Greasy Cove

I knew a little about "Albert Pike". He was some old guy from the 1800's who among other things, was commander over a group of Indian soldiers at the Battle of Pea Ridge, ...for the south. The Albert Pike campground on the Little Missouri River, is named ...Albert Pike presumably probably maybe most likely after, ...that Albert Pike guy.

I've managed to pick up a few books lately, on Arkansas history. Indians and stuff. Settlers and things.

In particular of course, I'm recently interested in local history of the area I've grown up in; the Ouachita River area, Malvern, Hot Springs, Arkadelphia, Camden, etc..

It seems that Albert Pike did a whole lot of things. He grew up in the New England states, then struck out on his own when he was 18.

It was 1831. He was headed west.

He and a friend walked and paddled their way through Boston, Albany, Rochester, Buffalo, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Nashville, and Cairo, enroute to St. Louis, which then was only a small village.

From St Louis he joined up with a party of hunters and traders, in a group of ten wagons, and headed for Sante Fe. In August. He left Sante Fe in Late 1831 and joined a hunting party in Taos. From there, out onto the great plains, where our hero hunted buffalo and smoked peace pipes with all manner of indian people. Then the hunting trip went sour. They had to eat thier horses out of starvation. They had to walk. In the whole trip back from Taos, they covered 1,400 miles. Pike said he actually walked something like 650 miles.

The guy made his way back to Fort Smith and became a school teacher, then to Little Rock as a lawyer. Then came the civil war.

He was against slavery, yet decided to take up the command of Indian troops. I think today more emphasis is put on slavery as the sole issue of the war, but back then it wasn't.

He didn't do too well at Pea Ridge. Some of the indians under his command scalped and killed some wounded northern soldiers. Many of the indians fled:

In the fighting his forces captured a battery of the enemy, but, as shots from the Federal Cannon flew over the heads of the Indians, shattering limbs of trees which fell into their midst, followed by exploding shells, many of the indians broke and ran, and Pike said some of them never stopped running until they reached their homes, hundreds of miles away. "The Indian does not fight in the open," said Pike; "he must have a log, a tree or a rock behind which to hide." He had proven himself friendly to the Indians, but he knew that these particular Indians, at least, were not adapted to "civilized warfare."

Albert Pike would be a sort of outcast after the war. As a former Southern military commander, he couldn't return to his normal life of being a lawyer in Little Rock.

"Pike disappeared mysteriously from the walks of mankind for a time, only to reappear as suddenly and mysteriously. ...He retired to a place called Greasy Cove, in Montgomery county Arkansas. ... and lived on a little farm a few miles below the Little Missouri river, coming upon the locals silently, unhearalded, and bringing with him wagon loads of books and furniture--such had never been seen in that section"

According to local stories, Pike remained in the seclusion of Greasy Cove until one of the bands of roving and marauding jay-hawkers that infested many sections of the south at that time found its way there. Then, it is stated, after terrorizing the settlers, thieves visited Pike's place, destroyed his furniture, threw his books into the Little Missouri, and threatened his life.

The site of his home was included in a large stretch of of mountain land comprising the proposed Ouachita National Park of the 1920's. The location being at the foot of Pryor mountain, one of the small peaks in the Ouachita range. Close by flows the Little Missouri.

I didn't know that the campground was named after him because he lived there for awhile. It would be fun to try and find the old cabin, ...Somewhere in the vacinity of Greasy Creek and Pryor Mountain.

There is a small bend in the road where the accident happened. Every day we all drive through it, past it, because its only two or three miles from the house. Five months later and the skid marks are still there, …if you know what to look for. Just like with the entrance to the cemetery, sometimes I don’t think about it when I pass by, but most of the time I do.

Sometimes I think about the history of highway 9. My grandmother used to drive through here occasionally as a child, when her parents would make the long drive from Smackover to Benton. Then, it was just a dirt road. They were driving in some kind of open-top old model-A looking vehicle. Weird to think of how she would’ve rambled down a bumpy dusty 1930’s road, and driven right past the spot where her daughter, or my mom would live now, and where her grandkids would grow up. She would drive around a slight bend in the road where her grandsons would somehow have a horrible accident 70 years later. Maybe there wasn’t even a curve there, at that spot, back then. Maybe somebody altered the path of the road or maybe that section of the road was washed out by heavy rains and changed to where it runs now, or maybe the curve got there as a result of somebody’s property boundary or fence lines.

I think a lot about why things are and where things are and how they got that particular way. About how a whole bunch of seemingly insignificant particulars led up to me and my brothers being born out here in Arkansas, and living on this particular scrape of land, near the funny little scrappy town of Malvern.

Back in the early 1800’s, around the time Lewis and Clark set off across the continent, another little known expedition of sorts got underway from New Orleans. The Dunbar expedition rafted up the Mississippi River and turned up the Red River, and turned up the Ouachita River where it met the Red. They would slowly make their way up river all the way to the famed “Hot Springs”, do some authorized white guy studies and stuff, and make it official that “yes, those barbaric French trapper guys are telling the truth about those hot springs.” On their way up the river they would see Buffalo and wolves and all kinds of animals that aren’t here now. And on their way up the river they came to a place that people would later name “Rockport”, where they described difficult to navigate “chutes” and a large rock outcropping where Indians and travelers had made it a custom to make easier river crossings and dock their boats.

So there, at a place that would be called Rockport, a small town would start. Many years would pass and the railroad would come through, several miles to the south, in what would become the town of Malvern. Logging companies would open up the surrounding land, building capillaries of train tracks and logging off the good timber. The lay of the land and some of the roads around our house, some seven miles south of town, would follow the paths of those old logging railroad lines.

Mom and dad would follow my grandmother to this town in the 1970’s, and eventually end up in this house where I grew up.

I think about how I am where I am today, simply because of some peculiar rocks that jut out into the Ouachita River. They made a town because of those rocks. All kinds of history around here. Indians and stuff.

I should be a history professor. This is what I would say to my class:

“You see kids, there used to be all kinds of ancient people walking around down there. For real. Indians and stuff.”

One week later, ..handing out the graded tests and going over the answers:

“Class, number four was fill in the blank. The answer to number four is “Indians and stuff”.”

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