks, in an elongated formation. One does not have to speculate much to figure out they're graves.

The opinion among oldsters is that these are slave graves, which they wanted to give a respectful resting place to, but couldn't bury them in the 'family' cemetery.

There's a certain....'feeling', when you get in the area of one.